Planting Seeds of Health in Humboldt Park

I just love the idea of urban farming. I can't think of a better way to use our city's empty lots than to plant gardens in them. Chad Bliss and his crew teach teens about farming, sustainable agriculture and healthy living, all while giving them that needed summer job. What's not to love?




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From Dirty, Noisy Naples, Lessons for Chicago

First impressions, arriving in 2,700-year-old Naples in southern Italy, are of a worn-out and poor city where most vertical surfaces, including trains and ancient buildings, are covered with graffiti.

But those were only first impressions.

Turns out this tightly packed metropolis of three million people, while struggling mightily with unemployment, bureaucracy and a long relationship with the Mob, has done what great cities do: create beauty and order and art.

There are lessons here for Chicago or any other city about the kinds of energy, investment and civic life that can counteract more negative forces.

1. Active street life. All day and into the night, the streets were jammed with people of all ages, talking and gesturing and walking together as Italians do. When there are hundreds or thousands of people strolling and sitting and shopping, the environment tends to be fairly safe.

2. Organized activities. Fliers pasted on walls invited residents to community meetings to discuss plans for cleaning up the streets and addressing problems at empty buildings. Other posters announced a trip to the capital in Rome to demand jobs for the unemployed. Those marchers shut down traffic while we watched.

3. Public transit. Unlike Chicago, Naples has a unified transit system that allows 90 minutes of free transfers between the two subway routes, buses, funiculars and suburban trains. Some vehicles were old and covered with graffiti, but service was frequent even on the suburban lines. And the city is building two major subway extensions, while Chicago can't raise the funds for basic maintenance.

4. Respect for history. The center of Naples is a UNESCO World Heritage site filled with 16th Century housing, monumental government buildings and the occasional castle. It's more or less intact, and there's a commitment to keep it that way. Those new subway lines, in fact, are years behind schedule because the excavations revealed 2nd Century palaces and a Roman temple. We saw archeologists in the pits working with brushes and measuring tapes (photo below) to uncover treasures that will be incorporated into the stations.

5. Urban farming. From the train to Pompei we saw scores of tiny farm plots and hoophouses growing zucchini, tomatoes, flowers and other produce for local markets. The farms filled most every piece of vacant land between apartment buildings and along the tracks.

I'm not saying everything is lovely. This is the city where garbage was piled to the second floors during last year's strike by the Mob-controlled trash haulers. There's dog crap on the sidewalks, the scooters are smelly and loud, and the day after we left town, a Mob assasination took place on a major downtown street.

That's bad, but the weekend we came home to Chicago there were nine killings and 13 wounded on our streets. Maybe we could learn a few things from those Napolitani. The food is good, too.

Photos by Pam Barry.

Growing Home's Satisfied Customer

When I moved to Back of the Yards from the North Side four years ago, one of the things I thought I would miss the most was biking home with my weekly summer box of veggies from a CSA (community supported agriculture) share.

Not any more. The photo above shows you what was inside the box I biked home with today. Growing Home's urban farm at 58th and Wood is the pickup point for their CSA share program, and it's an easy bike ride from my house. A few weeks ago, I walked over with three or four of my young neighbors, who got a complete tour from Tyra Rodgers, who manages the site. They learned how hoop houses control temperature so you can grow cold-tolerant vegetables through most of even a Chicago winter, how soaker hoses work and how you can keep a garden healthy without pesticide and artificial fertilizer, among other things.

Today, they couldn't come with, but I got to hear from Tyra how the entire Growing Home staff went to visit Charlie Trotter's and see what he does with the vegetables they grow. They got a full kitchen tour and the opportunity to sample a seven-course meal. "It was really, really amazing," he said. "A once in a lifetime experience." Before the event he was reluctant to go because he's a t-shirt and jeans kind of guy and this event required a coat and tie. But afterwards, "it was worth it." Now he's hoping the staff at Trotter's will come down to the farm so he can give them a tour, too.

Tyra also told me he's been making good friends with the neighbors whose houses surround the farm. One gentleman, who let them use his hose before they had their own water supply, is a fellow gardener with a back lot full of watermelon, greens and other goodies. His grandchildren got to pick a few tomatoes and cucumbers as a thank you for the early support.

When I got home with my box one of the girls who came last time and two of her friends all wanted to see what was inside. "Carrots!" one exclaimed joyfully. Plus, the first tomatoes of the season, small plum tomatoes we all plopped into our mouths right away. Beets, too, which these little guys and gals like. Earlier this season I went up and down the block making people try asparagus in lemon butter with a little salt. There was a two-year-old who kept coming back for more.

Today, as we were snacking on tomatoes and carrots, one of my older neighbors went by and looked over with interest. When I explained how a share works--pay up front and get veggies all summer--and how two or more people could go in on a box together to make it easier to front the cash, she looked interested. This summer I'm splitting a share with a friend out by Midway airport, but maybe next year four or five of us could split a share here on the block.

In the presence of genius: Grace Lee Boggs

I hang out with a lot of very smart people but tonight was different. Tonight I was in the presence of genius.

After spending the day with other community development practitioners at a LISC Learning Forum in Detroit, including a tour and workshop in the Morningside and East English Village neighborhoods, we were treated to a remarkable dinner presentation by 93-year-old civic activist Grace Lee Boggs.

She surprised us over and over again. First, this daughter of Chinese immigrants with a Ph.D. in philosophy, who later married African-American labor activist James Boggs, well, first she introduced an 11-minute rap video by the Detroit artist Invincible, a young woman whose words burn deeply as she spits them out against a backdrop of apocalyptic post-industrial Detroit. "Selective memory, convenient amnesia," she chants, and a whole lot more.

The video features a few snippets of interview with Grace Lee Boggs and other activists, but is really about youth and how, in Boggs' words, "their need to be useful can be the foundation for life in the 21st Century." I've pasted the video, directed by Joe Namy, at the end of this post, in two parts.

I can't do justice to what came next. Ms. Boggs spoke to us, in a quiet but forceful voice, about the whole sordid history of America's industrial cities, tracing the fall of the auto industry, the construction of highways that helped cut in half the city's population, and after years of economic decline for working-class African American residents, the "young people harassed by police who they thought of as an occupying army," after all that came the five days of explosive rebellion in July of 1967 that marked the beginning of a whole new era for Detroit, an era of decline that is starkly illustrated in the Invincible video and that we saw for ourselves on our bus tour this afternoon.

From all this, Boggs sees a bright future. In 1992, Boggs and her husband founded something called Detroit Summer, which used gardening, of all things, to bring older residents together with youth, and which taught those young people, "who thought everything was instantaneous, a sense of process." The same movement spawned a youth bicycle-fixing operation, Back Alley Bikes, the Avalon Bakery that set up shop in the wreckage of the Cass Corridor, and the Earthworks urban farm created by a Capuchin monk to grow food for a soup kitchen and a home for teenaged mothers.

Detroit is among a handful of cities, including Milwaukee, New York and Chicago, that have begun converting their vast acreages of vacant land into productive agricultural space. Was it a coincidence that three groups out of eight at the afternoon workshops suggested "green" development of Detroit's east side expanses, or were we seeing the same thing that Boggs and the seniors and youth saw: the promise of Detroit's next phase? "The whole concept of reconnecting to the earth has such magic to it," she said, especially in the face of today's "energy crisis and planetary crisis."

Referring to the gardening work and the rap video, Boggs said, "we have a model and inspiration for young people across the country." For sure, yes, but the inspiration for me was Grace Lee Boggs herself, a brilliant woman who left us, tonight, with a mandate to carry her work forward.

The video, titled Locusts, part one:



Part two of the video: