Forty thousand square feet is the size of four baseball diamonds, Michael Jordan’s wedding tent, or a little more than forty racquetball courts. You could fit my apartment in 40,000 square feet about 75 times. Forty thousand square feet is also the amount of green space GrowNYC’s Open Space Greening project added to the city in 2014, and it doesn’t even include the 13,000-square-foot space they rehabilitated in East New York.
The space is divided among seven new locations: six new community gardens and one Governors Island teaching garden. The Governors Island space, which is home to a fruit tree orchard and a rain garden, offers programming for public schools on weekdays and summer camp. Most of the green space was converted from vacant city-owned lots, and GrowNYC collaborated with the mayor’s office to place two gardens in District Public Health Zones.
Congratulations to GrowNYC for a great 2014. We reached out to program manager Mike Rezny for a 2015 forecast, and he told us we can look forward to the first full year of school tours and public programming at the Governors Island Teaching Garden as well as potential new gardens in the Bronx, the Rockaways and South Brooklyn. For more information on GrowNYC’s gardening initiatives, check out this profile on BBC radio or their website.
