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| Harvesting greens in Camden, N.J. (Photo by Kristin Moe) |
by
Kristin Moe, Yes! magazine:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/meet-the-tenacious-gardeners-putting-down-roots-in-america-s-most-desperate-town
These are Pedro Rodriguez’s chickens, in alphabetical order: Bella,
Blanche, Dominique, Flo, Flossie, Lucy, Pauline, Una, and Victoria.
Their coop occupies one corner of a vacant-lot-turned-garden in
Camden, New Jersey.
It’s an oasis of abundance and order in a city of
abandoned buildings, street trash, and drug deals that few attempt
to hide.
Rodriguez, 50, grew up down the street. Near the chickens, he has
planted neat raised beds of corn, tomatoes, cabbage, kale, asparagus,
eggplant, onion, 20 varieties of hot peppers, and broccoli.
Fruit
trees (cherry, apple, peach, and pear) line the perimeter of the lot, as
well as two beehives. He’s considering getting a goat.
To say that Camden has a bad reputation would be an understatement.
Indeed, Camden, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has
about the worst of any city in America.
It’s been ranked at various
times as both the poorest and the most dangerous. In 2012, it ranked as
the
number-one most dangerous city in the country.
Not surprisingly, Camden also gets a ton of bad press. In 2010
The Nation called it a “
City of Ruins” where “those discarded as human refuse are dumped.”
Last year,
Rolling Stone ran a devastating article by Matt Taibbi under the headline “
Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch from America’s Most Desperate Town,” calling it “a city run by armed teenagers,” “an un-Fantasy Island of extreme poverty and violence.”
It’s also one of the worst urban food deserts in the country. In
September of 2013, the last centrally located grocery store closed its
doors, leaving the city to feed itself on Crown Chicken and junk
from the corner bodegas.
One supermarket remains, at the very edge of
Camden's city limits - but most residents would have to cross a river
and travel along a major highway to get there - a difficulty in a city
where many can't afford a car. Like in many other low-income areas,
obesity is an epidemic.
Most kids in Camden talk about leaving - and many of them do. The
population peaked in 1950 and has since declined by nearly 40 percent to
about 77,000. Anywhere between
3,000 and 9,000 houses have been abandoned, although no one knows for sure. For residents who want a better life, getting out is the most obvious thing to do.
As so many flee the violence and crime, it may seem strange that
Rodriguez is literally putting down roots. In fact, it’s precisely
because of the city’s problems that its urban farms have grown so
much in recent years.
A
study by the University of Pennsylvania Center for Public Health Initiatives
said in 2010 that Camden’s gardens may be the fastest growing in the
country. Since then, the number of community gardens has more than
doubled to roughly 130, according to a list kept by local gardeners.
The Penn study found that these gardens - belonging to churches,
neighborhood organizations, and everyday backyard growers - produced the
equivalent of $2.3 million in food in 2013 and, because most growers
share their surplus zucchini with their neighbors, those vegetables
have helped feed roughly 15 percent of Camden’s population.
The city needs fresh food, and residents are doing what it takes to
grow it. It’s part of the untold story of Camden: a story in which the
residents of this blighted city are the protagonists, quietly
working to make Camden a place where, one day, you might want to live.
Room to grow
The success of community gardens is thanks in large part to the
Camden City Garden Club, which has been supporting the city’s gardens
with organizing power, education, materials, and food distribution
since 1985.
As you might expect, these are not your typical
tea-drinking, flower-growing gardeners. These people are here to
grow
food. In a place where kids are said to bite into oranges,
peel and all, because they’ve never eaten them before - this fills a
void.
The club’s founder and executive director, Mike Devlin, ended up in
Camden in the early 70s because of a paperwork mishap during his
enrollment as a law student at Rutgers. Over time, however, he found
that he was more passionate about lettuces than litigation.
He began
building an organization whose programs now include the Camden
Children’s Garden on the waterfront; Camden Grows, a program that trains
new gardeners; a Food Security Council, which was soon adopted by
the city; the Fresh Mobile Market, a truck that sells fresh produce in
the neighborhoods and provides a place for residents to barter their
surplus vegetables; a youth employment and training program that has
lasted nearly two decades; and Grow Labs, a school program to teach kids
about healthy food - in addition to supporting the growing network of
community gardens.
And, in a city of 12,000 abandoned lots, there’s plenty of room to
grow. While Detroit has garnered considerable positive media attention
for its urban farm movement, Camden’s has been expanding more
quietly.
Mike Devlin, Nohemi Soria, and Pedro Rodriguez (left to right). Photo by Kristin Moe.
Devlin’s hands are deeply creased, and there’s dirt lingering under
his fingernails. For him, gardening is not a hobby; it’s a way of
confronting the myriad issues that Camdenites face - poverty, food
scarcity, and the increasingly frayed bonds of community.
And the best
way to get at those issues, he says, is by giving the city’s
children a place of safety and support. More than 300 youth have gone
through the Garden Club’s employment programs, and countless more
have spent afternoons in its leafy sanctuaries.
A city in flux
It’s a sunny Tuesday in mid-May, and Devlin and Rodriguez are working
at the Beckett Street Garden in south Camden. The garden straddles a
single dilapidated rowhouse, now occupied only by squatters.
In the
heaped beds are lettuce, collards, spinach, leeks, and nice broccoli
crowns big enough to harvest. A Tiger Swallowtail rests for a moment
on a tomato plant nearby.
The two met in the early 80s, when Devlin helped the young Rodriguez
build his first garden in an empty corner lot just a block or two from
here.
Devlin walks over. “There’s something going on up the street,” he
says, pointing. “Four cop cars up there by Pedro’s house.” Rodriguez
walks to the curb, takes a look at the flashing lights, shrugs, and
goes back to work. Normal.
In another corner of the garden, Nohemi Soria, 28, is gathering big
armfuls of collards. Her hair is up in a loose bun and she wears sparkly
daisy-shaped earrings and a bracelet with rhinestone hearts,
despite the dirt.
As the USDA Community Food Access Manager, she does
work for the Garden Club that’s funded through federal grants,
including coordination of the Mobile Market.
Both Rodriguez and Soria are among the hundreds of Camdenites who
have come through the Garden Club’s programs, either as volunteers or
employees, and for whom the gardening scene is a little like family.
Both will testify that growing food has profoundly shaped their lives.
Born 23 years apart, the two grew up in different versions of Camden.
Rodriguez, one of 12 children, played handball with neighborhood kids
and gleefully swam in the “swimming pools” that formed when the
streets filled with water after a storm.
Many of the other Puerto Ricans
he grew up with came to work in the Campbell’s Soup factory, which
closed in 1990. By that time, the other major employers had also left
town, including a number of large shipbuilding companies, as well as
RCA Victor, which made phonographs and television tubes.
“Camden was once beautiful,” Rodriguez says, pointing to what is left
of the houses facing the Beckett Street garden.
Originally owned by
immigrants from Italy, he says, the apartments had marble floors,
painted tiles, and ornately carved wooden fireplaces. Rodriguez
remembers the Italians growing grapes in their yards and making wine
in their basements.
But houses in Camden don’t last long after they’re abandoned.
Stripped of anything valuable - marble, tile, wood, and copper - many of
them now sit, gutted, awaiting demolition. “It breaks my heart to
see these houses go down,” Rodriguez says.
Urban farmer Pedro Rodriguez. Photo by Kristin Moe.
Then came a major riot in 1971, when Rodriguez was a boy. An article in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
reported that “Bitter racial tensions exploded in the night,
fueling fires that destroyed parts of Camden and hardened the lives of
those who lived through it.”
In a story that played out in inner
cities across the country, those who could afford to moved out and left a
vacuum of empty houses, empty factories, and streets full of young
people with nowhere to go.
The 2013
Rolling Stone article
observed that, “with the help of an alarmist press, the incidents
solidified in the public's mind the idea that Camden was a seething,
busted city, out of control with black anger.”
By the time Soria was born, in 1986, the city was in full decline.
Her house on York Street was also home to drug dealers who treated her
front steps as their own. She remembers two guys getting shot in a
car right out front.
“I always felt scared to walk outside,” she says. “You think of
things that children shouldn’t really have to think about, and you
experience things that children shouldn’t have to experience.”
She remembers a time, years ago, when her father tried to take her
jogging in Pyne Poynt park. The two were stopped by a cop, who assumed
they must be up to no good. “We had to convince him that we were
just jogging for exercise,” Soria says. “He didn’t believe us.”
Although parks were mostly off limits, she and her younger sisters
had fun doing normal kid things too - well, normal for Camden. They made
mud pies, constructed obstacle courses in the abandoned building
next door, and baked imaginary pizzas in ovens built from scavenged
bricks.
At 13, Soria crossed the Delaware River into Philadelphia and had her
first taste of what it might be like to live somewhere else. Alone, she
walked under the tall trees and stately buildings of Chestnut
Street. It was the first time she’d been in a neighborhood this nice,
she says, so close to North Camden but so different. “I was like, oh
my god,” she laughs. “I felt like an ant.”
The Philadelphia skyline is always there, hovering across the water.
It shimmers on a hot day. Soria sometimes wonders: “What would my life
be like if I didn’t grow up here?”
Unexpected beauty
Soria is from North Camden, the roughest part of town. Back at the
Beckett Street Garden, in South Camden, we’re in Pedro’s neighborhood,
and the feeling is less post-war Dresden and more the fly-swatting
listlessness of a hot almost-summer afternoon.
Rodriguez’s place, a light-blue rowhouse, is across the street from
his garden and his nine chickens. The building was abandoned when he
moved in, so he slept on the third floor while he gutted it and made
it livable again - “I brought it back to life,” he says.
Photo by Kristin Moe.
The sounds are of distant cars, the groan of a lawnmower, birds. One
empty lot features, unexpectedly, a miniature Christmas village on an
enclosed platform, with tiny snow-covered houses. On a nearby block,
someone has decorated the tree trunks with brightly colored
butterflies.
An older couple hangs out in chairs next door, and some guys are
sitting on a stoop farther up the block. Occasionally, a man will coast
by on a bicycle, in no particular hurry.
Rodriguez seems to know
everyone, and they all return his greetings. A neighbor stops by and
asks in Spanish whether Pedro has any extra
palitos, peach tree saplings. “‘
Ta bien, ‘
ta bien,” they both say. OK.
Rodriguez takes me to his first garden, the one he and Devlin worked
on during the Garden Club’s first season, when he was just a few years
out of high school. Sunflowers, the really tall kind, are just
coming up along the perimeter, but there’s nothing planted there yet.
When the house next door was torn down last year, the demolition
crews razed the garden and ruined the topsoil he’d spent 30 years
improving. Now Rodriguez has to build it up again, starting from
scratch.
Rodriguez grows his vegetables on borrowed land. He knows that if a
landlord decided to build on the site he’d have to leave. “I wouldn’t
fight it,” he says, because any development would be a sign of good
things for Camden. Plus, he’s got a short list of other towns that might
welcome an enterprising gardener. “You always got to have a Plan
B.”
"Two separate worlds"
For most kids in Camden, however, leaving town isn’t Plan B; it’s Plan A. But Nohemi Soria is different; she’s here to stay.
She’s had a couple of advantages: She went to a creative arts high
school, and had some good teachers. She went to college, studied abroad.
She had parents - both migrant farmworkers - who instilled ambition in
their kids early on. And she had the garden.
Nohemi Soria. Photo by Kristin Moe.
When she first came to work at the Camden Children’s Garden at age
14, it was a revelation. It was a little like Chestnut Street in Philly,
she says, an oasis of safety and peace - but only blocks from her
house.
“It was two separate worlds,” she says. We were seven minutes away from each other, but the difference was so drastic.”
The garden was part of Soria’s survival strategy. Being there, she
says, has always been like hitting a pause button: so the bad stuff - the
drugs, the crime, the violence - “doesn’t take control of your life.”
A lot of her classmates, she says, “didn’t make it.” If they were
lucky, they found some positive influence - a teacher, an after-school
program, a place where they could let their guard down and be kids.
“But it was like living a double life.” Back out on the sidewalk, their
guard would come right back up.
Sometimes, she says, kids try to pretend they’re not from Camden.
“They say, oh, I’m from Pennsauken” or other nearby places. They don’t
want the stigma of being from Camden, of being thought of as
“uneducated, rude, lazy, violent.”
Soria and her boyfriend used to work birthday parties, making balloon
animals. When potential clients heard they were from Camden, Soria
says, their attitudes changed. “They’re like ‘Oh, we’ll call you
back’ - but you knew.” They never called.
It’s a problem that’s reflected in the city’s media coverage. When the New Jersey
Courier-Post asked readers their opinions of how Camden was portrayed,
a resident named Joe Bennett said he didn’t appreciate news that was
only about drugs, crime and violence and that it neglected some of the
positive things about Camden. “Crime is not just in Camden,” Bennett
commented on Facebook.
“It’s as though everybody from Camden are criminals,” Felix Moulier
commented. “The image that is projected to readers outside of Camden
instills a fear.”
And then there was the comment from George Bailey, a sentiment that
may often go unspoken: “Maybe if you ignore Camden it’ll just go away.”
One Saturday at the Children’s Garden, Soria and I ran into Sonia Mixter Guzman, another Camden native who helped create the
Goodness Project,
which highlights work that’s being done by the city’s nonprofits.
It’s
trendy now for places like universities, towns, and cities to make
“Happy” music videos
that show people grooving to Pharell’s hit song. So the Goodness
Project found a filmmaker to make a video for Camden, to show that
“happy” exists here, too, just like anywhere else. Soria’s in it,
wearing a crown of flowers.
Camden’s not a big place. But before she did the music video, she
hadn’t met many other people, aside from gardeners, who were willing to
invest in this city.
Seeing that she’s part of a bigger network of people who have all
chosen to stay makes her bristle even more at the negative coverage.
“It’s not just me - it’s a lot of us,” she says. “And we’re trying to
do something.”
“A tenacious lot”
The day after this conversation was Mother’s Day. While Soria and her
sisters were at a barbecue with their mom, Mike Devlin’s greenhouse was
burglarized for the second time in six months. It took him three
days to clean up the mess.
I asked him if food had ever been stolen from the Beckett Street
garden, and he says it has: someone once came in the night and pulled up
a bunch of premature potato plants. It’s not surprising, he says,
resignedly. “Conditions are getting worse.”
A few years ago, Soria’s mom moved out of the house with the drug
dealers to a new place four blocks away where she thought it would be
safer - but her new building, it turned out, was the center of one of
the biggest drug trafficking rings in the city.
Soria has three younger sisters. The youngest, Diana, can tell you
what to do if there’s a shooting: drop down, or hide somewhere that’s
away from a window. “That’s sad to me,” Soria says. She wonders if
Devlin is right, if maybe things are getting worse; she doesn’t remember
knowing that much at age six.
Rodriguez imagines what an alternative city might look like: a
monorail, maybe. A city of the future. Gardens on green rooftops,
instead of in empty lots. “Will I ever get to see that change in my
neighborhood? Maybe 30 years from now.”
Politicians, he says, are to
blame for not having the people’s interests at heart. “Camden has
such a bad rep. Who wants to invest in Camden?”
Instead, he talks about leaving, of traveling the world - Finland,
maybe, or Ireland - and settling somewhere to build another garden. After
50 years, he says, “It’s time to move on.” His siblings all left
Camden years ago. There’s always a Plan B.
Pedro Rodriguez with several of his chickens. Photo by Kristin Moe.
Soria recently moved, too - but to Fairview, a nicer section of Camden.
“I feel like I moved up in the world,” she laughs. “It’s so quiet.” But
back on York Street, her mother has built raised beds, and Diana
already knows how to plant and weed. The Soria women decide together
what to grow.
Change, she knows, is a process. There is nothing in Camden’s recent
history to suggest that things will get better anytime soon. But - whether
out of youth, stubborn optimism, or necessity - she has hope. Perhaps
it’s because she knows from experience that it’s possible to grow up in
Camden and still be OK.
“You don’t like going out and having a bullet in your car - like, you
know, you go through things like this that kind of leave you angry.
Like - ‘Ah, I’m tired of it, I just want to leave.’ But then you
realize, well, I can’t leave. Because if we left everything that was
hard in life, then where would we end up?”
Devlin, the oldest of the three, seems tired. After so many decades
of investing in this place, his hopes for Camden have been tempered by
experience. “I’m not sure you can save it anymore,” he says. “But
you can save
people.”
He says that most of the kids who have come up through the garden’s
programs, like Soria, have gone on to college. “I used to try and
convince kids to get through school, get through college, get a
trade, and then stay in Camden,” Devlin says. But he’s let go of that,
little by little.
“Right now it’s more like, get them on to a safe
life rope, and let them go to another place,” he says. “I don’t try to
talk them into staying.”
The hardest part, Soria says, is not knowing - not knowing whether her commitment to this place will matter in the end.
In the car, on her way back from the Beckett Street Garden, she
gestures to the streets. “I’m not sugar-coating anything,” she says.
“That is reality. But the part that’s beautiful is the resilience
that children have, that families have, that people have. Growing up in
this city, and still making some kind of life. That’s the part
that’s beautiful.”
***
Last winter was the worst in recent memory. The hardy greens, herbs,
and roots, everything that usually survives the winter, died - even
Rodriguez’s bees froze to death. Spring planting was weeks behind.
But by late May, when I talked to Soria over the phone, she was gushing:
Beckett Street garden was going gangbusters. They had so much extra
produce they hardly knew what to do with it, and Rodriguez’s two
brand-new hives were humming industriously.
Sometimes resilience means surviving long enough to get out, to build
something new somewhere else. But sometimes, it means staying put. In
Camden, that requires a certain grit, something the city’s gardeners
have in abundance.
As Devlin says, “gardeners are a tenacious lot” - they
work through rain, heat, and drought, hunkering down to weather
each year’s winter, trusting that seeds will grow.
Correction: This article originally stated that Camden was across
the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. The river separating the two
cities is the Delaware.
Kristin Moe wrote this article for
YES! Magazine,
a national, nonprofit media project that fuses powerful ideas and
practical actions. Kristin writes about climate, grassroots movements,
and social change. Follow her on Twitter
@yo_Kmoe.
by Mark Carrigan, Impact of Social Sciences: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/06/29/book-review-what-is-a-social-movement-by-hank-johnston
Image credit: Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common (Wikimedia, Public Domain)
