It’s not over yet for the Campus Road Community Garden.
Two days after Brooklyn College evicted community gardeners from the oasis, and a day after workers hired by the school tore up about a third of the remaining plants, advocates for preserving the garden succeeded in halting the destruction, at least temporarily, when New York State Supreme Court Justice Joel Goldberg issued a temporary restraining order last Saturday.
That order was extended on Tuesday, May 25, by Supreme Court Justice Richard Velazquez, after both the gardeners and representatives of the college appeared in court, pending a return court date of June 25.
Velazquez declined to order mediation to occur in the interim, said Andy Snyder, one of the gardeners and a plaintiff in the suit brought against the college and its officials, as well as against the state’s Dormitory Authority and an official with that agency, But, said Snyder, the judge had urged the two sides to try to come to a resolution before they come back to court next month.
The basis of the lawsuit is that the environmental review conducted by the authority contained “several elements that were capricious, arbitrary, and illegal.” To remedy that, the gardeners bringing suit asked that, “the Court require the College to produce an Environmental Impact Statement that would accurately address the true environmental impact of this planned and imminent destruction of a precious community resource, aesthetic public open space, and ecologically important land.”
Now, all they gardeners can do is wait. “We can only hope that, in the next three weeks, we can organize a good result,” Snyder added. Snyder said he was encouraged by the fact that two judges “recognized the importance of the garden to the community and the environment.”
The judge did not grant the gardeners the right to care for the garden until the return to court, a task an attorney for the college said the school would assume. Velazquez did, however, require the college to allow a gardener access to the garden on a weekly basis, in the company of a security guard, to make sure that the plants were being appropriately cared for.
The court battle is the latest chapter in the saga of the garden, which the college has long planned to raze and replace with a parking lot, which is being moved to accommodate an expanded athletic field.
After protracted objections from community gardeners, students and faculty, however, the administration agreed to include a smaller garden to one side of the parking lot; that garden has grown from 1,300 square feet to about 2,500 over the course of negotiations, with the college also saying it was possible that the garden could be as large as 4,000 square feet, should alternate parking be secured at the Triangle mall at the Junction. The current garden is about 6,500 square feet large.
Talks between the college and the mall — which the gardeners helped to jump-start — are ongoing, so the gardeners were stunned when the school announced it would shut the garden once the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York completed its environmental review of the project and gave the go-ahead, which occurred last Wednesday.
In a final statement before the garden was closed, Steve Little, vice president for finance and administration at the college, stressed that the garden was never meant to be permanent, but had been given a temporary home after its original location was developed.
The school, Little said, “cannot jeopardize (its) core mission” which “necessitates the closure of the old community garden in order to accommodate a reconfigured athletic field which meets NCAA requirements.”
The college already is short of parking, based on city zoning requirements, according to Little; retaining even a smaller garden means the loss of an additional 10 spots, Little said. Before the lawsuit, the college had planned to have the new, smaller garden — which will be open to the community as well as the college — ready by the end of June, according to Little.
By press time, the college declined comment on the lawsuit.