COLUMBIA ‘OBLITERATED’ DECADES-OLD NEIGHBORHOOD GARDEN; RATS MADE THEM DO IT, UNIVERSITY CONTENDS

A rose bush that was part of the garden. Photo by Nupur Sutaria from June 2015.

By Carol Tannenhauser

Columbia University sawed down rose bushes and fruit trees on the side of a parking lot that the university owns on 113th Street, causing an uproar among some neighbors and the woman who tends the makeshift garden.

But whether this was an injustice, or simple property maintenance, depends on who’s talking.

The garden on the day the bushes and trees were cut. Photo by Margaret Cuonzo.

To Columbia, the garden on West 113th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive was a forlorn urban jungle harboring rats and invasive plants. To neighbors, some of whom had picked several quarts worth of fruit from its trees this year, it was a beautiful and nurturing oasis. Since the trees and bushes were chopped in August, it has become more tame but less colorful too. Two cement-bordered planting beds, about 15’ long by 3’ wide, flank the entrance inside a freshly painted fence. A row of identical bushes are planted neatly in each one.

Even the visual documentation used by the two sides in this debate is dramatically different. Here are two photos of the garden that Columbia sent us — not quite as glorious-looking as that rose bush above!

Vita Wallace, who lives next door and tended the garden, has started a petition demanding that Columbia recognize the property as a community garden, as it has been unofficially for years.

“Columbia owns the parking lot,” she said during a recent conversation at the site. “I never really had permission to garden here. It was just something that has been done for decades by neighbors. I inherited it from a woman who tended it in the 1990s, and she took it over from a couple that started it in the 1970s. I’ve been doing it for the past 14 years. On August 26^th, without any notice, Columbia decided to get rid of the whole thing. They sent in a big crew and obliterated it in a couple of hours.”

A white-haired woman walked by.

“What happened to the beautiful rose bushes?” she asked.

“The garden was lovely,” said the woman, who preferred not to be identified. “The roses dripped over the fence, which may be what they didn’t like. Maybe, at night, it’s a little more dangerous for students going to student housing. There were two very old rose bushes, one here and one here. You could pick roses as you passed by. It smelled good in June when they started to bloom. They bloomed most of the summer.”

“It had such a different quality to it than those incredibly average shrubs Columbia planted,” said Kate Ettinger, a musician, who lives across the street. “There was a sort of wildness to it. This feels very regimented.”

The garden as it looked last month. Photo by Carol Tannenhauser.

“There were cherry trees with bulbs and herbs under them, and a whole bed of mint and lemon balm and columbine, and a peach tree and a cypress tree and a lilac bush and the roses,” Wallace said. “They were all perennials; they came back every year. That may be why Columbia thought the garden wasn’t being tended. They had already bloomed.”

“In general, this neighborhood is owned by Columbia, though there are a few independent buildings,” said Mark Ettinger, Kate’s father. “And, in general, Columbia favors a very minimal, clean, uniform-color, mono-cropped kind of thing. This is another example of absentee owners making a decision that impacts people who live somewhere.”

But what brought the garden to the attention of the decision-makers at Columbia after all these decades?

Rats.

On August 30^th, four days after the garden had been destroyed, Wallace received an email from Noah Lichtman, Communications, Columbia University Facilities and Operations, which read, in part:

“The presence of rodents and rat burrows were identified on the property. Addressing that problem required Columbia to eliminate places where rats can hide and to clean up the property. An inspection by our landscaping contractor found that the vegetation on the property was diseased, and upon visual inspection prior to removal, it did not appear to be actively maintained of recent.

“Specifically, they found that much of the planted area was overtaken by Porcelain Berry, an invasive vine which strangles trees, shrubs and anything it can attach to. The vine was climbing the buildings and fences throughout the lot. Also, the rose bushes showed signs of disease, and the fruit trees were being strangled by the rose bushes and also showed disease of powdery mildew. The roots of the rose and fruit trees were rotten and pulling up the sidewalk. No fruit was visible on the trees or on the ground during initial walk-through or clean-up.

“As the property is locked and restricted to Columbia affiliates who park there, combined with the professional visual inspection, we did not know that there was a community effort to maintain that area…please know that Friday’s action was the first step in the process. We will be fixing and repainting the fence, and will be adding greenery that we will actively maintain moving forward.

“Please feel free to share this information with your neighbors and/or let us know if there are others that it would be helpful for us to communicate this to. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have further questions.”

“I was so angry, I couldn’t answer him,” Vita Wallace said. “I admit the roses had powdery mildew, but it’s not a fatal disease; it’s something that plants get sometimes. It’s like saying that your grandmother has arthritis, so we have to kill her. Sure there were vines, mostly morning glories, which some of us enjoyed. I never saw rats, but I would see holes. I still see holes.” Wallace also said that “someone” had given her a key to the parking lot years before.

Friends of the garden: a visitor from London, Kate Ettinger, Ollie, the handyman, Mark Ettinger, and Vita Wallace.

Mark Ettinger conceded that the roses were badly in need of pruning, but disputed the claim that the roots of the fruit trees were rotten. He had run across the street at “eight a.m., the Friday before Labor Day,” when he heard the sound of chain saws and “had the horrible view of a perfect, clean, healthy cross-section,” he said. “I’m a carpenter. I know wood. I deal with trees all the time. Those fruit trees were incredibly healthy. A mere month and a half ago, they had the largest harvest they’ve ever had. (“Five quarts of cherries and 50 peaches,” said Wallace.) “To say there was no fruit visible makes no sense. It was a month and a half after the fruiting season!”

As for rats, Etttinger said, “I guarantee that’s not why it happened.”

Columbia insists it is – and that it was the NYC Health Department that made the university aware of the problem.

“New York City Health Code states that property owners are responsible for maintaining a rat-free environment on their properties and requires property owners to eliminate conditions that lead to rats,” Lichtman wrote in a follow-up email to Wallace, who posted an online petition demanding Columbia recognize the 113th Street Parking Lot Garden as a community garden, garnering 102 signatures as of Thursday.

The Department of Health said the neighborhood garden “was inspected this year and passed,” though a spokesman did not respond to a request for information on whether any evidence of rats had been found. Lichtman said the fact that it passed inspection is immaterial — the fact that rats are there means a property owner needs to mitigate the problem.

“In considering the situation going forward,” Lichtman continued, “we have made the evaluation that a publicly maintained and accessible garden is not the right fit for the space. We considered the information we learned from you and others in the community, and did not reach this conclusion lightly.”