Pleasant Village Community Garden in Spanish Harlem
I’ve said it on this blog many times: NYC is filled with community gardens. Small and intimate, many of these are the work of a handful of volunteers and communities that want to have some small part of nature in this town. Yeah, we’ve got Central Park and a dozen other big parks; but there’s great pleasure in having a pleasant area all of your own…you and a few thousand of your neighbors.
In Spanish Harlem, on Pleasant Avenue are several of these gardens. And, of course, I went to ‘em all. This first one is called Pleasant Village Community Garden. It’s somewhere around 119th Street or so. According to a nearly ruined sign on the exterior fence, it was created between 1978 and 1982 by Rose Gardella. However, it seems to have taken until 1997 to become a park.
The area of Harlem I was walking through was pretty deserted that day, but each of the gardens had people there. That’s the mark of a pretty good thing, I would say.
As I always love to point out, NYC parks (and gardens) generally have lots of places to sit.
All in all, this place really wasn’t a regimented garden. Stuff grew here and there. One thing I liked about it was the surrounding buildings. They looked pretty run down, but you don’t sneeze at a view of a garden in NYC, so I’d call the residents pretty fortunate to have one.
And speaking of the gardens, this was one that seemed to take the idea of a “garden” pretty seriously. There seemed to be a number of individual plots where residents had veggies growing. Now, that’s what makes a real garden.
-H
