Famous Ankles

I’ve been going through Alphabet City recently.  In other posts, I’ll describe it a little better, but it’s part of the East Village.  I’ve recently been informed that the old timers reject the “East Village” appellation and prefer to remember it as the Lower East Side (which generally is used nowadays as the same general area, but only below Houston).

Anyway, I kept running into small community gardens in the area.  Calling them “gardens” isn’t quite right as they don’t let you grow your own stuff, but are set aside as greenery areas in the midst of a lot of four and five story buildings.

On Avenue A and 11th Street, I ran into the Open Road Park garden area…although it’s not much of a park nor much of a garden (at least not right now).  Note the sophisticated signage.

This one’s quite a bit bigger than the normal community garden in other parts of the area, but it really does fall into the general type of garden in most ways.  Look at the plantings (it’s winter and all is dormant, of course).

In fact, it is very deep and even has a greenhouse area.

Amazingly, and I mean that with a lot of feeling, they even have a tiny pond!

It isn’t much, but it’s real.

The area itself is so mixed.  Alphabet City has areas of great beauty and significant poverty.  But it does have a lot of places like this and, although not unique by any means in NYC, it made me very pleased with how NYC has shaped up.

-H

This entry was posted on January 30, 2008 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Greenwich Village, LES, Manhattan, Wanderings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.