Ripe for a Party

The Southwark/Queen Village Community Garden will celebrate 25 lush years. It’s taken some hard work, and lots of lobbying.

 

Back in 1976, when Philadelphia’s neighborhoods were sprucing themselves up for the Bicentennial, the big empty space on Christian Street near Third was nothing more than a vacant lot, full of weeds, that hadn’t been used in years.

 

Hardly an urban oasis.

 

But the gardeners of the Queen Village Neighbors Association looked at that barren cityscape and saw the potential for a wonderful community garden–a common backyard for the land-poor rowhouse and apartment dwellers of Queen Village and Southwark.

 

Old-timers and newcomers to the gentrifying neighborhood worked side by side to make their vision a reality, clearing the site and digging the unyielding ground.

 

“When we started, one of our major tools was a pick, for turning the soil over,” recalls Libby Goldstein, a ceramist from Queen Village who was a driving force behind the garden’s creation. 

 

Later this month, the Southwark/Queen Village Community Garden will mark a quarter-century of planting on the site with a Silver Jubilee celebration for community

gardeners past and present, as well as neighbors, friends and well-wishers.

 

Holding on to the land wasn’t always easy.

 

Without “a handful of intrepid gardeners with a passion for their sacred space,” the greenery could easily have been lost to development, says Audrey Lisowski, who joined two years ago. 

 

Over the years, the politically savvy band enlisted the help of such allies as former Mayor W. Wilson Goode, then-U.S. Rep. Thomas Foglietta, and Sen. Arlen Specter in their efforts to stop the federal government from selling off the site as “excess property.” Along the way, the garden’s advocates were instrumental in the birth of the Neighborhood Gardens Association, a nonprofit land trust that helps protect Philadelphia’s community gardens. 

 

“Gardening in the city is a political act,” Goldstein, a veteran of all the battles, says somewhat dryly. “There’s no question about that.”

 

Today, the garden numbers doctors, architects, schoolteachers, domestic workers, salesclerks, home-health workers, and retirees among the 74 people who tend 65 plots on more than 18,000 square feet of open space. In age, the gardeners range from college students to senior citizens, and there’s always a waiting list.