“Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there.”
The Coming Insurrection (2009)
The sounds of the garden take on a new affective charge when we are forced to consider their political consequences. The garden has the power to resonate with joy and celebration, with anger and disgust, with sadness and loss, with nostalgia and love.
I wander into the Elizabeth Street Garden in New York City on October 14, 2022. The leaves on the pear tree overhead are starting to change, but the garden is full of people enjoying the slightly cooler fall weather. Someone has hung windchimes on a branch, and they blow in the breeze. The following day, I find a seat in the amphitheater at La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez Community Garden. An Afro-Cuban ensemble performs, complete with two saxophonists, a man seated behind a drum set, and two percussionists with maracas and a tumba drum. I sit in a folding chair in the De Colores Community Yard Garden on April 22, 2023 ― Earth Day. Bassist Felice Rosser lays down a reggae-infused bassline with her band Faith NYC. An unseen cardinal chirps faintly in the distance in response. As I enter each space, I am struck by how different, how unexpected, and often how loud their sounds are. “What does an urban garden sound like?” I wonder. What should it sound like?
Since the rapid onset of industrialization around the turn of the 20th century, New York City has developed its reputation as an almost stereotypically noisy place. As the Saturday Review of Literature so potently expressed in 1925,
“There is nothing fanciful in the assertion that the pitch of modern life is raised by the rhythmic noise that constantly beats upon us. No one strolls in city streets, there is no repose in automobiles or subways, nor relaxation anywhere within the range of a throbbing that is swifter than nature.”
This nearly century-old opinion piece on urban hinges on an even older comparison: the manmade city as oppressively noisy versus “nature” as a relaxing refuge. Here, too, the anthropocentric public sphere delineated by “modern life” is constructed as being in opposition to the nonhuman. Gardens have often been upheld as quiet oases, or as providing a dampening effect against noise pollution within a detrimentally loud human soundscape. And yet, a review of the history of these community gardens reveals that they have also been significant contributors to the urban soundscape themselves, from public concerts to musical protests to vibrant celebrations.
What is missing from these prior retellings is any work to actually establish the interdependence between music and gardens on a real-world, practical level. Central to my own project as a musicologist is the goal of re-envisioning urban community gardens not only as vibrant musical venues, but as spaces whose continued existence in fact relies on their identity as “noisy”, artistic centers. As writer-gardener Jamaica Kincaid asks, “why must people insist that the garden is a place of rest and repose, a place to forget the cares of the world, a place in which to distance yourself from the painful responsibility [of] being a human being?”
There is a problematic dichotomy that has emerged between sounds and silences of the urban garden. The term “sound” here is intentionally vague in order to express the full affective spectrum present within the audible urban environment. To illustrate this point, I draw attention to the World Health Organization’s Guidelines for Community Noise, published in 1999, which distinguishes between sound and noise as such:
“Physically, there is no distinction between sound and noise. Sound is a sensory perception and the complex pattern of sound waves is labeled noise, music, speech, etc. Noise is thus defined as unwanted sound.”
If there is indeed “no distinction between sound and noise”, we are then left to question what sounds are unwanted within the urban garden. Who gets to decide which sounds are more desirable and which sounds are less so? If the goal of the urban garden is to provide a space of quiet, should it be argued that any sound in such a space could be perceived as unwanted “noise”? However, if we are to understand sound as inclusive of movement, of vibration, and of biological life by proxy, then a lack of said sound within the confines of the urban community garden paradoxically signifies that something is deeply wrong. A silent garden is one that is underutilized by both human and nonhuman agents, a space which, in its lack of voice and lack of audible necessity, is in constant threat of being destroyed in favor of something deemed more necessary by bureaucratic structures that claim ownership of the land itself. A silent garden is, in this sense, a dead garden.
A brief history of LES Community Gardens
The history of community gardens in the Lower East Side is almost notoriously well-documented within garden literature. Malve von Hassell’s book The Struggle for Eden: Community Gardens in New York City, published in 2002, provides an in-depth history of community gardens across New York City, from the establishment of New Netherland and New Amsterdam in the 17th century to the end of Rudy Giuliani’s term as mayor in 2001. In particular, however, von Hassell details the period from the fiscal crisis of the 1960s and 70s to the end of the 20th century, when the majority of NYC community gardens were established and consequently came under threat. During this period, a confluence of white flight and government corruption led to a sharp decline in federal infrastructure investment in New York City. In turn, many of the city’s buildings fell into a state of extreme disrepair or abandonment. Without money to develop, the city regularly demolished these dilapidated buildings, if they were not already destroyed by arson, and by 1977, there were more than 25,000 vacant lots in NYC. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these lots were concentrated in low-income neighborhoods with large immigrant populations, including the Puerto Rican enclave in the Lower East Side (often still colloquially referred to as “Loisaida”). However, in creating these vacant lots without further oversight, the city incidentally allowed local residents to transform these spaces from rubble-strewn patches of land into neighborhood gardens.
In the film The Heart of Loisaida (El Corazón de Loisaida) produced by Beni Matias and Marci Reaven in 1979, viewers are presented with images of renewal alongside decay ― of the “milagro de Loisaida” (“miracle of Loisaida”). The camera shows scenes of people clearing debris from vacant lots, adults and children planting a garden, and people making music as a song plays in the background, “Cuando tengo el tierra…” (When I have the land…).
Excerpt from The Heart of Loisaida (1979), produced by Beni Matias and Marci Reaven
This fight for community gardens escalated dramatically in the final decades leading up to the 21st century. As Christopher Mele describes in Selling the Lower East Side (2000), an increase in real-estate activity and gentrification throughout the neighborhood from the 1980s through the 90s, due in part to the increased land value driven by the presence of these new and thriving community gardens, made the formerly blighted lots now appealing to developers. Under the administration of Mayor Rudy Giuliani from 1994 to 2001, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development eventually placed a moratorium on leasing lots to gardeners ― a drastic shift from the city’s relatively supportive role towards urban gardens, especially following the establishment of GreenThumb in 1978. Between 1984 and 2000, 91 total community gardens were ultimately auctioned to developers and destroyed, often without prior notice to their caretakers. As Karen Schemlzkopf states,
“The conflict over the community gardens in New York City was a contest over the right to the city. It was about control over public space about who has (or does not have) the right to space, and about the right to be a part of the public.”
Despite the fact that these gardens, through their audible contributions to the urban soundscape, were clearly utilized and valued by both human and nonhuman residents, district zoning maps of the area still listed many of these community gardens as “vacant lots” well into the 1990s. Herein lies the double-bind placed upon gardens amidst the neoliberal urban landscape: to produce too much sound is contrary to the goals of the garden and thus deemed unwanted “noise”, but to produce too little is to risk erasure altogether.
Sonic battles for the gardens
As it became clear that Lower East Side community gardens were facing an existential threat, these highly contested spaces were forced to become sites of active, noisy protest for community members and gardeners. If a noise-ridden garden was “unwanted,” at least it could no longer be ignored. These protests were shaped largely by a burgeoning number of environmental activist groups based out of New York City and evolving from the increasingly mainstream American environmentalist movement.
One of the earliest of these was TimesUp!, a grassroots organization founded in 1987 by activist Bill DiPaola in order to advocate for a broad range of environmental issues, from ozone production and non-polluting transportation to community gardens and accessible urban greenspaces. Regardless of the express campaign goals, TimesUp! has consistently used community-driven events, like large group bike rides and street parties, as a means of spectacle-building and non-violent civil disobedience.
Perhaps the best example of these was the repeated “Reclaim the Streets” events planned largely throughout the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. An organizing strategy borrowed in part from UK-based activists and the radical environmental advocacy group Earth First, Reclaim the Streets events essentially took the form of large street parties designed to block normal travel through heavy traffic areas. These events were planned with the intention of highlighting the need for public space by drawing outsiders in, featuring numerous performers like firebreathers, dancers in elaborate costumes, and a variety of music sources. “Civility campaigns” grew under the Giuliani administration, with the police department engaging in battles against amplified sounds through the aggressively titled “Operation Soundtrap” in 1993. This campaign aimed to limit excessive noise in high decibel ranges, especially from increasingly popular sources such as boom boxes and “boom cars”.
However, as this battle against city noise continued, TimesUp! organizers had to find ways to get around these proliferating noise ordinances. At large-scale protests like Reclaim the Streets, this often meant disguising speakers under elaborate, rolling cardboard sculptures, or instead inviting street bands such as the Rude Mechanical Orchestra to avoid the need for amplification altogether. These events often grew to draw crowds of hundreds of people and resulted in numerous arrests in clashes with police.
These spectacle-building strategies were adopted by numerous other environmental organizations. In 1991, recent New York University MA graduate Felicia Young organized the first Rites of Spring Processional to Save the Gardens ― a day-long storytelling pageant that would parade through nearly forty gardens with live musical performances, poetry readings, skits, and elaborate costumes and massive papier-mâché puppets. As Miranda Martinez states,
“Gardener protests were rich with ‘force of nature’ symbolism and pageantry, executed with maximum noise, spontaneity, and individual creativity. Many activists came costumed as plants or flowers, or wore lead crowns, representing themselves as partners with nature.” (emphasis my own)
The same year, Young founded Earth Celebrations as a non-profit 501c3 organization, and the Rites of Spring Processional returned annually until 2005.
In 1998, the More Gardens! Coalition was similarly founded by activist Aresh Javadi with the goal of protecting Lower East Side community gardens. Following a six-month-long encampment in the Esperanza Community Garden beginning in 1999 (which ultimately was unsuccessful when the garden was demolished on February 15, 2000), More Gardens! continued the trend of music-making and spectacle-building as strategy.
Similarly to TimesUp! and Earth Celebrations, the young organization organized smaller-scale festivals and parties often featuring drum and brass bands, such as the Hungry March Band, or the all-female Afro-Brazilian ensemble Batalá, again as a means to avoid the need for amplification. These protest street bands could move through a broad and sometimes clashing range of genres from samba-reggae to klezmer music. However, by utilizing largely fast-paced, instrumental “global street music”, More Gardens! seemed to prioritize creating loud, lively musical atmospheres with intergenerational and intercultural appeal. As Becky Liebman writes,
“The spectacle of these bands will not help change the minds of people who refute the science of climate change or spurn immigration reform or disagree with a living wage for hourly workers. But they do provide a soundtrack for the playful celebration of values like fairness, generosity, inclusion, innovation, and joy. And why not celebrate these values, as largely and loudly as possible?”
As garden advocacy continued to grow in popularity and momentum, Javadi also created a More Gardens! Song Book to promote sing-alongs not only at protest demonstrations, but also at the growing number of public hearings and community meetings promoted by organizations such as the Gardens Preservation Coalition.
The original songbook contained the lyrics not only to classic protest songs like “This Land is Our Land” by Woody Guthrie, but also “The Union Makes Us Strong!” with original lyrics written by early labor organizer Ralph Chaplin. Eventually, these lyrics were adapted by the artist Lisa Van Guard as follows:
When the Gardens’ inspiration through the people’s blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one
But our Gardens make us strong!
Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever
For the Gardens make us strong!
In 2002, the Save the Gardens movement in New York City achieved more widespread victory when the newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg preserved five hundred gardens by officially placing them under the jurisdiction of City agencies, including NYC Parks. Under the newly sanctioned leadership from GreenThumb, gardeners were provided with resources to continue growing ― such as gardening equipment and soil ― in exchange for compliance with GreenThumb policies. As of 2023, these policies actually require that two free public events be offered per garden per year, including musical performances, with advance permission from the Park Department, GreenThumb, and, of course, the Police Department if amplified noise is involved.
The future of protecting public greenspaces
When it became clear after 2002 that local government had slowed its aggressive attempts at land acquisition from community gardeners, many of the larger-scale and louder protest events quieted down or shifted their attention elsewhere, such as the Earth Celebrations shift towards the Hudson River Restoration Project in 2006. However, this is not to say that threats against community gardens have been eradicated altogether. Over two decades later, in June 2019, the Manhattan Borough President, City Planning Commission, and City Council passed resolutions to similarly re-zone and eliminate the Elizabeth Street Garden for a proposed affordable housing development. Although the circumstances surrounding the impending destruction of the Elizabeth Street Garden are easily comparable to the power struggles of the late 1990s, it is worth noting that attempts at organizing in opposition to the re-zoning ordinance since 2019 have been much quieter. The Elizabeth Street Garden still often organizes events featuring musical performances; but instead of featuring “global street music”, they might instead host a classical guitarist or a flautist like Tibetan musician Tenzin Choegyal.
This new approach, however, is not universally applauded. In a comment on a YouTube video from an Elizabeth Street Garden performance by Patti Smith in 2021, user cafeAmericano1984 expresses some disdain, writing, “From punks to Rich hippies.”
As the demographics of Lower Manhattan have continued to shift over the last several decades, it’s not hard to see why people like cafeAmericano1984 feel that the garden movement has perhaps lost its edge. Real-estate values in the Lower East Side have more than tripled in the years since the early 1990s, and a vast majority of residents in the area as of 2023 have lived here for five years or less. The Elizabeth Street Garden itself is located in the newly branded neighborhood of “Nolita” ― a merging of Noho and Little Italy ― that is home to a large community of wealthy young urban professionals, the quintessential “Yuppy” enclave. As the legal battle continues, it is not uncommon to find arguments of NIMBYism (Not-In-My-Backyard) versus YIMBYism (Yes-In-My-Backyard) on either side of the debate. There are vacant lots in less wealthy areas in which the city might consider developing affordable housing instead of a thriving community garden, but we are forced to wonder why the city might actively target a community garden. And, indeed, if the city were to develop affordable housing in other areas, what greenspace would be left behind? Who will be there to advocate for accessible greenspaces in areas across the city that are undergoing rapid gentrification as we speak, such as the South Bronx and eastern parts of Brooklyn? What will it take to make sure that these spaces are heard?
The sounds of the garden take on a new affective charge when we are forced to consider their political consequences. The garden has the power to resonate with joy and celebration, with anger and disgust, with sadness and loss, with nostalgia and love. The garden relies on these subjective emotional responses, and it relies on the listener to consider their own distinctions between desirable sounds and undesirable noise. What I hope I’ve made clear is that we have only scratched the surface of the collective soundscape of community gardens and, in telling the story of a handful of gardens in one neighborhood of one city, I cannot attempt to account for the experiences of countless other gardeners worldwide, not to mention the nonhuman agents whose voices have perhaps been so far unheard. However, what it can account for is a single truth: a living garden is a sounding garden.
Elizabeth Frickey
New York City
