Elizabeth Street Garden, Now and Forever #SaveElizabethStreetGarden

 

Two person yoga in the garden, Spring of 2017, with the kid, now in college. The battles for and quiet moments in the garden have been many. 

  

Elizabeth Street Garden, Now and Forever

 We heard about the beloved Elizabeth Street Garden was in trouble, that the bull dozers were coming, that we could be locked out any day. 

 Get into the garden, said the message on Monday:

“Dear Neighbors,

We are calling on everyone to gather in the Garden tomorrow (Tuesday) at 4 PM to celebrate this special space. We’ll be there for a while, but please try to arrive at 4 PM if you can. We are still in federal court and doing everything we can. At this point, we're taking it day by day.  If you're a painter, photographer, poet, or artist who has created something inspired by the Garden, please bring your work. We only ask that it be related to the Garden. We want to show everyone how much Elizabeth Street Garden means to our community and to New York City. See you in the Garden tomorrow, Joseph.”

On Tuesday, I let out my class early to ride to the garden, where I planned to read Sunflower Sutre, Allen Ginsberg’s homage to a friendship with open space, with the climate, with a sunflower. 

In class, we had been discussing the words attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854:

“How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people … We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man — all belong to the same family.”

We all arrived there at four. 

Friends from everywhere were there.

Roger and Janine, Norman talking with reporters, I was having a deja vu feeling from Feb 2000 when they took Esperanza, the beloved garden on East 7th Street. 

We’d been fighting for the gardens, ever since. 

Mgali was in the garden. So was Charles.

Greeting them, I walked about the garden, thinking about the full decade of activism we’ve engaged in to try to save this place from the wrecking ball. 

It's a place where we share poems and live, no fees, no costs, just fresh air, trees, people and daffodils, a place where the kids and I came to do person yoga. 

There are too many developers calling the shots, I found myself saying to Normal Siegel, the lawyer fighting for the garden. Democracy means public space for the people.

"Elizabeth Street Garden! we love you," screamed Patti to end her set. 

 Brad read a poem. I pulled out  Sunflower Sutra. Ray read about poems in the gazebo. And then Joseph introduced long time supporter Patti Smith who reminded us that  that activism is sometimes about just standing up to remember who we are.

We shall live again, sang Patti Smith. Keep on fighting.  What is happening to our city with art, with trees, space for contemplation. People need not just housing but places to house our souls. She read "a supplication to nature.

"If we be blind, if we turn away from Nature, the garden of the soul,. Nature will turn on us."  And she sang, "the people have the power."

"I was dreaming in my dreaming

of an aspect bright and fair

and my sleeping it was broken

but my dream it lingered near

in the form of shining valleys

where the pure air recognized

and my senses newly opened

I awakened to the cry

that the people have the power

to redeem the work of fools

upon the meek the graces shower

it's decreed the people rule"

Looking at her, we felt a trembling, a sense of the poetry of the space, and the fight we are in to “redeem the work of fools.”

Ray was there, later writing about the day:

Today turned out to be that time I accidentally opened for Patti Smith. There was a gathering from 4-7pm today at Elizabeth Street Garden on the Lower East Side of poets and musicians and other artists determined to save this important public green space (while also building more affordable housing). There was a moment about an hour into it when a poet was needed to fill some space while the next musician set up. I wrote a poem last night about the garden so I volunteered to read. I had no idea that the musician who would follow me was the incredible, brilliant Patti Smith. I read my poem to a couple hundred people, completely clueless that I was opening for Patti Smith. Oh, and the poem, it’s called UNDER A GILDED AGE GAZEBO. It’s about the first time I read a poem in the garden last June:

I strolled into a park on the Lower East Side

Tucked away on a street named Elizabeth.

The park looked from certain angles like Savannah, Georgia

And from other angles like Paris, France.

The air smelled of pear trees and rose bushes approaching peak bloom

As birds swooped low and called to one another

Amidst my fellow summertime Sunday afternoon strollers.

It felt like a 21st century version of the Seurat painting come to life,

Though no monkey on a leash,

Just one man in a fedora walking a cat.

Hydrangeas and black-eyed Susans climbed the statues and stone bird bath

While I anguished over whether my poem was good enough

To share with the assemblage of New Yorkers surrounding me.

I volunteered to read first

Get it over with, I thought,

Like tearing a bandage.

Under a Gilded Age gazebo,

Designed by Olmstead

During another age of robber barons riding roughshod

Similar to our own,

I momentarily froze

Afraid to share the poem on my phone in my hand.

A playful, kind sparrow sensed my fear as it circled the gazebo

Calling to me in a low sparrow voice

That only I could hear.

“Read the poem!” the sparrow said

Before soaring toward the treetops,

Leaving me to summon my courage, find my voice,

And add my poem to the din and tumult.”

It had been a full New York day, but really, the springtime was about feeling freedom even chaos loomed about us, an earthquake in Thailand, a war on tariffs, stock markets crash, erosions of civil liberties, deportations, on and on. 

Why all the cruelty, I think every day. 

Save the garden, save ourselves.

Memory Sandwich, Between ACT UP 38/ Nanette Kazaoka’s Memorial and Book Readings on Activism, Friendships and Fighting/ Boy with a Bullhorn

 

Nanette and the Swim Team 

Standing at the AIDS Memorial on Saturday, I looked at a woman in a wheelchair with black hair, a scarf about her head, dark hair, white skin, head down.

Is that Nanette, I  thought for a second, one of several of us in ACT UP experiencing that sensation, a glance of Nanette on the march, a memory of their fallen comrade, thinking about a rebel friend.

Saturday was the 38th Anniversary March for ACT UP, meeting at the AIDS memorial by the LGBTQ Center and marching down to Washington for the Pop4Planet Tesla Takedown, one of 500 such demos over the weekend, taking on the death by a thousand cuts of the current administration and its Department of Government Efficiency. Already this week, they disappeared a college student in Boston, with more disappearing every day.  

“Fight musk, fight back, fight aids!” we chanted. “PEPFAR saves lives.”

The sun was out. It  was warm, spring in the air, countless friends in the streets. 

Sunday would be a super emotional day, with an ACT UP memorial for decades long stawart Nanette Kazaoka at 430, at the Center. The day after the act up 38th anniversary march. 

At the march, several reported they saw her. I felt the same way walking into the room for our reading On Friendship and Movements, ACT UP and Queer Activism, with Ron Goldberg, at the The Bureau of General Services Queer Division at the Center. Andy Velez and Elizabeth Meixell were there a decade ago when they read about rebel friendships here. Their memories filled the room.

“Thank you for coming today,” I began my talk 

“Thank you to Greg and the folks at the Bureau, the best bookstore in New York city. Buy a book or a zine everyone. Thank you to the crew from common notions.Thank you to Mark and other others here, who sat for interviews, unpacking bits and pieces of our messy history.  Thank you Ron Goldberg for your monumental work.  Between your activism and day by day, week by week chronicles of struggles around AIDS, sex and friendship and fighting, you offer us a human response to an inhuman situation, bringing us back to that high and lonesome excruciating place of saying goodbye. I will read a little bit and then hear from you how you balanced the ups, downs, splits and conflicts, with the departures.  After 38 years of ACT UP, there is no doubt our tent is too small. How do we open ourselves up to those with different positions? For me, it's always been about the friends, the friends in the streets we see, that make going to the demo fun, the comrades that become family….”

It's the same with Ron, who read stories from his ACT UP memoir, The Boy with a Bullhorn, about his turbulent years with the group. In between the memorials for Troy and Nanette, Ron led us through his story. I scrambled notes about Ron’s years in the group from 1987 to 1995, recalling the dingy room in the Center where the group met, the most exciting place in town, he told us. We protest and demonstrate, we are not silent, the meetings began. Everyone had opinions. If I listened long enough, I could figure it out, Ron read. It wasn’t exclusively for dating and socializing. The passion was everything. If we met someone or got laid, that was an extra bonus. The passion was what kept people. After the meeting, we’d figure things out at Woody’s, gossiping about the meeting, tracing who dated who in the ACT UP food chain, and closing the bar. We clinged together, glowing with each other, before saying goodnight, said Ron. Sometimes, they met the next day  for a meeting. Sometimes, it was the next Friday night, traversing town to parties at Maria Maggenti's East Village apartment. Maggenti was ACT UP’s golden girl. It was the peak of the squatter period in New York, Ron did not know the buzzer number. There were names, so he just buzzed until someone let him in. Inside he walked up the stairs until he saw the door full of ACT UP stickers and noise, walking into Maria’s apartment.  Not everyone was invited to those get-togethers after elections or New Years. One night, David Serko and a few others ran outside to swim in the fountain in the park, returning only in wet underwear. Ron paused, reading, the conversation stopped, the temperature rose in the room and the nickname was born, ‘the Swim Team.’  Riffing on the moment, Goldberg recalled the summer in 1989, when ACT UP took over the World, a club, where house music mixed with activism. Porn, late night TV aficionado Robin Bird was host, the AIDS movement joining her safe sex party, cultural moment, with Delite, Jimmy Somerville, and Madonna playing. We were in the middle of a moment and movement. 

Of course, the point of the conversation was not only to push back against the hair shirt no fun left. But also to talk about the ways to cope with disagreements, some of which Ron characterized as destruye. Absolutist positions arose as things got more complicated and the losses accumulated, Ron confessed. Loss upon loss. Some argued if you were not working on AIDS drugs, you were waiting time. Others took a lighter approach. And others created housing, prevention, and medical services. But there are disagreements. 

Zero Mostel ended up working with people who had informed on actors in HUAC, recalled Ron. "I could work with them, not eat with them.” There were disagreements and there were disagreements. Sometimes and / or sometimes just and. ACT UP changed my life, said Mark Milano. There was a party line to be maintained, commenting from the audience. It didn’t feel like and / or. I found that if you disagreed, relationships fill apart, said Milano. Ron Goldberg commented on TITO, the anonymous zine, made by one ACT UP member. It was brutal, said Goldberg, full of unsigned articles and gossip, hurting feelings, getting in the way of productive discourse.  

Others in the audience recalled feeling left out, or ghosted after disagreements in activism. 

Jamie Leo recalled Elizabeth and her curiosity.

Following the reading, we snapped a few shots and went downstairs for a memorial for long-term act up member, Nanette Kazaoka at 430, celebrating the life and legacy of this longtime ACT UP member. Kazaoka was a fearless advocate for people with HIV, particularly in the early days of the AIDS crisis when she joined ACT UP/NY, said Mark Milano welcoming everyone, explaining that the event was open for anyone to provide memories. The only formal speaker would be Nanette, from her ACT UP oral history interview. In the interview she talked about her life, joining the group in 1989, taking part in action after action, for three decades.  Noteworthy actions included Target City Hall, Stop the Church, the Ashes Action, taking ashes from last comrades to the White House in 1992, the 10th anniversary action, in 1997, the Dr Wan action in 2002, in which we successfully demanded the release of a Chinese scientist who’d made the mistake of notifying authorities about HIV positive blood moved into the blood supply, the Naked Action in 2004 during the Republican National Convention. Her first arrest was against Clinton. The group’s greatest achievement was making people aware of HIV /AIDS, she told Sarah Schulman. 

“I thought I saw her yesterday in the street,” said act up’s unofficial bard, Jim Eigo. “The streets were crowded with her. In a way, I guess I did see her.”

When she saw Chris Henelly beaten by police for taking part in a police brutality action in 1991, she saw the brutality and subtelty of it all, the humanity of it all, said another observer. 

She welcomed new members. She was a mentor to a generation of women, of younger activists. That's an experience we’ll have the rest of our lives, another explained.

“She always put herself out there,” said Jason. “Thank you. I’ll miss you.” 

All week, I had been seeing her everywhere, in old pictures, a glimpse in the march, in my facebook feed, standing with her, at the Dr Wan action, my favorite ACT UP demo. 

She got the joy of activism. She was always there. She was ready to dance, said Brandon.

She was the quintessential soldier in the battle against AIDS, said John Riley. And she kept a clear head

Speaker after speaker recalled actions where we'd seen Nanette or she'd helped calm the waters. Brian recalled meeting her "working the merch tables for ACT UP at a GMHC Walkathon in 1991. She was (and in my heart is) what the folks these days call a high vibrational person." 

We recalled demo after demo through the years, including the day before, when she really was there.

Finishing, Mark Milano belted out a song by Liza Minnelli in her spirit.  

"Yes

Say yes

Life keeps happenin' every day

Say yes

When opportunity comes your way

You can't start wonderin' what to say

You'll never win if you never play

Say yes..”

Jason and Eric and I went to Julius afterward, as we have for so many of these occasions, talking about where we are at now, the fights to come, the uphill fight for democracy, for all we’ve fought for.

“Why would you want to hurt so many people,” Eric wondered, thinking about Musk, gutting PEPFAR.

We talked about Nanette, Jamie, Elizabeth, Kate, Mark Milano, Ann Christine, Maria Maggenti’s apartment, and Anne-christine d'Adesky’s  blog: “Overnight Illegals: Trump’s team just secretly cancelled the immigration status of hundreds of Middle East students in the US, ordering them to self-deport. The revocations are the next step in Marco Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” program, modeled after Nixon’s 1972 crackdown on pro-Palestinian students. Even as protests grow, the crackdown is escalating.”

It's only getting closer.

 

 Additional pics by @thejayboyproject @rdiskinblack