Kelebohile Nkhereanye gardens at the Williams Avenue Community Garden in East New York on Friday, Nov.1, 2024.
(Credit: Kennedy Sessions)
On a chilly and sunny Friday morning, Kelebohile Nkhereanye, 60, boarded the L train from the Lower East Side to visit Williams Avenue Community Garden in East New York. Nkhereanye, a former East New Yorker, said she takes the trek because she’s committed to tending to her large bales of kale, bok choy, tomatoes, bell peppers and basil.
“I feel connected to this space as a steward, and I’m benefiting in the sense that I get to grow food,” Nkhereanye said. “I get to experiment without stress of feeling like I don’t have resources; the resources are there.”
Wearing thick black gardening gloves and polka-dotted jeans, Nkhereanye, a former East New York community board member, trimmed the weeds one by one, cutting them with sharp clippers while a hose tilted on the raised wooden garden bed slowly watered the soil.
Kelebohile Nkhereanye’s bell peppers are shown. (Credit: Kennedy Sessions)
The 2,500-square-foot garden, owned by the New York Restoration Project, sits on a small plot in the center of Williams Avenue and Liberty Avenue, near a block of industrial businesses and residential homes.
Nkhereanye, a longtime food justice advocate, worries that the city’s moves, such as budget cuts to the Parks and Recreation Department, which manages community gardens, could lead to demolishing greenspaces in the easternmost part of Brooklyn.
East New York is home to more than 60 gardens, the most of any other neighborhood in the city. Most of them are managed by Green Thumb, a city gardening program. The gardens offer urban farming, organize neighborhood events and host weekly farmers’ markets.
In August, Mayor Eric Adams issued Executive Order 43, an ordinance requiring city agencies to review city-owned land for potential housing development sites.
“If there’s any land within the city’s control that has even the remotest potential to develop affordable housing, our administration will take action,” Adams said in a statement.
The order sparked uproar from garden lovers who were already on high alert following a months-long battle over the Elizabeth Street Garden in Downtown Manhattan.
According to The City, Parks & Recreation has seen cuts throughout Adams’ tenure. Of the city’s $112.4 billion budget, $618 million is allocated to the Parks Department, less than 1% of the budget.
Because of the uncertainty, a coalition of New Yorkers advocating for the preservation of community gardens gathered on the steps of City Hall on Oct. 28, calling on Adams to remove Parks from the list of agencies on notice.
Green Guerrillas Executive Director Sarah McCollum said the pressure to remove gardens for housing developments isn’t new, noting that similar provisions were attempted under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration in the late 90s.
“There’s a very long history of mayoral encroachment on community gardens due to these lack of protections,” McCollum said. “Many community gardeners are also in need of affordable housing, are rent burdened, and so it creates a false conflict where there really isn’t any.”
Council Member Chris Banks, who represents eastern Brooklyn, spoke at the rally and said New Yorkers shouldn’t have to choose between gardens and housing.
“No one is against building housing and building real, true affordable housing, but it should never be at the expense of protecting green space,” Banks said in an interview.
Banks described the gardens as “essential treasures” for a predominantly Black and brown neighborhood with scarce access to healthy food options.
“They are a way for them [kids] to stay off the streets, to give them vital skills on agriculture, how to plow land, how to eat healthy, and how to grow vegetables,” Banks added.
A 2020 Community Health Profile report found that in East New York and Starrett City, 23 percent of adults have been diagnosed with diabetes, and 37 percent have been diagnosed with hypertension, outranking other neighborhoods in Brooklyn and New York City overall.
Doctors diagnosed Nkhereanye with high blood pressure and prediabetes in 2019. The diagnosis shifted something in her, she said, causing her to change to a plant-based diet and plan routine visits to the local community garden. “I know going to the garden lowers my blood pressure,” she said.
“I fight for my health. The food that I’m fighting for is the food I want to eat.”
