Our Story

1974 – 1981

The Corner Garden
In 1974, on a vacant lot at the southwest corner of LaGuardia Place & West 3d Street, a loosely formed group of Village residents began to garden.

In the summer of 1980, the land was sold for development. The Corner Garden, as it was known, ended with the arrival of a bulldozer.

LaGuardia Corner Gardens

In the spring of 1981, several of the gardeners, led by Cheryl Small, Norma Turrill, Susan Kocki, Gean Mathwig, David Blake, Sandy Klabunde, and others, formed LaGuardia Corner Gardens, Inc., as a 501(3)(c) non-profit corporation.
The gardeners negotiated with NYC’s GreenThumb program and Community Board 2 to move the garden to barren land a block south, on city property adjacent to a supermarket.

After many Community Board meetings and hearings, and over some opposition but with the overwhelming support of the majority of local residents, the garden obtained approval to develop the space as a garden.

1981 was spent getting estimates for a fence, planning a water system, laying out plots, and raising money. The perimeter flower border and the pathway around the garden were negotiated with GreenThumb and the Parks Committee of CB2, chaired by Anthony Dapolito.

That summer the top soil from the West 3d Street garden was moved, by court order, to the new site.

1982 – 2013

The Work Begins
By May 1982, the garden had an eight-foot high chain link fence. The garden members set aside a weekend to lay out the garden and spread the soil.

Armed with sifters and wheelbarrows, the gardeners spread the dirt and removed the rubble, which was mostly broken bricks left over from the tenements that had stood on the site. Strings were laid out and plots were assigned. Some used the rubble for their pathways. A wood shed was built to house the tools. And the planting began. Gean Mathwig was the first gardener to plant her plot.

In the spring of 1983, garden members installed boards between the plots. In the summer, Jeffrey Rowland and others broke up the bricks for the perimeter path bed.

The Water System
Water was siphoned from a barrel filled from a fire hydrant outside the entrance to the garden. David Dorfman and Jeffrey Rowland then built an above-ground water system from PVC pipes. They connected the pipes to the hydrant with a hose, which was later suspended overhead to make it semi-permanent. Estimates were sought for a permanent connection to the water.

During the summer members of the garden and Ken Green, Director of GreenThumb, held a party to celebrate the garden’s progress.

In April 1985 an underground connection to the water supply was installed, making the garden self-sufficient.

2014 to 2021

Improvements & Repairs
The garden has celebrated its Silver Jubilee. It has gone through several sheds and more than a few tools. The chain link around the north garden fence has been replaced. White marble chips were added to the path around the perimeter of the garden. And many of the boards between the plots have been replaced.

In the winter of 2019-2020, the Parks Department installed a new rod-iron fence around the garden.

 

The LaGuardia Corner Garden, NYU and Supermarket saga

For several years, from 2012 until 2023, the future of the garden was very uncertain. Again and again, we feared that our urban oasis would be destroyed. The story runs like this:

LaGuardia Corner Gardens is on land owned by the NYC Department of Transportation. LCG’s members have sought to transfer the site to the NYC Department of Parks in order to protect the garden from development. Both Community Board 2 and our NYC Council Member supported the transfer, but it never happened. We think that NYU blocked the transfer every time.

NYU owns the land of the one-story supermarket adjacent to the garden, as well as the superblock comprising the Silver Towers and the Washington Square Village. In 2012, the city council approved NYUs massive expansion plan, which included construction of 4 new buildings, one of them at the Morton Williams Supermarket site. As one of the concessions to the neighborhood, NYU offered the city the option to build a public school at the supermarket site. Initially, the school was to be integrated into an NYU building. However, by 2021, NYU had no longer plans to build on the site, in which case the school would be a stand-alone building. The deadline for the School Construction Authority (SCA) to exercise the option to build a public school at the site was moved back several times until 2021.

2021 – 2023

In November 2021, the School Construction Authority finally declared their intention to build a public school at the Morton Williams Supermarket site. At this time, the school was planned to serve students with disabilities from across New York City.

Meanwhile, NYU finished the construction of a large multi-use building on Mercer Street, now called Paulson Center. During the negotiations of NYU’s expansion plan prior to its approval, NYU promised to integrate a supermarket into the new building. However, this promise was broken and no space for a supermarket was allocated. Instead, NYU offered a 20 year lease to Morton Williams at its old site (albeit with a demolition clause).

The supermarket would still have to make way for a public school, should the SCA decide to begin construction. Important for the community, there is no similar supermarket in the area and no alternative site for a supermarket of the same size had been identified.

Members of the community created the organization Save Our Supermarket (SOS) to preserve a supermarket in the area, ideally at the same site. Early in 2023, SOS representatives met with public officials and the School Construction Authority and learned that any school to be built at the site would be for pre-K to 5th-grade students from the neighborhood. A final decision was to be made at the end of 2023 after the need for school seats was established.

At that point, the future of the garden was very uncertain. The School Construction Authority indicated that the area of the garden would be used to stage equipment during school construction. They planned to return the land (by then destroyed and contaminated) to the community after completion of construction. Thus, the garden aligned with with SOS in the fight for an alternative site for the school, and for preserving the supermarket.

December 2023 – today

At the very end of 2023, the school construction authority finally decided that they would not build a school at the site at this time.

A new agreement was made between the SCA, the supermarket and NYU, in which the supermarket has the right to stay at the site for the current lease of 10 years with the possibility of two 5-year extensions (until 2041). If the supermarket does not extend the lease, the SCA still has the option to build the school, but only until 2038 when the property will finally fall back to NYU. This means that NYU cannot sell the property or build anything until 2038, or until 2041 if the supermarket signs the second extension of their lease.

What does this mean for LaGuardia Corner Garden?

With the decision not to build a school at this time, our garden will be totally safe for at least 7 more years, when the supermarket has to renew its lease for the first time. If the supermarket renews the lease, we will be safe until 2038, when the SCA has the final call to build a school. Nobody knows what will happen after that, but a lot of water will flow down the Hudson River until then.

Meanwhile, the garden is renewing its efforts to gain more protection from development. However we can finally plant for a longer future without fear of losing our garden.

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