After a fire, new hope for a garden in Kensington 

Trinity Thomas had walked by the Ruth Street Garden many times. She’d been curious about its rare expanse of green grass amid Kensington’s landscape of asphalt and concrete, its raised beds popping with red and yellow peppers, vivid sprays of lavender, and chives and cauliflower and eggplant.

“I used to just see it a lot,” said Thomas, who lives down the street. “Every time, you know, it never was really open.”

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, however, the gate was unlocked and about 20 people milled around the park-like space. Thomas was finally able to stroll in with her mom, Taisha Diaz, and her 4-year-old son Izair, who made a beeline for a table covered with toys.  

“I love it,” Thomas said. “I love, like, the different types of flowers and that y’all grow tomatoes, fruits, vegetables and stuff like that, and give the stuff for the kids to do, play and have a good time.”

“It’s nice to have nice things in the community, because we never can’t have nothing no more, in Kensington and just Philly in general,” she added. “You want to feel safe while you outside,” without dealing with “needles, fiends, or, like, having to worry about anybody here getting hurt and stuff.”

In fact, the event the family had walked into was a celebration of the garden’s persistence as an oasis of respite from the ravages of the neighborhood’s opioid epidemic, after it suffered a series of challenges that threatened to shut it down.

After being leased for years, the 13,000-square-foot plot was recently purchased by the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, ensuring its long-term survival and paving the way for further investment to restore losses the property suffered late last year.

“We’ve had a lot of deterrents and barriers here in five years,” said Britt Carpenter, whose organization, the Philly Unknown Project, created the garden in 2020. “But it hasn’t stopped us yet, and we’re not going to stop.”

Flames, breaches, and a huge loss

Carpenter, who is in recovery, said he started the garden as a tool for personal and community healing in a “chaotic” neighborhood. In addition to providing neighbors with access to free fresh produce, and eggs laid by its handful of chickens, the site hosts events like Boy Scout gardening sessions, birthday parties, baby showers, pet vaccinations and compost distribution. 

But that work recently faced the looming threat of interruption. The property owner wanted to sell, and Philly Unknown — a small nonprofit that runs a thrift store and does outreach to people living on the street — lacked funding to acquire the land. 

Carpenter discussed his options with Bill McKinney, executive director of the NKCDC, which already owned some gardens and was working to create more green space around the neighborhood. NKCDC got the site appraised, and last October applied for funding from the William Penn Foundation’s newly established grant program to preserve urban gardens.

Then the next month, disaster hit, in the form of a fire that destroyed a building next door.

Carpenter pointed to a now-vacant lot north of the property. “That used to be the wall of a building. The fire ripped through it and took everything down,” he recalled during last week’s celebration. “When they demolished the building, it exposed the entire garden.” 

Firefighters rushing to reach the fire also cut down 50 feet of the garden’s fence along Ruth Street and drove their engines onto the property, destroying eight raised planter beds, he said. Philly Unknown couldn’t afford to repair the fence and the city refused to provide compensation. 

McKinney said he’s very familiar with the damage that vehicles can cause — for example, at McPherson Gateway Garden, a small plot NKCDC owns on Kensington Avenue.

“A week after we got it, a car drove through the fence, same way. All of a sudden it was like, how are we going to come up with another $10,000?” he said. “When we got Tusculum Garden … same thing. Two weeks after we got that, a car drove through it, and — where’s there going to be more money?”

Compounding Philly Unknown’s woes, thieves took advantage of the damaged and missing fencing along two sides of the property to enter and steal thousands of dollars worth of ladders and other equipment, Carpenter said.

“We’ve incurred a huge loss there,” he said. ”It’s been an interesting ride, put it that way.”

Visions of urban farming

In January, the William Penn Foundation awarded NKCDC $701,000 for land acquisition and $320,000 to develop a Kensington Green Space plan. Part of that money went toward purchasing the Ruth Street property in June.

McKinney said that assistance was critical to meeting needs that Kensington residents have often mentioned in community engagement sessions.

“One of the things that came up over and over was, how do we integrate more urban ag, more greening, into our community,” he told those gathered at the garden last week. The foundation “listened, and they put money behind it.”

“What it’s going to take in Kensington is consistency and a long-term vision, and the vision needs to come from the community. When it comes from us, it can last. It doesn’t matter who else comes and goes. We will own it forever,” he said.

Now that they don’t have to worry about losing the site, the two organizations are starting to think about its future. Philly Unknown put up a proper fence at the property’s northern end, but the stretch along the sidewalk is propped up with boards and needs to be replaced, which will require more funding. They also want to bring electricity and water to the site. 

Carpenter said he’d like it to eventually serve as both a community space and an urban farm and food co-op, along the lines of the acclaimed Greensgrow Farms in Fishtown, which shut down three years ago. 

Ruth Street Garden is “a little bit of magic in the midst of all the chaos, I call it. It’s a sanctuary, and I really love it like that,” he said. “We’re going to make this what it really deserves to be for the community, for the residents, for everybody to just enjoy.”

Catherine Reuter, who manages NKCDC’s gardens and green spaces, said the patch of land the fire trucks drove through could become, for example, a pumpkin patch, or the site of a greenhouse. As part of its planning effort, the organization is starting to survey neighbors about what they’d like to see done with the properties it oversees.

“What does green space mean to you? What do you need from it? What kind of spaces? What do we already have that needs more support?” she said. “We’re not telling the community what the plan should be. We’re asking all these questions to figure out what they want.”

The post After a fire, new hope for a garden in Kensington  appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY.