The Battle for Gotham (49 page)

The Food Landscape Is Changing

If you absorb what Michael Pollan has been writing in recent years,
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the state of our food supply, now dominated by agribusiness, is so compromised that it is hard to recognize the food production we once accomplished so well. That is changing, slowly, to be sure, step by small step, starting locally in small increments but expanding exponentially. The food landscape today is not what it was even a few years ago when one almost had to go to Europe to find farm-fresh food not mass produced.

This new landscape is having a most dramatic impact on inner-city neighborhoods where fresh food is the hardest to find, decent supermarkets rarely exist, and food- and environment-related health problems are the highest. But in Brooklyn and the Bronx what is available are patches of city-owned undeveloped land.
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From East New York to the South Bronx, community- and privately run gardens are increasing, obtaining immeasurable help from city agencies and private groups.
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Some of the urban farmers are producing more than for personal consumption and selling at local markets. One Jamaica-born couple cultivates four sites in East New York and last year sold more than $3,000 worth of produce at a nearby market. In Red Hook, the high school students who run the Added Value garden on an abandoned three-acre asphalt ball field last year sold more than $25,000 in goods. About 135 students have steady after-school jobs, earning money and free vegetables. More than 5,000 kids have visited with their classes.

This is a national inner-city trend with gardens increasing in number in Detroit, Philadelphia, West Oakland, Milwaukee, and elsewhere. Food from the Hood in South Central Los Angeles is probably the most advanced of all.
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After the 1992 civic unrest when Crenshaw Boulevard, the commercial spine of South Central L.A., went up in flames, students at the local high school decided to aid the community-healing process by planting a garden at the school. Soon they were selling produce at a local farmers’ market and selling a salad dressing made to go with the produce. They used their favorite herbs, parsley and basil, to create their “Straight Out the Garden Creamy Italian Dressing” that grew in popularity, with more than 2,000 stores, including some major supermarket chains, carrying it. More than $250,000 earned goes to support college scholarships for the participating students.

Ten years ago, when I was writing
Cities Back from the Edge
, I devoted a whole chapter to the explosive growth of greenmarkets in cities. I illustrated their value in giving birth to new value-added businesses, some of which filled empty downtown storefronts, attracting more customers and more new businesses, adding new economic and social life to moribund downtowns. I noted then that in the 1970s, fewer than 200 markets existed. From 1994 to 1996 alone, their number increased from 1,775 to 2,400, a 38 percent increase. Today, there are more than 5,200 markets, and more than 25,000 growers depend on them.

When planner Barry Benepe and agricultural specialist Robert Lewis conceived of and started the Greenmarket in Union Square, a primary goal was to save upstate small farms, too many of which were being sold to developers because they were no longer financially viable. Today, many of those farms would not exist without the urban outlets that markets provide.

But more than saving farms, markets are often precursors of larger urban change. This pattern was apparent around the Union Square neighborhood and is also apparent in similar forms in market districts everywhere. Restaurants open nearby, taking advantage of fresh produce direct from the farmer. Run-down, empty, but solid buildings get fixed up and reoccupied. New social relationships develop at the market and, in the process, strengthen neighborhoods. Public space is enlivened, and often created for the first time. Regional family farms are given a new lease on life. Young people once again find reasons either to stay on the family farm or to buy farmland and start anew. Many expand their product offering based on customer requests. Some nearby dormant farms are bought not by subdividing developers but by new farmers producing dairy products once only imported from afar, raising goats, sheep, and even alpacas, or growing a wide assortment of once hard-to-find fruit and vegetables.

In the past decade, beyond farmers’ markets, many small and larger things have been happening that from the bottom up are not only changing eating habits, restaurant menus, and supermarket offerings but also neighborhoods and lifestyles. Empty, rubble-strewn lots of all sizes in urban neighborhoods are converted to local gardens. Some have become valuable community gathering places. School districts around the country have initiated “farm-to-school” programs to include local foods in school lunches. Fresh foods are slowly becoming available in poor neighborhoods where processed foods dominate. Poor kids are learning how to farm, where food comes from, and how eating affects health, all having an impact beyond measure, sometimes in neighborhood gardens, other times in school gardens. The “buy local” food movement—“a thousand miles fresher”—of which this is all a part is forcing awareness about transportation choices, environmental conditions, and neighborhood health. An increasing number of students seek to be interns on farms as a way of participating in the sustainable food movement. Food has become the political movement of the day. “Opportunity, not necessity, is the mother of invention,” Jane said.

Every imaginable esoteric food-related operation seems to be cropping up in New York. Workshops in kitchen composting are increasingly popular. And Brooklyn, already the city’s hippest borough, is a hotbed of locally produced foods—from handmade pickles and chocolate to grainy mustard and exotic cheeses—sold in local shops or the back of trucks. Last May, a Brooklyn Food Conference held more than two dozen workshops under the categories of Food and Economic Development, Access to Food, and Growing Food. Hundreds attended, learning how to start everything from a food co-op to a new farm.

The Precursors Are Maturing

Like never before, our industrialized global food and distribution system is being challenged. The sands are shifting, even if slowly. In the United States the number of farms increased by 4 percent from 2002 and 2007, with most of the new farms being small part-time operations. Today, the number of U.S. farms is between 2 million and 2.5 million, including 100,000 new ones in recent years. Until recently, that number had been diminishing since the number of farms peaked at 6.8 million in 1935. And what is even more encouraging is the diversification of farming and increase in organic farms from 12,000 in 2002 to 18,200 in 2007. Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) wants to institute small diversions from the agricultural budget to encourage sustainable agriculture, create farmers’ markets in every community, develop year-round farmers’ markets, and nurture small-scale agriculture in other ways.

Promoting local and sustainable food and healthy eating has become a mission of the first lady, Michelle Obama. Before a state dinner in February 2009, she gave a kitchen tour for reporters and culinary students, as Marian Burros reported in the
New York Times
on February 23, 2009. “The first lady took the opportunity to put in a pitch for local and sustainable food and for healthy eating, a recurring theme of hers during the campaign and since she arrived in Washington. When food is grown locally, she said, ‘ofttimes it tastes really good, and when you’re dealing with kids, you want to get them to try that carrot. If it tastes like a real carrot, and it’s really sweet, they’re going to think that it’s a piece of candy,’ she continued. ‘So my kids are more inclined to try different vegetables if they are fresh and local and delicious.’” She is also encouraging serving local foods at soup kitchens.

All these small, seemingly unconnected occurrences are precursors of positive change, gradual growth, and an urban resurgence that is hard to fully appreciate before it is full-blown. Understanding how these issues relate to one another forces one to look at a city holistically. Only then do you understand urbanism as a process, not a series of projects.

For forty years, whenever I extolled the virtues of these kinds of small precursors of change, experts and professionals dismissed them as too ad hoc or inconsequential. How wrong they have all been! Community-based efforts were dismissed as too inconsequential to make a difference citywide. The early establishment of farmers’ markets had to be fought for to overcome disbelieving and resistant city officials and professional experts. The observation that more people were moving into downtowns to live was dismissed as of minimum consequence since it was mostly young singles and empty nesters, although a funny thing happens to young singles: they have a habit of getting married and having children. Witness Tribeca, where several schools exist that didn’t in the 1970s. All such movements of big change start ad hoc and small.

Recognizing Precursors Is Key

It is not as important to be able to measure, explain, or applaud regeneration after the fact; it’s more important to recognize, respect, and nurture it in its earliest stages. This is where professionals and policy makers need to observe and listen more carefully to local citizens, to recognize the value of the precursors, to observe closely and not make judgments from afar. If you look closely at what people are doing or what they are identifying as needed in their community, appropriate corrective measures that are under way and new ones to be initiated reveal themselves.

Citing poet Robert Frost’s famous quote that “Nature’s first green is gold,” Jacobs noted in conversation about the positive value of the urban agriculture trend: “That gold is a different kind of chlorophyll than an infant plant needs to start off. It is a very powerful kind of chlorophyll. Largeness has nothing to do with it. It is a different quality and it permits larger things later, but it doesn’t overwhelm the chlorophyll; it’s a precursor to it. I began to see this when I realized I was looking at the wrong phase of the business cycle, not at the nature’s first green gold part of it.” Precursors are important to all areas, she added. “Ecologists have to think of precursors when they study the aftereffects of a fire. They not only have to see what has been destroyed but what is left to regenerate.” This was true in the aftermath of the St. Helen’s 1980 volcano eruption as well as the 1970s burned-out condition of the South Bronx.

This is the fundamental error—a tragic one, in fact—of Moses’s urban philosophy and why, as we will see later, this error keeps getting repeated. Moses mistook precursors—often messy at best and hidden in deteriorated and dormant areas, at least—as blight. Actually, precursors didn’t fit
his
vision of what the city should be. He was incapable of recognizing the precursors that stood in the way of his bulldozers, incapable of valuing their rebirth potential, and, worst, incapable of knowing how to deal with them other than through elimination. If even half of what he destroyed were nascent precursors or mature but growing contributors to the social, physical, and economic health of the city, one can begin to understand what the city lost and why it took so long to recover from the damage.

Historic Preservation: A Visually Obvious Precursor

If you look at any revived urban neighborhood today, you would be hard-pressed to find a more potent catalyst for its early regeneration than historic preservation. Historic preservation never starts in a big way. Sometimes the first upgraded building may be ahead of its time. Years may pass before other properties are similarly upgraded. Chances are, however, that things—often, small, creative, and productive things—are occurring in neighboring unrestored buildings of primary importance. Yet occasional and scattered upgrading, whether to official historic preservation standards or not, can be an important clue that precursors to more positive change exist. Wherever there is activity, close observation of its nature is called for to understand future possibilities.

Most people don’t even know or remember that such celebrated neighborhoods around the country as the French Quarter and the Garden District in New Orleans, Georgetown in D.C., the Battery in Charleston, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the Victorian District in Savannah, the King William District in San Antonio, South Beach in Miami, Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the North End of Boston, Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and many more were at one time considered “slums.” And those are just the transformed residential districts. Likewise, many of today’s viable former industrial neighborhoods, now popular loft neighborhoods, all over the country were once declared slums.
Slum
, in these instances, meant deteriorated, seemingly empty, occupied by unimportant activity, abandoned, or absentee-owned, properties that owners were thrilled to sell.

But many of the buildings in all of these districts also were occupied either by precursors that went unrecognized or offered an opportunity for new small enterprises and start-ups or by new residents. If such areas survived to grow and thrive while upgrading occurred around them, it was only because no larger replacement agenda existed to threaten them or a replacement plan was thwarted either by civic resistance or by failing economic conditions. Many of the empty buildings had a value often invisible to experts but not to potential buyers looking for affordable space. Many were scheduled for demolition that hadn’t happened yet (remember the Civil War-era piers Gregory O’Connell rescued from demolition plans in Red Hook). The historic nature of the architecture was probably not the first point of appeal, but the quality of the design, construction, and space added up to a good package. Now if the neighborhood was hopeless, if the problems so overwhelming a newcomer would stay away, then one could assume any hidden precursors wouldn’t last and no new ones would appear.