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How to Tend a Garden in New York

New York City officials have long been plotting the sale of community gardens to housing developers. Appreciating the few stretches of green in our city of concrete and steel is easy for anyone who’s visited; saving them is something else. Fortunately, garden defenders have proven a creative lot and have successfully frustrated Mayor Rudy Guiliani’s plan to sell off every last vestige of public space. Yet what's happening in New York is going on across the nation–municipalities are selling off public space to private interests. Inspired by the garden troops, Stay Free! has compiled a list of their tactics for folks to try in their own communities.

DISRUPT FILM SHOOTS
Guiliani understands how important it is for Hollywood to use public space, so don’t try walking down 5th Street during the "rain sequence." Instead, drive home the value of public space. Win the administration’s attention by getting that of the filmmakers: chuck eggs filled with glitter onto the set, which disturbs lighting. Offer disgruntled local dwellers sheets of mylar–a reflective material available at any crafts store–to put in their windows. Afterward send the poor crew some chocolate chip cookies; it’s not their fault city officials suck!

RUSH-HOUR GRIDLOCK
Take the day off! At 8 a.m., block State Street, the road on which the New York Partnership (for Garden Killing) is located, by handcuffing humans across it. Unhandcuffed others should hand out flyers. Smile and comb your hair. People are watching.

POOL PARTY
Find some kids, gather outside a developer’s home with beach toys, kiddie pool, balloons, noisemakers, and let the fun begin. When passersby inquire, tell them that without gardens, the kiddies have to play on the sidewalk.

AUCTIONS
Attend public auctions where gardens are to be sold. Encourage family and friends to make false bids, drive prices up up up until you WIN! When it’s time to pay, search desperately for your wallet. Offer to run home and check. Speak slowly. Stall. (Warning: highly illegal.) Then graciously offer your wrists because you, friend, have won a night in jail.

Another option: purchase 10,000 live crickets off the internet, stuff in large envelopes (cut a hole and cover it with mesh to allow air in), then place each in a briefcase. Comrades–dressed stylishly and businesslike–should disperse throughout room. At the signal, release insects and watch the fun. Cricket-launchers will spend a night in jail, so make sure undercover pals are on hand to videotape the show . . . and to hand-deliver dubs to local television network affiliates [the aforementioned scene, thanks to help from Dyke TV, made it on all three major networks]. Inform animal rights extremists that the crickets typically met their fate in an instant, painless manner while helping New York cops exercise aggression through vigorous (and comedic) stomping.

TREE SIT
Put on a sunflower costume, climb up a gingko tree in City Hall Park, and promise not to come down until Giuliani decides to meet with you or, more likely, you get arrested. Or: Gather 30 or more people who, in the words of Rudy Guiliani, are stuck "in the era of communism." All sit down in City Hall lobby.

PUBLIC RELATIONS
Promote the gardens to the public; encourage people to spend time with them. Extend garden hours; enroll more members (usually only $10 a year with four hours of volunteer work); provide keys to more members. Hold parties and bake sales in the gardens.

FAX AND PHONE JAMS
Fax: Set that puppy on loop–only to one number, that of the city council. Tie up their fax for days. You may be able to send as many as 400 from one machine before they knock on your door to cart you away. To avoid arrest, don’t fax the same thing over and over–fax different long missives, in large type. Also, limit the number of faxes from any one number; inform others to fax on behalf of the gardens (appropriate or poignant wording not necessary; old newspaper articles and recipes works just fine).

Phone: Same idea. Call City Council Speaker Peter Vallone’s office on specified days and keep the receptionist on the phone at all costs. Talk slowly, accidentally drop phone, mumble, adopt an important-sounding manner. Perhaps now’s the time to practice that second foreign language. Or to ask vaguely civic-related questions you might have wondered about. Send harried secretaries flowers the next week.

PRESSURE HPD
Pressure Housing Preservation and Development, an agency that argues that affordable housing requires sacrificing community gardens. Place a classified ad in the local weekly offering low-cost housing with the HPD’s phone number.

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, BRIND ON BETTE MIDLER
Really. This woman has helped provide funding for dozens of gardens slated for sale. Activism, though–not money–has saved the gardens.