WE are prepping for the Community Garden Rally on Monday with a poster making party this Friday, October 25 during the LUNGS CSA 4-7pm at DeColores Garden 311 E.8th St Btwn Aves B & C.
Bring your creativity we have canvas and supplies. Open to all!!
We are continue to collect signed petitions please bring any that you have to DeColores on Friday too.
REMEMBER the RALLY IS MONDAY, OCTOBER 28 at noon on the steps of City Hall–SAVE THE GARDENS! Share your LOVE! Tell your fellow gardens! Spread the word, we need a good turnout to be heard.
We are standing up to protect our gardens on Monday, October 28 at noon on the steps of City Hall. Please come if you can. We need to be LOUD!LUNGS is coordinating a City-Wide rally with Green Guerillas, the New York Community Garden Coalition and the Elizabeth Street Garden.We are alarmed by the actions and intentions of the City administration in regard to our gardens.Our rally is in response to Mayor Eric Adams’ executive order 43 of August 21 requiring all city agencies to review their city owned and controlled land for potential housing development sites and in response to the Eviction Notice that Elizabeth Street Garden received on October 2.
Our community gardens are an integral to the health and well being of our neighborhoods. They are the glue that strengthens our community by bringing people together and providing a healthy, educational, active environment.In the 1960s and 1970s New York City abandoned low income communities. Buildings were allowed to burn, entire neighborhoods became moonscapes. But people, on their own, volunteering their time, converted the urban blight into community gardens. Creating a community garden is an act of self-determination. In marginalized communities, gardeners challenge one of the most dehumanizing consequences of poverty and unemployment — severely limited resources. In community gardens people experience a sense of liberation and empowerment. And, as community gardeners, we demand respect.
Since 1978, community gardeners and the Department of Parks and Recreation’s GreenThumb Program have enjoyed a fruitful relationship. Gardeners voluntarily give their time, labor, and money to be stewards of the City’s property and natural resources while GreenThumb has provided much needed organizational support.
Yet in 1996 a city-wide struggle ensued when then-Mayor Guiliani tried to sell hundreds of community gardens to developers.
Now we fear history is about to repeat itself.
In a comment on the Mayor’s E.O. 43, Sue Donoghue, Commissioner of Parks and Recreation, said: Adams’ “new executive order is an important step in addressing New York City’s affordable housing crisis. This effort ensures that we can carefully balance the need for housing with the thoughtful use of the valuable facilities under NYC Parks’ jurisdiction.”
Community gardens signed a ten year license agreement with the city in 2022 but the wording imposed by the city states “ this License is terminable at will by the Commissioner in his or her discretion at any time, upon sixty (60) days written notice, and Licensee shall have no recourse of any nature whatsoever by reason of such termination.”
We are the biggest community garden program in the country — and yet we are not safe. We seek a permanent solution to the preservation of community gardens in New York City.
For eleven years The Elizabeth Street Garden has been trying to reach an agreement with the city government to insure its continued existence. The city has ignored over a million letters sent to the Mayor’s administration calling for the protection of Elizabeth Street Garden. Pragmatic alternative locations to the proposed housing have been offered, but the City remains intransigent.
The past tells us we have to be proactive. We cannot sit back and watch as our gardens are listed as available for development and Elizabeth Street Garden is destroyed. We’ve got to make some noise.
We demand that no community gardens be placed on a list of city properties for potential development and that Elizabeth Street Garden be preserved. This is our ongoing struggle, please join us.
Green Oasis Community Garden, 370 E 8th St (between Ave C & Ave D)
Sunday October 6,
2 pm. Poetry, Sparrow, the Truffles, Bob Holman, and provisional list.
Sun Oct 6, 4 pm. Mitchell Cheng [Green Oasis]
Sun Oct 6, 5 pm. Elliott Sharp [Green Oasis]
Sun Oct 6, 6 pm. Kid Java [Green Oasis]
KID JAVA is a NYC‑based band that plays “Blue Note Americana”, ie., music that is deeply indebted to the blues, but mix it up with other rootsy genres and often with a contemporary feel. Sometimes we’ll play a down-home traditional blues, other times more swing-oriented material, and then there is the New Orleans second-line or funk tune thrown in to keep things lively.
Sun Oct 6, 7 pm. Ray Santiago [Green Oasis]
Afro-Cuban Jazz, Ray Santiago is New York City based pianist, percussionist, singer, composer, arranger and band leader, active in the US Salsa scene from the early 1970s.
LUNGS is working in conjunction with the Green Guerillas and the New York City Community Garden Coalition to coordinate a Day of Action this Saturday 12-4pm at El Jardin del Paraiso, 710 E5th St between Aves B & C, you can also enter on E.4th St.
This Day of Action coincides with GreenThumb’s City-Wide Community Garden Harvest Fair at El Jardin.
Our purpose is to make a public statement supporting community gardens and our total opposition to the gardens being put on a list for development. The gardens are too important to lose, we must protect them for our families, ourselves and future generations.
On Saturday we will collecting signatures and making posters and signs to express our love for our community gardens. This is an all out effort, we are asking you to wear green on Saturday to show your support. We need to make our voices heard. We must be proactive.
We’ve been through this before. In 1996, Giuliani was mayor, and he tried to auction off every community garden across the city to developers. The gardens were listed by the city as empty lots. Gardeners mobilized city-wide, demonstrations, pranks, and arrests followed. We lost some gardens but ultimately prevailed.
In 2015 de Blasio proposed building housing on over 40 community garden sites. After fierce advocacy, 36 of these gardens were preserved.
Losing green space to buildings is obscene. This is not a housing issue, this is a developers scheme. Once an open public space in NYC is gone, it will be lost forever.
We are supporting the work of GreenThumb, and welcome the chance to meet gardeners from across the city.. But our message to Mayor Adams is Hands Off Our Community Gardens!
Preserve Our Gardens, Protect Our Future: Tell Mayor Adams to Stand with Community Gardens!
Beginning in 1973, the NYC Community Gardens movement is the largest urban gardening program in the United States. Community gardens provide free, public, green space to the residents and visitors alike. These community gardens provide ecological, nutritional, and health benefits to the all and provide space for community building. Many community gardens sprang up on vacant or abandoned lots that the City of New York owned. The city issues 10 year licenses to community groups to steward and maintain the gardens under the NYC Parks Department’s GreenThumb program.
We demandthat Mayor Eric Adams issue a clear directive exempting community gardens on city-owned land from Executive Order 43, reaffirming their protection, and ensuring that any land review process fully recognizes the irreplaceable value these spaces bring to our city.’
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Please join us Saturday, the GreenThumb Harvest Fair will be fun!
LUNGS 13th Annual Harvest Arts Festival continues this week, see the complete schedule HERE.
Join us for our Spring Awakening Celebration Saturday. April 20. We are meeting at 11:30am at El Sol Brillante, 522 E.12th St between A & B. Our parade steps off at Noon with our Tree Goddess, Batala, Stiltwalkers and more.
The parade will travel east on 12th St, south on Avenue C, west of E.6th St, north on Avenue A and enter Tompkins Square Park at 7th St, meander through the park and end on Avenue B and 9th St.
There will be many greening groups representing on Avenue B. From 3:30–5:30 pm free pony rides will be available for kids.
At 2:30 on Avenue B Isabel Estrada-Jamison’s group will perform Afro-Cuban folklore and Rumba.
From 3:00–4:30 pm a garden tour will be led by Magali Regis, meeting at 9th St & Ave B.
There are other Spring Awakening events happening in various gardens throughout the day. This schedule is still in flux, so these times are approximations.
At 1:30pm, DeColores, 311 E.8th St ( B & C) is hosting a meeting to introduce the migrants to the community gardens, followed by a short tour of the gardens.
La Plaza Cultural ( SW corner of 9th & C)
2 PM: Elika Healing Bowls
2:30 PM : Bubblez
3pm: Poetry featuring Sparrow, Truffles, David Carter, Flip Marinovich, Jill Rappaport and Bob Holman
4pm : Christopher Thomas
430pm : Bartho
5PM Open Jam with Ali Bishop (from the HAven Jam)
6 pm NORY
6:30 Sylvain Leroux & Sources
7:30 Kid Java
Lower Eastside Girls Club
Here is the RSVP link, to the Planetarium Shows but walk-ins are OK.
Pancho’s Garden (formerly 9C garden, NE corner of 9th & C) will have a memorial for gardeners who passed away in the last year, hosted by GreenThumb. 2023 In Memoriam for GreenThumb community gardeners who passed away at Francisco “Pancho” Ramos Community Garden
UPDATES to Follow!!!
SUNDAY SURPRISE!!
Theater Workshop and Performance!! LA PLAZA 6:15-7:15 pm
Performance by The Commons Choir:
UPON HUMANS is a multifaceted project by The Commons Choir that includes auditory and somatic performance and educational components.
As an archeology of the Kassandra myth, UPON HUMANS utilizes the Faïn/Kocik Prosodic Body voice and movement methodology to unwind the curse of denial, giving renewed significance to contemporary prophetesses. Confronting the disregard of the warning signs from those with scientific and intuitive foresight, this project proposes ways to restore the relationship between our miraculous yet fragile interdependence with the planet.
This performance is part of a series of SEED BOMBS, an emergent program articulating the larger, durational project UPON HUMANS. Designed as an event series, SEED BOMBS will introduce the overall project and explore its broad themes.
The performance features two performers, dancer Samantha Lysaght, and juggler Luther Bangert.
Two bills have been introduced in the New York State Legislature for a vote – calling for community gardens to be designated as Critical Environmental Areas. Both bills have the same wording and purpose which read in part as follows:
Requires the community gardens task force [of the New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets] to conduct an assessment of all community gardens located on publicly owned land in the state to facilitate each garden’s designation as a critical environmental area.
A Critical Environmental Area (CEA) is a geographic area with exceptional or unique character with respect to one or more of the following:
a benefit or threat to human health;
a natural setting such as fish and wildlife habitat, forest and vegetation, open space, and areas of important aesthetic or scenic quality;
agricultural, social, cultural, historic, archeological, recreational, or educational values; or
an inherent ecological, geological, or hydrological sensitivity that may be adversely affected by any change.
On Monday, the State Senate passed CEA Bill S629A.
Now Assembly Bill A4139A is before the members of the State Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee.
Assembly Bill A4139A calls for a regulatory Process by which community gardens can be officially designated as CEAs.
When passed this will raise the “environmental impact review process” bar in order to help preserve & protect community gardens as CEAs.
Both bills have the same wording and purpose which read in part as follows:
Requires the community gardens task force [of the New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets] to conduct an assessment of all community gardens located on publicly owned land in the state to facilitate each garden’s designation as a critical environmental area.
The State Senate bill was sponsored by State Senator Leroy Comrie. He represents the 14th Senatorial District of Queens
The State Assembly bill (A4139A) is sponsored by State Assemblymember Donna A. Lupardo and co-sponsored by State Assemblymember Steven B. Raga.
Assemblymember Lupardo is the Chair of the Agriculture Committee She represents the 123rd Assembly District, which includes Binghamton, Vestal, and Union, the villages of Johnson City, and Endicott
Please visit by email, phone or in person, the members of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, including the Committee Chair, Helene E. Weinstein, in order to communicate yoursupport for the Critical Environmental Areas Designation of community gardens along
Albany Office:
Legislative Office Building, Room 612, Albany, NY 12247,
PROTECT COMMUNITY GARDENS
Contact members of the Ways and Means Committee and tell them why you support this effort to protect the gardens and why the New York State Assembly Ways and Means Committee should vote in favor of the bill. The members of the Ways and Means Committee can be found HERE
SPRING AWAKENING kicks off with our parade led by BATALA, through the Streets beginning at 11am at El Sol Brillante, 522 E. 12th St between Aves A & B, walking east to Avenue C, south on Avenue C to E. 7th St, west on 7th to Tompkins Square Park, meandering through the Park and ending at Avenue B and 9th St.
Avenue B & 8TH ST
1 PM FREE Pony rides, WITH CHARLIE AND NUGGET
PLEASE sign the pony ride waiver to saddle up
Toy Makers workshop
BRING Your old and broken toys and make them into new. Sonny & Sara reinvent timeless characters and cherished heroes into new, one-of-a-kind friends and legends. You are invited to get creative and build your own creations out of up-cycled toys!
2pm Hawk Nest Tour with NYC Park Rangers Rob and Grant, meet at 8th St & Ave B
In the GARDENS
DeColores, 313 E.8th St btwn Aves B & C
2pm Poetry
with Eileen DOSTER and friends
Music
3pm Victor & Carmine and friends
4pm “FAITH” with Felice Rosser
5pm Kid Java
6B GARDEN, the corner of Avenue B & 6th St
1 pm Let’s make Art!!
Outside on garden fence Art around the Garden, we provide canvas
La Plaza Cultural, the corner of Avenue C & 9th St
4:30 pm Kids & Family Socially distant Tango Tangles class. Dance tango connected via a rope, host DD Maucher.
De Colores Community Yard & Cultural Center, 8th St (Aves B &
6pm Standup Comedy: Joan Reinmuth and Nature Boi Comedy
Green Oasis, 8th St (Aves C & D)
6:30p Music.Family PLAN: Immaculately conceived in 2018 in Brooklyn, Family Plan is an aesthetically diverse three-person extraction. The contemporary jazz trio consists of the Canadian pianist Andrew Boudreau and two Chileans, Vicente Hansen and Simón Willson, on drums and bass, respectively. Family Plan has performed at venues such as Scholes Street Studio (NYC), Dièse Onze (Montreal), and the LilyPad (Cambridge), among others. Descendants in equal parts to the sensibilities of high- and low-brow music, Family Plan is performing this concert to celebrate the release of its eponymously-titled debut album comprised entirely of original compositions on Endectomorph
