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The Brooklyn Botanic Garden announced the Greenest Block in Brooklyn today! The contest has inspired locals since 1995 to get creative with their greens and clean up their blocks. Marty Markowitz was on hand at the ceremony this morning, declaring, "Brooklyn’s gardens—and stoops, planters, window boxes, and tree beds—are the greenest!" (And those stoops sure are nice to drink a nice glass of wine on.)
This year's residential winner is Lincoln Road between Rogers and Bedford Avenue in Lefferts Gardens, and the commercial winner is Mid-Atlantic Block Association (South) for Atlantic Avenue between Bond and Nevins streets, South Side, in Boerum Hill. The Best Community Garden Streetscape went to Washington Avenue between Gates and Greene Avenues in Clinton Hill; with best window boxes, tree beds and storefronts located in East Flatbush, Bed-Stuy and Fort Greene, respectively. The full list of winners can be found here, with more images here.
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I love the Ruffles wrapper in the 2nd place tree bed.
Even better! It's a "community garden"!
Pretty
If everyone bothered to do this, quality of life in this city would go up exponentially.
On my block in Bed-stuy, one of my neighbors painstakingly attends to the flowers around the tree in the front of her brownstone. It makes walking to the train a beautiful experience.
This is a great idea but I can't help but think the revenue-hungry city will turn around and start giving these same people $100 tickets for "unauthorized vegetation" or some other absurd ordinance that's buried in the books.
I've planted a ton of plants and flowers on my street and I haven't had any problems. I live directly next to the Police Station and the cops have never bothered me even though I think I need a permit to do some of the stuff I'm doing (building tree box planters). They actually comment on how nice it looks. One cop said "there should be trees everywhere in this city." I like to think that the more people who put out plants, the more people who are inspired to garden. I find these photos inspiring (though the ruffles bag leaves me a tad upset).
I'm sure that cop is quite reasonable, until of course the city starts pressuring him to meet ticket quotas. Of course, they deny this by calling them "performance standards" or something and that people are too stupid to realize it's the same thing.
I think they don't bother ticketing their neighbors because it's in their own best interest for us to get along with them. Plus I don't think they personally mind about the gardens - they probably actually like it. I do agree though that there likely are some ridiculous fines as a result of "guerrilla gardening" (as it's called).
P.S. I'm in Manhattan.
Yeah, PLG!