Gardener Log InRSCG Story
The Garden sits at the crossroads of a very diverse neighborhood including large populations of African-Americans, Hispanics, families descended from the Italian immigrants of the nineteenth century, a large Polish-American community and a new influx of young, artistic residents. Across the street are both the Greenpoint Hospital complex built in 1914, which served as a men’s shelter and methadone clinic for years after the hospital closed in 1983 – housing 1200 homeless men at its peak – and is now abandoned; and the Cooper Park housing project, comprised of eleven seven-story buildings with 699 apartments housing about 1,753 residents. A major local truck route sits two blocks away; also nearby is largest sewage treatment plant in the Northeast.
Open space is precious in our neighborhood. The district ranks 52nd out of New York City’s 59 districts for percentage of open space, with only .55 acres per 1000 people. The Brooklyn Queens Expressway cuts through our community, and its entrance and exit ramps, combined with heavy local industrial and garbage truck traffic, result in some of the poorest air quality in New York City. Among other consequences of this, 9 per 1,000 children in our neighborhood are victims of asthma.
The garden contributes important green space and clean air to our urban Brooklyn neighborhood. By hosting a Community Support Agriculture (CSA) food distribution, the Red Shed also helps to bring locally grown, healthy food to the community. We hope to expand on this relationship and help foster the development of a full-fledged farmer’s market in nearby Cooper Park. The Red Shed also functions an outdoor classroom for teaching local school children about nutrition and how food is grown.
We would like to be able to include rainwater collection as part of our educational offerings, in addition to using it to water our plants. The Red Shed gardeners use only organic gardening methods, and we believe it is also very important to both use and model such ecologically intelligent systems, especially when they are simple and relatively easy to replicate by other gardens and individuals, as this system will be.
