Garden Party

BLOOM TOWN: Liberty Lands community garden could soon produce peppers, cucumbers, spinach and lettuce.
Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Once soaked in toxic chemicals and rusted machinery, this NoLibs park keeps neighbors grounded.

by Jenna Portnoy

Gnarled branches and overturned cinder blocks litter the path. An abandoned hose twists in the wind and the rain-soaked park benches are empty. There's no one around except Caryn Hunt. She's looking at her garden.

Her 5-year-old daughter, Mary, plays here after school and Hunt has a lot of friends in the neighborhood so this spring, the South Philadelphia resident is giving up container gardening on her deck and digging into the soil at Liberty Lands. "It's a mess," she says happily. With any luck, patch No. 14 will soon give way to red peppers, cucumbers, spinach and lettuce.

The keepers of Liberty Lands Park don't care if it takes another decade to perfect the two acres of green space sandwiched between new row homes and posh shops sprouting up around the site, bordered by Third, Wildey, Poplar and American streets. These neighbors are doing more than planting flowers, nurturing root veggies and picking up trash. They're taking a stand and maintaining the integrity of their community.

"If people don't stay involved, it's going to go away," Maureen Wellner says of the artsy culture that makes Northern Liberties attractive to hipsters who have helped boost the property values and the bragging rights here. "If we didn't own Liberty Lands, I'm sure it would have been developed."

Wellner, a freelance photographer, refers to a common catch-22: parks that make neighborhoods marketable inevitably fall victim to encroaching development.

But unlike most community groups, the Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association (NLNA) actually owns the land, which has only fully taken shape as a park, garden and playground in the last two years. "It wasn't just that there is a nice park here," says Janet Finegar, a Philadelphia University English professor and ardent park supporter. "It's the coming together of people discovering that we could do great things if we just went ahead and did them."

By the time the Philadelphia Urban Resources Partnership committed $59,000 to the park in 1996, passersby would never have guessed the site was once home to the blighted American Street Tannery.

In 1987, the Environmental Protection Agency removed 1,000 drums from the facility and returned three years later to find toxic chemicals leaking from discarded electrical transformers, EPA spokesman David Sternberg says. The city knocked down the buildings and imposed a $500,000 demolition lien on the property. Since the site had been donated to the NLNA, it assumed that debt, too.

Enter City Councilman Frank DiCiccio. Through his help and the clout of various city agencies, the debt was forgiven in 1999. "We saw the benefit of providing for this green, open space in a neighborhood where we all expected to see a significant amount of interest in terms of development," DiCiccio says.

In a symbolic burning-of-the-lien ceremony, the NLNA embraced its new mission: brownfield redevelopment. "It's a very successful project with good reuse of an old industrial property that's really added a lot of vibrancy" to the area, Sternberg says.

The NLNA formed another nonprofit, the Northern Liberties Action Committee, to assume legal responsibility for the land — and all its attendant hassles. Trash has always been a problem, Finegar says, as have off-leash dogs. And liability? The committee has insurance for that. Besides, the good stuff far outweighs the chores. Finegar ticks off a list of park activities, including movies, live music, a weekend soccer league, birthday parties and a Wednesday farmers' market.

A group of "freelance fund-raisers" devises creative ways to raise cash for all these endeavors. An annual October variety show features talents from baton twirling and hairstyling to music. The show officially kicks off the calendar sale, a moneymaker spearheaded by Wellner because she was "tired of doing bake sales." Calendars have featured babies, men, women and art of Northern Liberties. (The 2006 theme is dogs.)

But 3-year-old Maya doesn't care about any of that.

Her stick-straight black hair tangling in the wind, she licks a purple Popsicle and enjoys the playground. Her dad, Neil Kohl, pushes the swing and ponders the changing face of the community he's called home for 10 years. "Considering everything that's going on with the neighborhood, it's great that [Liberty Lands] is a park and not just for squatting," he says, motioning across the street to a shrinking plot of land dubbed Seedy Acres. "It's gone from fear to envy. People used to say, "You live where?' Now it's, "You live where?'"

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