NYC Casitas and Community Gardens
For over 25 years, community-cultivated gardens and casitas have provided fresh produce, a patch of green, and safe havens for thousands of New York City residents in poor neighborhoods plagued by inadequate social services, drugs, and crime. The municipality has always viewed the innovative use of public land for community gardens not as long-term improvement of inner city neighborhoods but as a form of temporary custodianship of its neglected property. In September 2002, the Bloomberg administration changed this long-held position by agreeing to preserve 500 community gardens.
- Earth Celebrations is a non-profit organization dedicated to addressing environmental issues through the arts.
- From 1984 to 1998, Jane Weissman served as the director of GreenThumb, New York City's community gardening program. Weissman assisted hundreds of city gardeners to plants roots in abandoned transform and saw the value of Puerto Rican-style casitas.
- In 1998, the Bronx Council on the Arts assembled a research team consisting of a photographer, a sociologist, an architect, and two folklorists to document Puerto Rican casitas in New York. Their work was resulted in a video documentary, an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., and a series of articles. Since 1995, photographer Ejlat Feuer and landscape architect Daniel Winterbottom have expanded on that initial research. You can check out Winterbottom's "Castitas: Gardens of Reclamation" article .
- Preservationist Laura Hansen and folkorist Steve Zeitlin make a good point in their asute article — while New York City considers the midtown Bryant Park a jewel in its crown & has invested resources for its rehabilitation, the South Bronx casita and community garden Rincón Criollo is a thorn in its side, which the Giuliani administration is taking steps to painfully remove.
- Elena Martínez's article "Los Amigos Garden and Casita: 'Mi casa es su casa'." (PDF file)
- Nilda Flores-Gonzalez's "Paseo Boricua:Claiming a Puerto Rican Space in Chicago." (PDF file)
- Prof. Ann Hetzel Gunkel's course quetions to my essay "Return to the Future: Puerto Rican Vernacular Architecture in NYC."
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