East Harlem/El Barrio Block 1617

About This Listing

Community spaces under threat of demolition from looming luxury development

Place Details

Place Matters Profile

Written by Bethany Herrmann, Glenn Bell, and Meisha Guild

Block 1617 is located in East Harlem / El Barrio, on Park Avenue between East 112th and 111th Street. According to open data systems, of the 28 lots comprising this block, one contains a structure and the rest are vacant. In reality, the block is home to five community gardens and a baseball field, developed and maintained by the community on land cleared by the city and left for over fifty years.

A community has come together to create relevant spaces that provide agency and meaning. They have seized their right to the city by turning an abandoned lot into a site for recreation, food production, nature, socializing, and gathering.

This place matters because it is a symbol and site of reclamation, and it is threatened.
Block 1617 is a community hub, a precious plot of open space slated for demolition under the new high-rise, high-density rezoning of the East Harlem neighborhood. Formal and official representations render invisible the activity of this community, which need to be seen, heard, and recognized.

According to the tax map issued in 2017 by New York City’s Department of Finance, Block 1617 is located in East Harlem on Park Avenue between East 112th and 111th Street. Of the 28 lots that comprise this block, one contains a structure and the rest are labeled vacant…at least, this is how Block 1617 appears on governmental listings and in open data systems. In reality, Block 1617 is home to five community gardens and a baseball field developed by the community on open land cleared by the city and left for over fifty years. As NYC Planning Open Data notes, these resilient forms of space-making have long been ignored by city officials, and by extension, “developers and all members of the public.” Formal and official representations render invisible the activity of the community, and invalidate its efforts in creating a community hub for a neighborhood that desperately needed it, and still does, to this day.

In the 1960s, throughout East Harlem and directly adjacent to Block 1617, large swaths of tenement housing were cleared, public housing was constructed, and people of color were displaced in practices of urban renewal. Community groups developed the block’s current baseball field in response to the abundant empty lots in the 1960s, and the dearth of municipal recreation programs in this neighborhood. Through community effort, this baseball field, while technically illegal, existed on a city block for more than twenty years. It is a testament to the community’s perseverance despite lack of public maintenance and resources. Through their bottom-up reclamation of abandoned space, this community gave hope to its youth.

The activist history of Block 1617 dates back to the early 1980s. Community groups like El Barrio Unite formed “to protect the residents of East Harlem form predatory developers that threaten the decay of the community and living environment through gentrification, displacement, tax increases, exploitation and greed.” The residents of El Barrio, in East Harlem, worked collectively to raise money needed to offer activities for their children. Thus. the East Harlem T, a youth baseball team, was born. “The baseball field is a symbol of hope for this neighborhood,” says Mr. Clarillo, a thirty-year resident of East Harlem. He expressed what it was like to raise his kids during the tough times of eighties when drugs were prevalent, and explained the importance of providing a place where children can escape from the cruel realm of criminality. The baseball field was a place for growth and hope for the future. Similarly, Harlem RBI, founded by neighborhood volunteers in 1991, transformed an “abandoned, garbage-strewn lot” in East Harlem to “address the greater needs of the community…throughout summer and after-school enrichment.” The transformation of these lots by the community into something beautiful is one thing; it is another to recognize unmet community needs and to work together to create opportunities for themselves.

The baseball field was one success amongst the many other events and spaces developed by the community in the effort to build local ownership of this block. Another major and lasting accomplishment has been the creation of community gardens along the east and west peripheries of the block. When the City of New York declared bankruptcy and was denied a federal bailout in the 1970s , community gardens became one of the positive outcomes to this financial collapse (NYC Parks, “History of the Community Garden Movement”). A people’s grassroots movement to reclaim these neglected neighborhoods slowly took shape as citizens joined together to transform trash-strewn lots into urban oases. Many of these gardens were, and still are, tended by African-American or Latino families of East Harlem, growing fresh food and creating safe gathering places for their communities where they previously did not exist. These gardens, like the baseball field, became a symbol of pride and hope, as well as a way of planting roots and creating a sense of ownership of space. These gardens are the evidence of a neighborhood’s resilience and the demonstration of its people’s initiative.

Five of the neighborhood’s stalwart community gardens span twelve lots of Block 1617: Villa Santurce, Chenchita’s Community Garden, Mission Garden, Little Blue House Garden, El Jardin Simpatico. Founded between 1988 and 1995, four of the five gardens were the product of Community Block Development Grants; all five gardens are owned by the city’s department of Housing, Preservation, and Development (HPD), and are maintained by members of the community with oversight from the Parks Department’s GreenThumb program. In 1978, New York City initiated the GreenThumb program to provide assistance and coordination for the grassroots community movement willing to tend to vacant city lots. It asserted legal control over all community gardens by issuing short-term leases to the gardeners and encouraging creation of new gardens on city-owned lots.

Inside these gardens on Block 1617 sit three casitas, each one a small shed that can shelter a family of four. According to landscape architect Daniel Winterbottom, “casitas are community endeavors that transform vacant lots into valuable community spaces.” This Puerto Rican typology is known for its small front porch and use of traditional vernacular building materials, often recycled. They mark moments of gathering and communal space. The value of these buildings, and these gardens, transcends the limitations of the law because they are physical manifestations of immigrant life here in the United State. Casitas, especially on this site, represent cultural adaptation and resilience.

The fact that three casitas stand on Block 1617 further solidifies the importance of this place. Winterbottom notes, “for Puerto Ricans, whose immigrant experience has been one of displacement rather than assimilation, ’casitas enable them to take control of their immediate environment and, in the process, to rediscover and reconnect with their cultural heritage.’” It is ironic that casitas, which have helped stabilize and revitalize neighborhoods, have unwittingly contributed to another wave of Puerto Rican displacement in the sense that once that the community has been uplifted and beautified, it is desirable to others, and ripe for gentrification. Like most powerful landscapes, casitas are fragile ecologies susceptible to disruption. Community members have taken abandoned land in their neighborhood and erected structures to their heritage, giving roots in this community and land upon which they have been constantly displaced.

Unfortunately, Block 1617 sits within the East Harlem Rezoning proposal, which includes redevelopment that will demolish the existing baseball field. The lot has now been sold to L+M Development Partners, which plans to build a 30-story, 751,000-square-foot luxury apartment building , despite the communities’ cries of protest. Mr. Clarillo and the community of El Barrio disapprove of this project and have adamantly expressed concern about its negative impact on the neighborhood. Mr. Clarillo responded with a change.org petition and has used social media to gather enough signatures to raise concern
. The petition states, “A couple of seasons were played after the installation of what many in the neighborhood knew as the 112th St. ‘Field Of

Dreams,’ but that has all come to an abrupt end without the community being properly informed and having any say in this situation,” (

Clarillo, “East Harlem Baseball Field Closed by NYC Officials for the Development of Luxury Housing” petition).

The 30-story building complex proposed for El Barrio is to be called Sendero Verde or “Green Pathway.” The program for the development includes 655 affordable apartments, a YMCA, a job-training center, a DREAM charter school, and spaces for a grocery store, restaurant, and a preventative health care facility (which will be run by Mount Sinai). On paper, the proposal seems like a dream; however the community is suspicious of L+M’s intentions because of the ongoing displacement caused by the East Harlem rezoning initiative. “Affordability” is a term used quite often in the low-income neighborhoods like El Barrio, and the current residents who worry about the definition and interpretation of “affordability,” and are afraid that they ultimately will not be accepted into these new residential developments. With such an impressive assortment of programs, the community would want assurance that these offering will actually be for them. They are well aware that in the past, large developments have made promises to sell a project but never quite follow through.

Additionally, there is news circulating about previous business ventures of the companies involved in constructing Sendero Verde. L+M Developers and Handle Architects also collaborated on a 58-story tower in San Francisco called the Millennium Tower. It is sinking. The Millennium Towers has sunken 17 inches and tilted 14 inches toward the northwest since construction and the developers are being sued by the City of San Francisco (Wertheim, “San Francisco’s Leaning Tower of Lawsuits”). Mr. Clarillo mentioned the water from the Harlem Meer runs under the site and fears the same conditions will be an issue in East Harlem because of the high-rise, high-density proposal.

There is a rush to densify East Harlem, which has been slated the neighborhood “falling behind” in its contributions to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing program (Schulz, “East Harlem’s Sendero Verde”). This site, being an entirely ‘vacant’ block, was seen as ripe for development because of its potential capacity to host a large number of units. It appears to be an easy solution to putting a dent in De Blasio’s goal of 200,000 created/preserved units of affordable housing in his Five Borough, Ten Year Plan (The City of New York, “Housing New York; A Five-Borough, Ten-Year Plan”). This is a perfect example of what happens when a community is not seen and is blatantly ignored.

Block 1617 has five gardens with an active weekly schedule of events and operating hours, and an arrangement of informal social spaces that compensate for a lack of outdoor gathering places in the neighborhood. The gardens’ regular and impressive attendance is a testament to their success. There are symbols of peace and hope crocheted by community members into the fences that run the periphery of the block. The baseball field, now closed-off and desolate, was once activated by community recreational activities. Despite all of this, these gardens are still invisible to the forces who have the ownership of the land and the power to decide its future. A once-flourishing site of community enfranchisement, social interaction, and youth empowerment remains threatened by the rezoning initiative. The community faces the demolition of open space and community space not just at this block level, but in the neighborhood as a whole. Already dense and with minimal open space, East Harlem cannot afford to lose any more, especially not to buildings that aren’t designed for them.

Mr. Clarillo, in his petition, writes that “…most importantly it [the field] brought the community together; my children and their friends of all different backgrounds were all fortunate to participate in all the activities that took place in the park, keeping them healthy, focused, out of trouble…it has also helped build courage, character and strength.”

Block 1617 is a site of numerous cultural resources that function as a unit, creating a community hub in a rapidly densifying, gentrifying neighborhood at risk of being redefined from the outside. In this time, it is ever more important to preserve green space, and to preserve this site as opened, reclaimed, community space. This neighborhood has worked hard to define what it means to be a member of East Harlem/El Barrio, and have built a place of pride. East Harlem is rich in resistance groups and artists, who recognized the power of being an embodied public, active in fighting for their right to space. By reclaiming Block 1617, and creating spaces like the baseball field and community gardens, East Harlem/El Barrio residents have produced a sense of relevance, importance, and validation within the city, and have established their right to space within their own neighborhood through their own means. They need to be seen, heard, and recognized.

(December 2017)

Nominations

Glenn Bell, Meisha Guild, Bethany Herrmann

Because #theyarenotinvisible

Nominated through Dr. Marta Gutman’s Race, Space and Architecture course, Spitzer School of Architecture, City College, New York, Fall 2017

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