Bagels and Riots
Reminiscing in an East New York garden
I’m out researching a story about a young woman and her oyster farm on the New Jersey shore. Since many, if not most of you, haven’t seen AE!’s early stories I thought you might like to read the fourth one I wrote way back in June, 2020. At the time I was writing a series of stories about Ms. Johana. At 84 years old, she is one of the last remaining gardeners from when New York City established its GreenThumb program which continues to help neighborhood residents turn vacant lots into community gardens. Ms. Johana single-handedly planted her garden in East New York 22 years ago. Her neighborhood is one of the city’s worse food deserts where a great many residents shop for their groceries in the ubiquitous Dollar Stores. This story tells of the transformation of the neighborhood from a middle-class immigrant neighborhood to one of the poorest Black communities. I hope you enjoy it and I’ll be back next week with new adventures!
After four days of hard rain, Ms. Johana leans on the men pretty hard.
“What’re you doing over there?” She calls to the two men in the corner slashing through a nasty patch of bamboo.
“Almost done, Ms. Johana,” one of the men calls back.
She’s stretched over her sage bed to uproot an invading patch of thistle.
“See that one over there?” She nods her head back toward the picnic table under her cherry tree. “The one in the wife beater—that’s what they call it, right—wife beater? Stupid name. ANYWAY, he’s their boss, retired policeman. These two here are on work release. I know their mothers so they know not to fool around on me.”
The retired policeman soon walks over and tells Ms. Johana it’s time for them to move on to another garden.
“What time you’ll be here tomorrow? You're not done here.”
“I told you,” he say. “Nine o'clock. Don’t you stay out much longer. Be too hot.”
Ms. Johana rolls to her feet and dusts off the back of her pants. She doesn't have any attention of listening to him as she turns to the business of pushing her walker over the uneven pitted path. Protecting her and her walker from tilting over would be hard given her command to return the shovel to the shed because the useless men didn't think to do it.
“Make sure the lock’s on,” she yells after the shovel is safely in it's place.
“Get my backpack on the table and we’ll go around the corner to the other garden,” she says. “They got some plants I want over here.”
Ms. Johana locks her garden gate and off she goes, around the corner and down two blocks. Few people are about, but those who are call out greetings and she bestows a nod back. She points out what she says is the neighborhood’s last remaining farmhouse. It looks much like the other houses we pass, aluminum siding masking Colonial-era rooflines and the triagular jut of bay windows or a side porch. Auto repair shops and a construction company’s storage lot squeeze in between the houses. Two vacant lots—one a jungle, the other strewn with old refrigerators and car parts—could be longing to be turned into gardens.
The garden we’re heading to, Jerome Glenmore Corner Stone Community Garden, is one of the prettiest in the neighborhood. Lilies and roses bloom everywhere among the straight vegetable rows.
Ms. Johana parks her walker under the shade tent where Helena and Joe sit.
Joe says, “I’m like the historian around here. I can tell you about anything.”
He’s a large man, somewhere in his 50s, with close-cut hair and an angel’s smile. He crosses his long arms around his thick chest and settles into the subject.
“When I was coming up, this used to be Jewish, Polish, Italians, and Irish around here.”
“And Puerto Ricans,” Helena adds.
“Yeah, Puerto Ricans. But we all lived together. It was so peaceful and beautiful. You can’t imagine how beautiful it was around here.”
Joe’s father was a Mohawk Indian. The family lived in downtown Brooklyn with others from their upstate reservation. They all had jobs building the steel skeletons for skyscrapers and bridges. His mother was Hispanic and grew up in East New York. She wanted to be closer to her family when their children started arriving, so they moved into a house on Warwick Street. Joe thinks he might have been four years old.
“You remember the bagel lady?” Ms. Johana says.
“Oh, the bagel lady! You know where Blake Avenue is?” Joe asks. From the tilt of his head it seems to be due west.
“That was where all the shops were. You could get anything there. A whole bunch of bananas for like five cents.”
Ms. Johana cuts in. “I used to send my daughter over and she’d get two bagels with butter. The lady had this big ladle and she’d scoop out butter.”
“From a barrel,” Joe adds.
“And she scooped it out of the barrel and put it in wax paper to take home. You talk about a bagel! A bagel was a bagel back then, you didn’t have to eat nothing else all day,” Ms. Johana says.
“They had milk, too,” Joe says. “From a farm in New Jersey. You know how they poured it in the bottles slowly. . . .”
“That’s so you have the cream nicely on the top,” Ms. Johana says. She grabs ahold of her walker, pulls herself up, and creaks off toward a gardener working a particularly lush plot.
“There were Jewish butchers, Irish butchers, German butchers. An Italian butcher paid me to go out hunting for rabbits. I used to go where the sanitation plant is now, used to be swampy around there. Seven years old, and I’d go out there by myself with a bamboo stick with a wire on a hook. What you do is you lay the wire down on the ground and put food in it, then hide in the grass holding the stick. When a rabbit pokes his head in the wire, you pull right up. Then I’d tie his feet together and put it in a bag the butcher gave me and take it back to him. I could catch six, eight rabbits in a day. That’s how it was around here. It was beautiful around here. Then the riots came in the ‘70s.”
Helena's been kept busy tending to her grandson, almost eight months in a week and itching to cartwheel from his stroller.
“Everybody got scared,” she says, hoisting her grandson into her lap. “My father came out of the house to call me in and they shot him in the leg.”
“The Italians and Irish left. The Jews, all their stores were looted,” Joe says.
“You can’t blame them for leaving,” Helena says.
“I'm just saying what it was like,” Joe say “My dad got me to go into the Air Force when I turned 18 to get me out.”
Ms. Johana returns to the table with the gardener who's loaded several buckets of iris and hostas onto a metal wagon for her to wheel back.
Goodbyes are said all around.
“Get out of the sun, Ms. Johana,” Joe calls.
She's not listening to him. The heat doesn't bother her. Ms. Johana and her walker slowly lead the way back to her garden. The overloaded wagon has joined her and the walker to the threat of toppling with every crevice in the sidewalk.
“Did you get anything to eat?” she's asked once she's seated at the picnic bench with a bottle of almost frozen water.
“Nothing looked good after thinking about that bagel,” Ms. Johana says.
Hear more stories about growing up and living in East New York through an invaluable collection on the East New York Oral History Project website.
We need more folks like Ms. Johana.
We can only hope