Garden Given Two Days to Make Way for Condos

The group that spent three years carving a community garden from a garbage-strewn lot on Franklin Avenue has been given less than 48 hours to dismantle it.

Garden organizer Stacey Sheffey was informed this morning that the owner was in the process of selling the building to a condo developer and everything that wasn’t removed by Tuesday night would be destroyed Wednesday.

“This gives us two days to get the things out that we really care about,” she said. “It’s very stressful for all of us. But we don’t have a choice, we have to do it.”

The 27-by-100-foot lot on Franklin Avenue between Park and Sterling places has been vacant since 1984, and over the decades it became a dumping ground for everything from a kitchen sink (literally) to mattresses, to cans of tar, Sheffey said.

Volunters from the Crow Hill Community Association have been cleaning the lot for years. Then three years ago Sheffey put a lock on the gate and volunteers spent a day clearing it out it in earnest, she said.

“It was crazy, the amount of stuff that came out of here,” she said. “A kitchen sink, bicycles, satellite dishes, cans on top of cans. We didn’t know what we were getting into, but we had a whole group of people who just came out and cleared it out ... and it morphed into a garden."

Now the lot is filled with planning beds, garden furniture, hundreds of plants and this year, a sculpture made of 1,300 of the plastic handcuffs used by the NYPD as part of the project “."

“It really was a catalyst for the neighborhood,” Sheffey said. “It did a lot to brighten up the avenue.”

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Last week, Sheffey got a call from the lot's owner, Michael Dandee, informing her that he was in the process of selling the land and as part of the deal needed to test the soil.

“He said it’s a big machine the width of the lot. It will destroy everything in its way, so you have to be out,” she said.

At first she was given two weeks. This morning, she was told to be out by Tuesday night.

Dandee, who bought the lot in 2008 for $60,700.00, according to city records, said he would have liked to give the group more time.

“I was trying to work it out but the buyers are not interested. Unfortunately we had to do this in a rushed situation,” he said.

A member of the garden has offered to store the paving stones, furniture and tools and members are trying to move as many of the plants as possible before the deadline.

“Everybody’s scrambling right now,” said Lana Zellner, a Classon Avenue designer who . She and Kristin Svorka, who own Ground Up Designers, installed a sculpture in the Garden made of plastic handcuffs used by the NYPD as a symbol of both youth violence and what they see as overbearing police presence in the neighborhood. The pair had planned to hold between 2 and 5 art and dance classes per week at the garden during July and August for area youth.

In the past month, the pair had raised $500 through small donations to sponsor the classes and found volunteers willing to lead them.

“We have funding for the classes, we just have to find them the housing,” she said.

Both Sheffey and Zellner are resigned to the situation.

“It’s something that the garden had known was a possibility,” said Zellner, adding that the same thing happened at another community garden she was involved with. 

“It’s part of a changing neighborhood,” she said. “It’s sad and it’s upsetting but I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily surprising.”

Sheffey, meanwhile, remains optimistic that the garden can be relocated.

“We had a really good run and hopefully we can continue. This is not going to stop us this is not the end, this is just one chapter starting.”