OPINION: Community garden members seek to save towering willow
Members of a community garden in Weeksville are seeking to raise money to ensure the survival of a portion of their garden which, because of a fluke of the city’s tax and legal systems, now belongs to a private owner who has slated it for development.
The Imani Community Garden, at 87-91 Schenectady Ave., was built on three lots. The middle lot, the one in question, is important to gardeners because it contains an 80-foot-high, 80-year-old willow tree, which would be destroyed if the new owner decided to build on the site. It also contained a chicken coop and a chicken run until recently, although these have been moved to a side lot.
According to advocates for the garden, Imani was established by a local church-affiliated nonprofit on what were then three vacant lots. In 2001, as part of its policy of buying local community gardens to save them from development, Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project bought the two side lots but, because of an error, failed to realize that there was a third lot on the garden property.
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.