a literal grassroots revolution
Hattie Carthan, Frances Griscom Parsons, Liz Christy and more
I walk by 679 Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn whenever I’m on my way to my friend Everdeen’s house (which is to say, I walk by it often). There’s a grand Southern magnolia draping over the street, and if you’re headed to the park or scrolling Instagram at the bus stop, you might not ever have noticed it — but Hattie Carthan did.
In 1968, Hattie’s bus commute took her by the tree every day. She was already in the habit of appreciating the greenery of her neighborhood, but the 100-year-old tree struck her as something special. She told friends she thought of it as “my tree.”
So when she heard the magnolia and several abandoned brownstones around it were slated for demolition, she took action.
“We’ve already lost too many trees, houses and people,” she told The New York Times. “Your community — you owe something to it, and I didn’t care to run.”
She held neighborhood meetings, mailed postcards and petitioned the city. In the decade since she’d moved from Virginia to Brooklyn, she’d already noticed the tree canopy in her neighborhood slowly vanishing. The leafiness she once appreciated on her daily commute was growing paler and paler; she knew that with its history of blockbusting and redlining, the city’s parks department wasn’t going to invest in historically Black neighborhoods like hers.
But Hattie couldn’t let this century-old magnolia be another casualty. She created a neighborhood association, raised money with back-to-school cookouts and organized tree-plantings to bring some nature back to the block.
By 1970, Hattie’s advocacy paid off. She secured permission to build a protective wall around the magnolia, and today, New York City recognizes it as a “living landmark.”
Hattie wasn’t done — she turned the abandoned brownstones into the “Magnolia Tree Earth Center,” and by the time she died in 1984, her work led to more than 1,500 trees planted over nearly 100 blocks in Brooklyn. And the magnolia? Still standing, stretching tall.
A handful of months ago, my co-author Bourree Lam introduced me to a term that instantly resonated with me: “kinwork.” As “kinworkers” or “kinkeepers,” women are often the ones tasked with keeping families together; they host the holidays and pass down traditions, send the birthday cards and plan the reunions.
I think of Hattie’s work in Brooklyn as its own kind of kinkeeping. Women tend the gardens, just as they tend to their communities. The history of public gardens is one of women turning vacant lots into lush oases that in turn become gathering places, even schools.
Frances Griscom Parsons, or “Fannie” to her friends, founded America’s first school garden in 1902. She took a plot littered with garbage and created a little experiment she called “the Children’s School Farm.” At its peak, the Manhattan bloomed with nearly 500 plots growing all kinds of vegetables, fruits and herbs. More than 1,000 children took part in Fannie’s project, and by 1906, more than 7,500 other school gardens cropped up across the country.
But — as Hattie knew all too well — the work of gardening and kinkeeping isn’t always an easy sell, especially when the gardeners are from marginalized groups and their neighborhoods are neglected by city planners.
Liz Christy and her “Green Guerrillas” didn’t shy away from the seediness of 1970s New York (I had to get in one gardening pun, OK?). While the city disinvested historically Black and brown neighborhoods, Liz’s group swept in with their own, less conventional methods of beautification.
They planted rogue sunflowers along busy highways and added flowering window boxes to the crumbling ledges of abandoned buildings. Liz made her name throwing cracked Christmas ornaments packed with seeds — she called them “green-aides” — over fences. When the balls burst open, scattering seeds, wildflowers would soon overtake the vacant lots. The Green Guerillas wanted “a literal grassroots revolution” — and green-aide by green-aide, they got it.
In 1974, Liz and the Green Guerillas took over one of those vacant lots on Houston Street on New York’s Lower East Side. They petitioned the city to rent the lot for $1 a month; within 10 years, the revamped “Bowery-Houston Community Farm and Garden”
Just as I walk by Hattie’s magnolia, I also walk by Liz’s garden. After her death in 1985, the Green Guerrillas renamed it the Liz Christy Garden. I take friends for coffee there, to catch up as we sit by the koi pond; my brother and I once ate our breakfast on benches in the shade of the magnolia (yes — another magnolia!).
The kinkeeping continues.
More from me:
Please read my latest story for Esquire! I spent months talking to incarcerated people about prison libraries, book censors and more, and I so enjoyed working with the incredible Adrienne Westfield at Hearst. I interned for Esquire way back in 2013
I’m rereading the Dear America series as an adult and recapping on my TikTok. Follow long!
Thank you again to everyone who filled out the survey and shared ideas for how to make this newsletter bigger and better. If you have any comments, thoughts, ideas (or hey! writing pitches or assignments — I’m a freelancer, after all!) please do reply to this newsletter and get in touch.
And more for my gardeners:
Stewards of Grassroots Movements, The Brooklyn Public Library
If you liked today’s edition, I think you’d really like Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. The best book I read in 2023! There’s a Green Guerillas-like group, a Macbeth subplot, everything.