By Russ Kuhner

Matthias Radler, 72, a retired dental technician living in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Hamilton Heights, is an outdoors person. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, feeling stuck and isolated inside, Mr. Radler said the lockdown was driving him up the wall. 

“With the Corona shutdown, mentally, I was not in the best state having to stay indoors,” said Mr. Radler, a tall, lanky gentleman whose speech retains a touch of his native German accent. “‘Don’t go out, don’t go out, don’t go out’ – psychologically, it really had an effect on me.”

Every three to four days, Mr. Radler had to go for a long walk, more than two miles past Columbia University and back, “just to get that energy out of me. Even if it snowed, I’d get out. I had cabin fever.” 

While Mr. Radler lives with his partner, isolation from other people has still been challenging. “We don’t really come in contact with people anymore, except for when you go shopping, but that’s not one-on-one,” he said as he and I had a socially-distanced conversation along the long, raised garden beds of Riverside Valley Community Garden in early spring. 

With collard greens already beginning to tower over the otherwise dormant garden beds, Mr. Radler shared that he’d just become one of the garden’s newest volunteers. For him, volunteering “is the perfect opportunity. We can be around people with distancing. Now we understand the coronavirus a little better, so we can go out.”

“I felt like it was time for me to shut up and do something about it,” said Mr. Radler. “I’m looking forward to being outdoors and being part of the community. You think of green spaces, but you’re not part of it until you get to do something there.” 

Nestled down a hill between Riverside Drive and the West Side Highway, and bordered on one side by Amtrak’s railroad tracks, this patch of green space in the city that most people lovingly refer to as “Jenny’s Garden” has become a refuge for a new wave of residents like Mr. Radler since the start of the pandemic.

Like the people that seek out the healing and reconnection offered by this patch of green space in Harlem, the land itself was reclaimed and healed by the garden’s namesake, Jenny Benitez, in the 1970s. 

Ms. Benitez, a Puerto Rican mother and an assistant teacher at Manhattan P.S. 192, needed a safe place for her children and members of her community to spend time outside. Before she and several other community members intervened to transform this space into a community garden, it was home to burned-out abandoned cars, garbage, and drug addicts.  

According to Laurie Brown Kindred, 46, who has volunteered at the garden since 2012 and who works as a production manager and assistant director of finance and facilities for PACE University School of Performing Arts, Ms. Benitez was so dedicated to this transformation that “she would literally run a garden hose from her apartment, across Riverside Drive, and down the hill, when there was no water source down here.” 

“It was the ultimate guerrilla gardening,” said Ms. Brown Kindred.

Ms. Benitez’s effort and dedication created a botanical refuge that became an important source of comfort both for her and Ms. Brown Kindred, now one of the garden’s longest-serving volunteers.

Back in 2012, Ms. Brown Kindred was grappling with her breast cancer treatment. 

A year earlier, Ms. Brown Kindred brought her twin baby girls to the garden weekly before becoming a volunteer. “My daughters and I grew seedlings and gave them to Jenny,” said Ms. Brown Kindred. “A year later, I underwent chemo treatment for stage 3 breast cancer. I passed by the garden and Jenny said, ‘I haven’t seen you in a while,’ and I took off my hat and showed her what it was.”

Ms. Benitez responded with, “We’re all going through our own stuff” and shared that her son was currently in a coma. 

Mrs. Brown Kindred continued, “We were both in this weird health, questioning-of-life place and Ms. Benitez said, ‘Look, I’d love to give you a plot, but you have to show up and take care of it,’ and I was like, ‘absolutely.’ It gave me something to do at that time, to really get through what I was going through, which is kind of the story of most of the gardeners here.” 

Ms. Benitez passed away in November 2019, but her legacy lives on through the garden, which continues to provide a safe place for her community. It has become an especially valued resource to the neighborhood during the pandemic. 

Linda Searcy, who works in finance at Morgan Stanley and has volunteered at the garden for eight years, echoed Mr. Radler’s sentiments: “In the past year, we have been in a very unfortunate situation where we were confined at home,” said Searcy. “People came to the garden, some of them for the first time, second time or more, and they discovered probably within themselves that the garden was giving them hope for the future and a place that they could breathe.”

Most new people to walk through the garden’s chain-link gates came with their food waste. The garden has a community compost program that filled the void created when the city shut down its residential Food Scrap and Yard Waste collection. This change, in turn, has led to a spike in the number of new visitors to the garden and, consequently, new volunteers. 

Mrs. Brown Kindred stated that prior to the pandemic, the garden had 15 full-time, consistent volunteers. Since the start of the pandemic, they’ve doubled that number, adding another 15 full-time volunteers and an additional 12 ‘sporadic’ volunteers.

“I’ve been coming up once a week since the fall. I have nothing else to do,” said Andrew Fem, who lost work as a casting director for theater, television, and film during the pandemic. “Now I mostly sit on my couch and make art.”

Bringing food waste all the way up from their apartment on 93rd Street to the garden since the fall has been good for their mood. “I was throwing my food scraps away for a while, and that was really depressing,” Fem said. “It gives me something to do, which is good and seems really simple. I get a walk in and do something good for the environment.”

Mr. Radler, the retired dental technician and new volunteer, felt similarly when the city decided to halt its residential food waste program. “I found it very upsetting because I felt I was doing something right and then [I thought], ‘Now I’m going to have to start throwing it all away again.’”

Lara Donnelly, 31, works as an executive assistant and author, and also volunteered at the onset of the pandemic. “I used to live in this big apartment complex over on 135th Street that had city pickup compost, and I got really spoiled,” Ms. Donnely said. “When I moved to a different building that didn’t have it, I was very upset because I couldn’t compost. I would feel really guilty every time I threw out vegetable scraps.”

Prior to the pandemic, Ms. Donnelly would walk past the garden at least once a week, where she’d see a sign saying, ‘If you want to volunteer, email this address.’ 

“And I just wouldn’t do it for months and months, despite really wanting to,” said Ms. Donnely. “When the pandemic hit, I was like, ‘This is the time! How else will I get outside and experience human interaction?’”

To meet the demand for a compost site, since the city halted its program, the garden has opened its gates every weekend to lines of people looking for a place to put their food scraps.

According to Athanasios Bourtsalas, a lecturer in energy and materials at Columbia’s School of Engineering who collaborates closely with the city’s Department of Sanitation, when the pandemic began, “Mayor de Blasio and his team had to reallocate their budget, because we had an emergency.”

Dr. Bourtsalas admits that the city knew it wasn’t a very successful program. “Most of the collected material ends up in Staten Island,” at a Department of Sanitation facility.

For Ms. Donnelly, like many others, her used coffee grounds and banana peels became a fruitful opportunity. “When I started volunteering at Jenny’s Garden, it was the first time I realized they had community compost, which was thrilling. I started bringing my compost and I also noticed that loads of people from the community were bringing compost too. And then more and more people started to show up as the pandemic went on.”

While a common environmental drive to compost brings many to the garden for the first time, a man who’s come to be known as “Compost Shawn,” is who convinces them to return.

Shawn Schoonmaker, 60, who works in gym membership sales, welcomes each person that deposits their scraps in the wooden compost bins he and the volunteers have built, chatting them up and making them feel at home. 

While Mr. Schoonmaker has only been an official volunteer for the past two years, he proudly declared he had been bringing his compost to the garden for the past decade. “I used to bring tons of it from my own place, my neighbor’s, my girlfriend’s, so I was known as ‘the compost guy,’” Mr. Schoonmaker said.“This is going to be the first summer that we’ve had this much compost. We’ve never had this amount because the city stopped, we picked up the slack. Normally we were closed in November and that’s it, we wouldn’t reopen until April, but I mentioned to Laurie that I’d come every Saturday. That’s how I became ‘Compost Shawn,’ because I was here every Saturday. I haven’t missed a Saturday yet.” 

The hours that the garden is open to the public has been limited during the pandemic, but those in the know check the Jenny’s Garden Instagram page every Friday for the weekend composting hours.

When Shawn opens the gates on the weekends, he said, “The community gets a chance to know each other, they also get a chance to feel a sense of belonging. They belong to something and they’re contributing to something, something that’s net positive. They feel great about it, we feel great about it.”

To Jason Enlow, 41, a sales manager for a data analytics company, who brings his food scraps on the weekends, the garden before the pandemic “was a sanctuary in a jungle where you find that there’s so much concrete and so much noise, or you can come and hear birds and see just beauty and greenery and things that are familiar from childhood.” 

“During the pandemic, with the city shutting down its composting projects across the city, to be able to have this back in some way in our community says that we are going to get back to a place of normalcy.” 

“That’s really that kind of understanding that we will survive and get through it and there is another day beyond it,” said Mr. Enlow. 

For Mr. Enlow, “gardening is one of those therapeutic things that just absolutely seeing things grow, and the passage of time, you can track it with growth. Seeing the daffodils come up and being a part of when they were covered in two feet of snow, you’re able to see that and know those milestones in your mind, it’s very helpful.” 

“Every week, being able to come into a garden to be able to spend time around nature, whether it’s dormant or thriving, is just another part of that therapy that is nature and gardening in general,” said Mr. Enlow.

Others echo the therapeutic benefits of gardening. 

Ms. Searcy, the financial sector employee, was drawn to the back part of the garden to weed and prune back the prolific trees. “Being there, with the ability of breathing outside air, it surely saved my life. I think many others feel the same, whether they want to say or not, but I really think that helped a lot to continue to move forward.”

Taking a break from chatting with and cajoling community members as they chop up their added compost with a large garden hoe, Mr. Schoonmaker put a lighter spin on the benefits of the garden. “We give people things to do, adults need a playground, so it’s an adult playground that gives back,” he said.

In addition to the personal benefits of time spent outdoors, volunteers at Jenny’s Garden work to serve neighbors facing food insecurity. Through their efforts, they grow and transport three to four harvests each season to the Broadway Presbyterian Church soup kitchen on 114th Street and Broadway, near Columbia University.

The compost that the community contributes to is used to fertilize the produce grown in the garden. Mr. Schoonmaker shares that the community grows “everything from carrots, strawberries, raspberries, bok choy. We have lettuce. I grew celery.” 

He adds that the harvest isn’t just kept for the gardeners themselves. “It’s going to the soup kitchen. Well, we have everything ready for a soup.”

Mrs. Brown Kindred shared that, “the concept, in the initial formation of the garden with Steven Gallagher and Jenny Benitez, was really as a place for the volunteers, but also for the community. Not only a beautiful place to just marvel at, enjoy and appreciate, but also to serve. And that’s when the concept of providing harvests, several times a summer, to the local soup kitchen was created.”

For Mrs. Brown Kindred, this garden continues to be a refuge, from that day over nine years ago when Ms. Benitez gave her a garden plot of her own, to this moment in her life. Her cancer returned at the start of the pandemic as stage 4 breast cancer. 

“It’s a stigma that stage 4 is horrible and everything. I’m in an amazing place, amazing doctors, caught early, but again, during the pandemic the garden became another saving grace.” As we spoke, she was stacking cinder blocks to make a strawberry planter. 

Whether seeking human connection, the therapy of working the earth with your hands, or looking for a beautiful place to just breathe during the pandemic, people who bring their food scraps, along with those who decide to volunteer, are offered a welcoming place of healing and belonging. 

In return, “Jenny’s Garden” welcomes anyone who wants to get involved to give back. According to Mrs. Brown Kindred, “we not only take care of this garden and this area of the park, but also up on Riverside Drive from 135th Street to 145th Street,” tending to the magnolia trees, forsythia, and tulips that are currently on full display.

Ms. Searcy, smiling under her mask in the brisk March sunlight, put it like this in an open call to any nearby resident, “you know what, the garden is open, come over and be a part of the family. You will fall in love.”

“That’s what I can say. It happened to me eight years ago, and I’m still here.”