Unlocking Maggie’s Garden

To get to Maggie’s Garden from downtown, you take the 1 train north to 145th Street Station and walk four blocks north on Broadway to 149th Street.

Traveling uptown, the bustle of lower Manhattan recedes. Most New Yorkers don’t venture all the way to the northwest corner of Harlem, to some of the northernmost neighborhoods of the island of Manhattan. The bustling skyscrapers give way to shorter buildings; brand-name chain stores are replaced with mom and pop shops. The express trains turn local. Trends don’t come and go as quickly. Life slows down. To those that live here, the sidewalks and streets have familiar faces. People recognize their neighbors and say hello.

The neighborhood’s name has changed over the last decades. Those who grew up here call it Sugar Hill, or just plain Harlem. Newcomers usually call it Hamilton Heights.

‘Hamilton Heights’ is an homage to the founding father Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, who came to Manhattan at the age of seventeen to study at what is now Columbia University, represented New York in Congress, founded the Bank of New York and died after a duel on the west bank of the Hudson in Weehawken, is buried a dozen blocks north at the Trinity Church Cemetery. He lived in his house in Upper Manhattan, then farmland - the only house he ever owned - for only two years, the last two years of his life. The house decayed, was renovated, relocated, and repurposed several times over the next two centuries, before being restored to its original state and ceremoniously rolled to its original place in what is now St. Nicholas Park, to much fanfare, in the summer of 2008. Hamilton Grange National Memorial - a square house with yellow paneling and ample white porticoes - is now a modest tourist attraction.

Originally settled and named by the Dutch in 1658, Harlem was redefined at the beginning of the 20th century, when an expansion of the New York subway brought houses and tenements and Black Americans poured in from lower Manhattan, the South and the Caribbean.

By the mid-1920s it had become the iconic Harlem: a Black Mecca, a cultural and artistic launchpad and an intellectual hub of Black America. This very neighborhood produced jazz, soul, poetry, resistance, the creativity and community of block parties- free and open to anyone, alongside the style and prestige of the new Black upper-class.

Harlem was home to some of the hottest cultural destinations of the mid-century. On 142nd Street, seven blocks south of Maggie’s Garden and some avenues east, the Cotton Club was a platform for Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, to name just three of the many jazz musicians who emerged from the neighborhood or moved there. The Cotton Club operated from 1923 to 1940, during Prohibition and Jim Crow-era racial segregation. For most of its life, it was one of those many establishments that turned a blind eye to the first set of regulations, but not to the second - it had a stage for Black artists, but no seats for Black patrons. Only in 1935 did it open its doors to Black patrons, only to move to 48th street after the riots of the following year. 

But you didn’t need to go to the Cotton Club to dance in Harlem. A few blocks from the Club, the Lindy Hop was invented in the Savoy Ballroom, an integrated establishment from its opening in 1926 to its close in 1958. In the mid-century, Harlem was home to over a hundred speakeasies, cabarets, dance halls, theaters and bars. And beginning in the 1970s, block parties exploded, DJs diverted the power from streetlights to run their sound systems, and, in Harlem and in the Bronx, hip hop was born. 

Though Maggie’s Garden sits just outside the borders of the Sugar Hill National Historic District, the people who grew up on the block still claim the name. Sugar Hill once represented the sweet life for Black America - an elite Black culture that had formed roots in the country’s unforgiving soil. The area was home to W. E. B Dubois, Duke Ellington and Thurgood Marshall. The first hip hop single to become a top 40 hit was “Rapper’s Delight”, by the Sugarhill Gang. 

Shan Daly, 29, grew up on the block. She remembers that there was always dancing on Sugar Hill.

“​​It used to look just like that. A parade. Every Saturday night,” Daly said. Even during the weekdays— “You could hear the music start as soon as you got out of school.”

_______

In August of 2021, I moved into a five story apartment building with an avocado-green entrance, two doors down from the garden. I thought the 33 blocks north of campus would buffer Columbia’s sprawl, but the long hallway was soon filled with three more Columbia-affiliated students, all queer white men. My building was full of young millennials wading through grad school or taking their shot at Broadway. 

I noticed Maggie’s Garden from the moment I moved in. I could see its lush greenery; an arbor sheltering a couple of tables and chairs from my bedroom window, with dark green leaves of vines curling around the wooden alcove. Every so often as I walked by and looked in. This spring I watched as the yellow daffodils closest to the street bloomed, and then the cherry tree blossom in the back corner, with its luminescent pink petals. I was delighted when wooden boxes of soil appeared along its little walkway, promising new plants or trees or flowers.

The garden is a bright little pocket of nature in New York’s concrete grid. But it puzzled me that it was hardly ever open. A wrought iron fence blocks it off from the street, a silver padlock bound its gates shut all winter and for most of the time in the other seasons, too. 

The bulletin board on the gate, tacked with sheets of paper outlining the garden’s guidelines for COVID-19, for photography in the garden, for the disposal of trash, and the do’s and don’t’s of the composting site, called it a “Community Garden''. Maggie’s Garden specifically, part of the New York Restoration Project. Why was a community garden so often closed to the community? And who was Maggie?

______

Maggie Burnett, I learned, was born in Allendale, South Carolina, in 1934. She worked on her family’s farm, and graduated from Schofield Middle School, a school founded in 1871 by a Pennsylvania Quaker to provide an education for free slaves.  At fifteen, she fell in love with New York City after visiting her older brother in Harlem, before following him north in the second wave of the Great Migration. Some years later, she married Walter Burnett, and in March of 1968, they moved into the basement unit at 551 West 149th Street, where her husband had been the super - and where she stayed for the rest of her life.

The community on 149th Street had always been close. Everyone I spoke to who grew up there said it. People spent a lot of time in the streets, with music and dancing and conversation. People knew one another, looked out for one another.  Kids were certain adults had eyes on them, and would call their mother faster than they could get home. 

But over the following decades, Ms. Maggie saw the block erode. Many properties were neglected, then abandoned. In 1974, the house across the street from her building was demolished. It became an alleyway for young boys to play in, then a marketplace for drug dealers. Empty bottles and used syringes littered the ground, and the abandoned brownstones across the street became crack houses. Daly remembered them as spooky mansions: white and decaying.

Ms. Maggie was horrified by the violence that the crack epidemic brought to the neighborhood, and she was determined to fight it, inch by inch. By all accounts, she was a fearless person, strong in her convictions and bolstered by a profound belief in God. She did not hesitate to fight crime, or to put a stop to any behavior that she thought was inappropriate.  When she learned that the deli on the corner was a hotspot for prostitutes, for instance, she walked in with several jugs of bleach and doused the shop with it. And when she saw drug dealers loitering outside the laundromat, she poured water out of a 2nd floor window, soaking their supply.

—

Emory Porter, 71, has lived on the block almost all his life. He knew Maggie better than most, and after she died, he took on an executive role at the garden. 

“Everybody has stories,” Porter said of Maggie. “And they probably are very all right. Because Maggie was that kind of a woman. She was a character. She was. She was loved and feared.” 

Maggie liked order, and she was not afraid to tell someone what to do. Porter remembered how she managed the laundromat. Maggie was the super of several of the buildings on 149th in the course of her life, including Porter’s– the current super. But, like others I spoke to, he can’t remember whether she worked at the laundromat, or just seemed to work there, by virtue of being Maggie there.

“She was assisting people whether they wanted it or not,” Porter said. ”I remember a friend of mine was in there washing, and apparently she thought he was doing it wrong. So she decides she's gonna show him how to do it. ‘No, no, no no, darling. No, you have to do this. No, no, no, you can't put that in there. You got to do it this way.’ My friend was looking at her like, side-eye. I know how to do laundry, old lady.”

In Sugar Hill, after school, kids played on the stoops of the buildings. But everyone knew that Maggie’s stoop was out of bounds. If she found someone hanging out on her stoop, she told them off, and poured oil on the steps to drive the point home.

“Getting to know her wasn't that easy, because she was very guarded,” Porter said. “But once you got it, once she allowed you in, then you'd see another side of her. You see that, that softer side that she didn't want to show because she was a tough, tough ol' boy.”

Some journalists have mistaken Maggie for a cop, and that tough reputation must have been one of the reasons for their mistake. Porter explained: “I can see where they got it from,” He said. “Like, block cop. You know, policing the neighborhood.”

Maggie worked with the cops. She built a relationship with the 30th precinct, particularly when Deputy Mayor Milton Mollen broke up the corruption that had earned the precinct the name “The Dirty Thirty.” In the mid-’80s, at the height of the crack epidemic, Maggie decided to make the alleyway a battleground. She contacted Ed Koch, then mayor, for permission to restore the abandoned lot. Granted. Then she set about cleaning up the trash, bringing in plants, and tending to the soil.  

Maggie put up the fence herself, black wrought iron, and had a lock and chain donated to her shortly after that she started to lock it with. As she told the Wall Street Journal in 2011,  “The drug dealers did their best to take over. I didn't give up and they didn't give up. My sister, a lot of people, told me I was crazy. I guess I inherited that from my mother -- she was a fighter her whole life."

So Ms. Maggie went to war over the plot of land. It was going to be her garden.

The fight for the garden was difficult, dangerous, even brutal. At one point in the 80s, Maggie was stabbed in the street and left to die.

Her neighbor, Katherine Kavanagh explained, “There was a lot of drug and gang activity in the 80s on the block. And she was just not putting up with that stuff. And so every time she saw people hanging around, she would get in people's faces, and you know, she was not intimidated by them.”

The perpetrator was never identified, but everyone in the neighborhood knew that Maggie and the drug dealers were not on good terms. She didn’t discuss the stabbing afterward. When her close friend, Lauren Lynch, asked after noticing the scar on her chest years later, Maggie shook her head. Shooo. Lynch said, Maggie told her— she was too old for that.

It was because of her humble childhood, and her experiences like this, that Maggie was slow to trust.

Porter said. “Miss Maggie– she held this garden really close. Because she wanted to protect it. … She knew what was here before.”

Katherine Kavanaugh is one of those few people who, like Porter, earned Ms Maggie’s trust over the years through diligent dedication -- enough that Maggie eventually gave her a key to the garden gate. Kavanaugh is a loyal fan of Maggie’s, but also recognized that her authority was severe. 

“I will say on the record, I loved Ms. Maggie. And, you know, I also recognize that she ran the garden. I'm trying to, like, think of a nicer way,” Kavanagh said. “Like, she basically was a dictator.”

Maggie allotted plots to loyal gardeners, but she expected decisions to be run past her.

“I think some people got on her nerves because they went in, and they did things. They tried to change the garden without her permission. And she had a problem with them,” said Porter.

 “There was a grapevine that actually was fruit-bearing. And someone decided they were–she–was going to cut it in their pruning–not knowing what to do, and how to do it. And she cut it, and it died. Miss Maggie was livid. She was livid. It was like why would you go into it? Not knowing what you're doing!”

Maggie liked things to be done right– so that also meant she passed on her careful knowledge of tending the earth to the other gardeners.  Kavanagh learned many life lessons from Maggie, who taught her how to garden.

“There are so many life skills that are analogous to gardening,” Kavanagh explained. “The kind of patience that you need, and that so much of it is trial and error. Like in our space, we have very little sunlight. And you know, not everything works every season. One year we got all of these beautiful tomato vines, and no tomatoes. It was so bizarre.”

What else did she learn from Maggie?

“How to get my hands dirty, and how to dig down deep for certain things. And, you know, to just not be intimidated - and also about, you know, what you can grow together, versus what you shouldn't grow side by side. How to deal with certain pests that come into the garden.”

_______

In 1999, Mayor Rudy Giuliani decided to sell New York’s community garden land to developers. Almost 300 were going to be turned over for property development, and Maggie’s garden was among their number.

It was a tense moment. Members of community gardens across the city protested the move outside City Hall, but short of making a deal with the city to buy the land, something which was beyond the means of most, it was not clear that the city could be opposed. 

What Maggie did not know was that she had affluent allies in the city - in particular, Bette Midler, who in 1995 started the nonprofit organization New York Restoration Project. Midler, an actress and singer who has won four Golden Globes and three Emmys, and a lifelong nature lover, was troubled by the neglect that the city’s parks fell into in the ‘80s. NYRP grew out of Midler’s trips to her local park to pick up trash, and by the late ‘90s, it was one of a few organizations able to step in and save the city’s community gardens.

“It was kind of at the eleventh hour,” Lauren Wilson, NYRP’s media spokesperson told me over the phone. “Bette got together with the Trust for Public Land, and decided to purchase the land.”

NYRP would go on to purchase over a sixth of the endangered gardens - 52 in total. NYRP saw its mission as funding further work on the gardens, but letting the communities continue managing them more or less as they saw fit.

“We saw ourselves as in a position of bringing in funding to actually help take it to the next level basically, and provide resources for things like a garden bed and like significant cleanup and new soil and plantings and things of that nature,” said Wilson.

She said Middler saw Maggie’s garden as a special gem. 

______

Out of the blue one brisk day that year, Ms. Maggie got a call. There was a man’s voice on the line, Maggie told the Wall Street Journal. "He said, 'You may not know me, but I know you. I'm at your garden spot. I've got somebody who wants to meet you.'”

 He told her to come down to the garden.  There, in a van parked out front, she found Bette Midler waiting for her.

Midler told her, “Maggie, we've come to give you a helping hand for your garden.'”

The next day, bulldozers were going to arrive. NYRP was going to revamp the garden. 

The cabbages, cucumbers and tomatoes that Maggie had planted were all dug up. The rooster and the hen found new homes. In their place NYRP planted Magnolias and large shrubs, and built an arbor, seating areas, and a new water source. 

Three years later, in 2002, the garden reopened. Neighbors crowded the fire escapes on 148th and 149th to watch the opening ceremony. Former president Bill Clinton and former New York House of Representatives member Charles Rangel, were among the guests. 

Maggie made a speech where she made clear she would don a sheriff’s badge to keep the garden clean. President Clinton said, “I want to thank Maggie for giving that talk. I couldn’t figure out if she should be appointed the next drug czar or secretary of the interior.”

Though the powerful allies had destroyed Maggie’s carefully cultivated garden, Kavanagh told me that Maggie was grateful for the help NYRP provided. 

“I think that she was, I know that she was grateful for some of the help that they provided, especially, you know, towards the end as she got much older. NYRP has a big ops team– an operations team– that used to come in every Monday morning, and you know, just kind of like sweep up.”

Still, Kavanagh added: “As beautiful as the magnolia trees are in there, as soon as those petals start to drop, it just creates kind of a mess in the garden. And so Maggie actually hated the magnolia trees because it was such a pain to clean up.”

_____

When Maggie first planted her garden, it was a symbol of hope, the hope that Sugar Hill could overcome the trauma of the ‘80s and build a safer future. That hope was in many ways realized. But time - and the very safety Maggie fought for - brought other changes with it. From 2000 to 2010, this part of 149th Street saw its white population increase by over 300 percent; the proportion of the population that was Black decreased from 58 to 36 percent of the total. For those who remain, this meant seeing friends and family move away, mom and pop stores get replaced with Popeyes and Dominos, and cherished customs fade. 

The famous block parties that were the highlight of summer and the birthplace of hip hop, when the whole neighborhood showed up for free barbecue and dancing. The way life took over the streets if the sun was shining.

But Porter is not opposed to change so much as a certain style of neighborliness - common in Manhattan - that does not involve being a neighbor. The garden’s new executive committee, on which he serves, has made a pivot in recent years to host more cultural events. They have jazz and art events, programs for kids to sculpt dolphins and bees out of bananas and kiwis and blueberries. A couple of neighbors hosted hip-hop and spoken-word events a couple years back, before the pandemic took a lot of the events away. This year, they're hoping to host more events focused around health – things like yoga, tai chi, meditation, blood pressure checks. 

But Porter’s noticed that not all of the new neighbors like the garden’s cultural events. The music events bring noise complaints, and he just gets a weird feeling when he invites some new neighbors to join them. As he put it:

“There are some people who actually integrate into the neighborhood, very well. And then those who just come through, and Harlem is just a place that they live. They don't want to be a part of it. Because I've noticed when we do things in the garden, and I'm standing out front trying to get people to come in, they look at me as if, ‘Oh, my God, no.’ You know, It's like fight or flight. And I said, Well, wait a minute. I didn't understand that. It was like, but you live here now.”

Maggie agreed. As Porter remembers it, walking down 149th Street meant passing Maggie in a green chair outside the open gate, welcoming visitors and greeting familiar faces in her signature bandana and oversized clothes. 

“When I came home from work she would be sitting out front,” said Porter. “She'd say, ‘Come, come! Sit down, pull up a chair, pull up a chair! You just came home from work, relax.’ And it's just chit chat. She would rundown what happened during the day, what she saw.”

A dive bar, At the Wallace, now sits on the corner where Maggie’s laundromat - or the laundromat she superintended, in any case - used to be. It’s one of three bars that Lauren Lynch, a close friend of Maggie’s, opened on the block after moving to Sugar Hill in 2008 - the first being Harlem Public, now the neighborhood’s most popular establishment, well stocked with avocado fries, draft beers and the Instagram-famous burgers that patrons with beards and painted nails travel from uptown to taste. Lynch’s third bar, Honeywell, whose back patio borders on Maggie’s Garden, sells matchboxes printed with her portrait; Harlem Public has “Maggie’s Boozy Mintmosa” on the brunch menu on weekends, and At The Wallace has her portrait hung beside the bar.

Maggie liked Lynch’s businesses – to her, business meant prosperity, and kept people inside, off the streets. In fact, it was not long after Lynch arrived that the two struck up a famous friendship, founded on their shared drive and vision for 149th Street. 

“Miss Maggie gravitated to Lauren,” Porter told me. “And Lauren did the same.” 

—

Maggie died in 2017 after an infection in her leg spread throughout her body. In her final months, neighbors visited her in the hospital with rotisserie chicken; and Lynch’s pitbull Ladycakes spent the days laying on Maggie like a lap-dog.

Since the new executive committee took leadership, they’ve been peeling back some of the legacy of Maggie’s careful watch. While following those rules once earned them keys, the garden no longer requires the care that Maggie applied to preserve her precious plot.

Members have been debating whether to abandon an old policy: that the garden gates should always be kept closed when a volunteer is not present. Many would like to leave it open all the time. Kavanagh was taught by Maggie, and can see the value in having a gardener to welcome visitors, stop dogs and smoking, and to make sure people know they can take herbs from the wooden plot.

But Kavanagh is still ambivalent about the decision, and Porter said he to leave the gates open now.  He’s started sending his son out to open the gates in the morning, and leaving it open throughout the day. 

“Because it doesn't make sense.” Porter said. “You know, it is a garden, it shouldn't be closed because on a beautiful day people want to go in.”