Memorial Day Weekend, 1988
The ground has been warm enough for two months, but this is the first chance I’ve had to dig my plot, number 13 in the Frankie Machine Community Garden. I jump on the rim of the shovel several times; if I’m lucky, I have found a spot in between the stones, bricks, pistons, and plumbing buried just beneath the surface, and I can pry up a small crescent of dirt as dry and hard as plaster. I have been here almost an hour, and I have only puckered the surface of a fraction of my plot. The temperature is in the 90s, I am sweating like a pig, and my feet have been bruised through my tennis shoes.
He is wielding an imaginary tool. An ax? No, a pickax! “Yes, please,” I laugh, “a pickax. Yes! Thank you much!”
When she is gone, I take a couple of desultory swings at the ground, but my heart is no longer there. I drop the pickax over the fence and go home.
I protested: urbanites eat too, and a connection with the earth was, to use a buzzword of the period, natural. But a seed of doubt had been planted.
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I live in an area called either West Town, East (Ukrainian) Village, or Humboldt Park, depending on whether the person speaking is a city administrator, a real estate salesman, or an urbanologist. The residents are mostly Latino or Polish, with a smattering of euphemistically named “urban pioneers.” Until very recently, vacant lots were plentiful and cheap in the neighborhood; the depressed prices of existing buildings didn’t justify new construction.
In April 1988, my friend Marjorie Isaacson told me that the East Village Association (EVA), a community organization to which she belonged, was planning a public garden on the lots. At a March meeting, Gutierrez had claimed that a lack of community interest had stymied the original project; Margie and Mark Frohman, under the auspices of EVA, hoped to prove him wrong. They posted signs in English and Spanish announcing the garden. With volunteer labor they cleaned up the lot and installed a donated chain-link fence. A dozen people or so showed up for an organizational meeting. The alderman promised a ten-year lease from the city.
Suddenly the water stops flowing from the hose. Margie is concerned that someone is stealing the special adaptive cap we use. She runs around the corner.
