We were told, right in the heart of Mayor Zohran Madami’s New York, a makeshift communal farm, kept inside a long abandoned lot in Bushwick1, was suddenly locked up.
The matter had taken locals by surprise. Some 60-100 congregated outside Bushwick City Farms (354 Stockton St) over the weekend in an effort to draw attention to their sudden plight. A news crew from PIX11 had shown up, as did local environmental substack The Footprint. Eventually, garden volunteers would convince the nonprofit blog The City to dispatch an intern2 to write up the situation.
“Save our farm, save our farm, save our farm,” the crowd chanted. Later, they said “Feed the people, feed the people!” They had scribbled those slogans on signs posted onto the padlocked fence. In a circle, three or four of them had formed a loose brass band and were playing salsa versions of socialist anthems.
“They would help migrants with relocation and language services and legal services,” an enthusiastic volunteer named Emil told me. Emil had moved to the neighborhood recently and told me, in a hushed whisper, that they were “also a blogger,” for yet another substack.
“I don’t want opps knowing,” said Emil. (We won’t tell them, we promise.) Emil was going on about the work they had observed being put into the abandoned lot by the time the city ordered it vacated in January. A week ago, following threats of fines from the city, the landlord locked up the garden, chickens still cooped up inside for days but still clucking away.
“Literally millions of dollars, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of hours and now they just want to lock everyone out and disregard all the work that’s been built up,” Emil tells me. “Now they just want to lock everyone out.”
Per Brian Jones Kraft, deputy editor at large, and who supplied me with a dossier of facts about this place, it had been long abandoned and served “a ground for illegal dumping, squatting, violence, and even a murder,” which sounded like one of those things someone could say about anywhere in Bushwick. I didn’t ask for a link. Surely someone has been killed everywhere. The converted block off Stockton street, at any rate, had been converted into a garden during the big wave of Brooklyn community gardens in the early 2010s. Inside the locked gates, I could hear chickens cooing. One of the signs I saw someone holding read: Bushwick City Farm/ Straight of Hormuz = Closed Due To US Imperialism.
The city’s interest in the repurposed lot was recent and, in a somewhat awkward way, involves getting caught in the crossfire involving one of its various wars against the homeless, dating to the migrant shelters erected during Eric Adams’ time in office; one had been situated down the street from the lot, inside what had been a Blink gym. (It’s currently unoccupied now.)
The shelter’s arrivals had brought some territorial infighting between Club A, the mutual aid group that helps operate the farm and, Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, who position themselves as working with migrants, but eventually, after what can only be imagined as some kind of mafia-like standoff, Club A kept their foot on the corner’s food distribution supply.
But then the shelters closed. That’s when things got a bit tricky, Jason Reis told me. Cutting a striking figure in thick Big Lebowski shades, he’s been a longtime operator of the farm, among various other jobs (including currently, per his LinkedIn, operations director at “Cuban Cultural Trips”) Around him, his children tried scaling the fence. It was nice to hear that they had grown up there.
There had been some fight with the owner of the long unused lot, most recently sold to a Mr. Faramarz Roshodesh decades ago and a threat had been made by Mr. Roshodesh to sell the property to developers but, following a protracted public campaign, Mr. Roshodesh appeared to back down. Reis described a friendly relationship with Mr. Roshodesh, who would visit occasionally amid the site’s transformation into a post-pandemic mutual aid effort.
“We had cooking stations set up and stuff like that,” said Reis. “And 99% of the guys appreciated that moment and then the shelter actually closed and most of the folks moved to [other] shelters or found housing, but there was a handful of guys that got to jumping the fence to live in here and and [make] fires and that caused neighbors to complain, which resulted in the [Department of] Sanitation and the Department of Buildings coming in and initiating those violations, mostly with the intention of getting the people who were sleeping here out. But, as a result, we got the vacate order from [the] DOB, because someone had run makeshift electricity and that was really the main concern from the Department of Buildings’ standpoint.”
Last week, fed up with facing fines from the city for allowing the farm to operate, last week, Mr. Roshodesh locked up the garden yet again.
Another sign read: Chi Ossé Save Our Community Farm. Many, among the gathered group, were hoping Ossé, their city council representative, recent DSA member, and aborted primary candidate to challenge the powerful House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, before being talked out the run by the mayor and a vote by the aforementioned DSA, would take an active stance in the politically potent idea of defending a community garden from the dark forces in city government shutting it down.
“Our office supports keeping Bushwick City Farm open to the community it serves and urges the city and all decision-makers to take the necessary steps to allow the organizers to continue their work,” read a statement from Ossé’s office a few days later, following a collective campaign by garden members to harangue his office with complaints. “We are looking into the citation,” he told the City.
He had been invited to make an appearance outside the garden over the weekend, but couldn’t make it, one of the volunteers told me.
“We are in some of the worst times as a country, as a society, and its places like these, this farm, that makes it even a modicum better for anyone,” testified Chris Hominini, a local in a dazzling leather jacket complete with spikes. “This place, which is, let’s be frank, not owned by anyone really. It is owned by all of us. This is our farm. This is land for all of us and it should not go away because of one simple court order that does not understand this neighborhood and that does not understand what we do here every week. I hope they try to understand. More importantly, if they don’t understand, they better leave us alone.”
Around the lot, passerbys mostly gawked before moving along. My buddy Aaron scoped out neighboring businesses and came back with this report: managers at Jochy Deli Grocery & Friendly’s 24/7 laundromat reported no quality of life concerns related to the garden. He had talked to a young woman named Candice, working at the Sicilian spot Concrete— which occupies that old DIY spot Palisades, celebrated at one point by a handsome illustration on the cover of the New Yorker before being closed for building code violations and turning into a spot to get a $30 chicken cacciatore—she had told him that the nearby garden was a net good for the surrounding area. All of the above was echoed by one mother living at Sumner Houses, the public housing across the street from the garden, etcetera. etcetera.
“It’s honestly mad inconvenient for me to come right now, I had other shit to do, but I feel like the state relies on you choosing convenience over what matters,” says Isa Steadman Ruiz (above) a model who has worked with brands like Boucheron, Versace, and Uniqlo. “As you can see, transplant gentrification and soaring real estate prices are really fucking up everything. It’s horrible,” says Crackhead Barney (below).
“My friend sent me the Instagram post. And I was horrified,” a local performance artist known as Crackhead Barney told me. During last year’s election, Barney made a sport of harassing local politicos, landing an uncomfortable interview with Mr. Mandami himself, as well as landing in the pages of the New York Post for yelling “sexually harass me, Cuomo” at rival Handsy Andrew.
She’s also, it appears, a character around here too. “Becuase I harass immigrants here. Where the fuck else am I going to harass all the immigrants?” she asked before going to describe the lot’s other attributes, the food distribution programs and so on. “I tell them I’m white and I tell them to go back to their country. Where else am I going to do that? Because I wanted to be an asshole and I wanted to give them a taste of America. I wanted them to get it from me because I’m African so, I wanted to ease them into the racism of America. It’s a public service,” Crackhead Barney says.
On the loudspeakers, someone was playing the Steely Dan song from One Battle After Another. Barney’s sense of tastelessly pointless stunt politics brought to mind the political program of similar fringe Brooklyn characters like Paperboy Love Prince, who are often as skeptical of Zohran’s DSA left, as they are of the more traditional centrist Democratic Party places that have also excluded them.
“Scam-dani! Making promises he can’t keep!” said Barney, gesticulating in her purple sports bra and thick shades. “He’s a politician. He speaks out of both sides of his mouth. I don’t really expect him to do anything. He’s just going to smile at us and tell us what we want to hear and then just do something behind our backs. I don’t really trust him.” There were real cultural forces at work and she wasn’t afraid to name them: “As you can see, transplant gentrification and soaring real estate prices are really fucking up everything. It’s horrible.” She walked away, waving her hands up and down, flipping off us and everyone else.
“I’m someone who believes that mutual aid is really what is going to hold us together,” said Isa Steadman Ruiz, a model who has worked “with brands like Boucheron, Versace, and Uniqlo” per her management website, and who moved to the neighborhood last December after initially settling in the “model apartments” in Midtown and “not feeling that whatsoever,” eventually finding a room instead “with the girls, gays and the divas.” Like Crackhead Barney, Ruiz had seen the news online, and decided to stop by after a job interview in the city.
“I’m a beautiful 21-year old girl and I get paid just to stand and be beautiful, so for me donating my time and presence to matters like this, I think it matters twice as much,” said Ruiz.
“We have onions growing there right now. We have fig trees that start giving fruit toward the end of summer,” Mariel Acosta told me. She lectures on the subject of hispanic sociolinguistics somewhere in the CUNY system, and has been growing food at the farm since 2013, a year after it started to take shape.
“There’s Bangladeshi families that have been here many years and they plant squashes. We have chickens and give away the eggs on Sunday,” she said.
Per Acosta, a recent rezoning of the lot during the Eric Adams era turned the lot front from residential to commercial, which brought property taxes up. “The tax rate when he [Roshodesh] purchased the land in 2004 was $400 and the 2025 tax rate is nearly $40,000,” Reis tells me.)
Club A wants the city to buy the property from Roshodesh and manage it through the city’s GreenThumb program, which regulates the sprawling network of community gardens in the city.
“This has been a battle for a while. We’ve been asking the city to make the garden permanent since 2017, so it’s time the city takes it over,” Acosta told me. “My kids were literally born here. It’s a lifecycle that happens here.”
“It’s honestly mad inconvenient for me to come right now, I had other shit to do, but I feel like the state relies on you choosing convenience over what matters,” said Ruiz, the model. She had volunteered at the garden once, and it had moved her.
“A lot of these girls haven’t spent time with revolutionary theory. I’m like someone who likes studying revolutionary theory in my free time, but not every model is like that. But some of them are,” she told me.
“I’m maintaining the fantasy of why capitalism is so great and, as someone who is a critical and radical thinker, it feels hard to talk about it. You’re just observing it. So, it was very hard to find somewhere where people think like me. That’s why I was really excited to move to Bushwick. I can’t stand bottle service clubbing. There’s an ideology for rave culture that aligns with this culture, in the farm. So, I do think I’ve found a lot of radical artisans and thinkers on the rave dance floor. That’s why I had to move to Bushwick. I’m ten minutes from every rave spot.”
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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