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For Those Patches of Green, Home Rule Draws Closer
By
JAKE MOONEY
It was just starting to snow, and the scattered vegetable
plants in the Warren St. Marks Community Garden in Park
Slope, Brooklyn, were brown and shriveled. The first
workday of the season, traditionally the first weekend in
April, was still weeks away. Karen Stead Baigrie, who is
one of the garden's general administrators, surveyed the
barren plots.
"It looks so ugly right now," she said, "and then you come
in a few months and it's this verdant forest of green that
comes up to your waist."
The cycle of dormancy and rebirth is a tempting metaphor
for the history of the garden, and dozens like it
throughout the city that were on the verge of being sold
off for development before the Trust for Public Land and
others snapped them up in 1999. Now, the trust, a
preservation group, is preparing to transfer control over
the 64 gardens it owns to a new set of organizations, and
planners say these groups will help keep the gardens
permanent.
The Brooklyn-Queens Land Trust, chartered 10 days ago along
with the Manhattan Land Trust and the Bronx Land Trust,
will represent about 400 gardeners from 34 gardens. Among
that group is Ms. Baigrie's plot, which is east of Fourth
Avenue between Warren Street and St. Marks Place. Each
garden will have one vote on organizational matters, and
the group's members will elect a board.
What it all means on the ground is that the gardeners are
leaving the nest, said Susan Clark, a spokeswoman for the
Trust for Public Land. The transfer is a year away, but
staff members at the trust are already training members of
the new groups in the complexities of running an
independent organization.
"We're making some very important history here in terms of
the preservation of community open spaces," said Paul
Joseph Coppa, program director of the New York City Gardens
Land Trust Program, part of the Trust for Public Land.
"It's extraordinary that this group of people, so diverse
racially, culturally and economically, have been able to
come together on a common theme."
For Ms. Baigrie, a painter and photographer by profession,
the transfer is a big step. "They've set us up, but it's
important for us to be self-governing now," she said. "It's
going to be interesting when it happens, because we won't
have T.P.L. to put up fences and fight legal battles for
us."
Still, she believes that her fellow gardeners have enough
dedication to make the arrangement work. "A lot of us are
artists and writers and nurses, and don't have much money,"
she said, "and a lot of people live in apartments and don't
have backyards. So this is their backyard."