My wife and I moved to 22nd Street in Brooklyn a little over a year ago, attracted by cheaper rents but pleasantly surprised by the little corner of the world that we found.  The neighbourhood is now are home, and we’ve added our young son to the family.  Perhaps because of him, I’ve become more acutely aware of the world that he’s spending his first years in.

Last Winter, as the throes of economic crisis began to solidify into an acute ache in the world, the bursting of the housing bubble was what brought the rest of the countries problems crashing into our little world.  Our landlord lost his shirt in other real estate deals, and sold our house to his lawyer.  Our neighbours across the street came to live downstairs for a short while, driven out of their home by shoddy renovations on the house next door which destabilized their foundations.  They moved on  a few months later, though their house still remains empty.  I lost my job at an architecture firm in the City, and began to spend more time in our new neighbourhood.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon, which I came to realize was an indicator for a whole tangled mess of problems.  On snowy days, as I walked to the subway I could tell which houses were unoccupied by the ice and snow that collected unshoveled on the walk in front of them.  Walking down the hill towards 4th avenue, this became apparent as a pattern of gaps in the fabric of the neighbourhood.  Here a stalled renovation, the waterproofing flapping in the wind around a front door without any stairs leading to it.  There a luxury condominium, largely finished but completely dark at night, the furniture of the model apartment still visible through the curtain-less floor-to-ceiling windows.  The only indication of activity was that the tickets from the DEP appeared and disappeared from the front doors.  Worse were the vacant lots, precious open space waiting in stasis for the economy to get back onto its feet.

This was a problem bigger than gentrification – more like walking across a floor with missing or dodgy floorboards.  We worried as the financial crisis deepened that empty projects would get torched by their owners, desperate to recoup something from their investment.

As the weather warmed, we planted a garden in our backyard and took solace in the effortless inevitability of sprouting seeds and new growth.  Our little 4′x8′ plot, uncovered from the woodchips and gravel in the backyard and fueled by an unusually wet Spring, exceeded our wildest expectations this summer. The tomatoes and peas spreading greedily over the back wall of our yard, so that individual plants merged into a single tangled wall of greenery.  With relatively little effort and attention, our tame little yard had become a productive jungle.  It was in that garden that I found the beginnings of Gap Gardens.

What if a little bit of care and attention could be injected into those weedy lots?  Could a little nurturing and attention heal the holes in our neighbourhood, at least until something more permanent could take root?

Advertisement