Of Gardens and Ghettos

 Lately, I find myself sometimes telling people that I am a bit of a fraud. I don't mean it literally, of course. But since I began the Newburgh project, I often find myself running up against severe limitations. I spend endless hours in trying to landscape the property, and I believe that gardening -- for reasons I will get to eventually -- is the key to saving Newburgh; but when someone asks me the name of a particular plant or tree, I either can't remember or never knew in the first place. It’s the same when I talk to any of the local artists, city planners, historians, the carpenters and electricians who come to work on the house; I try to pretend I know enough to hold my end of the conversation, but I don't know all that much about anything, really. However, I think I know something about how to analyze and solve problems. And how to fix troubled situations. It all begins with the azaleas.

The house in Scarsdale

Nearly 30 years, my wife Susan and I bought our first home, on the outskirts of Scarsdale, in lower Westchester County, a 25-minute train ride from midtown Manhattan. The home was a 1920's Tudor, on a pleasant, leafy street, and had a small yard on the side, graced by an oak tree. We had been told that a couple of owners back, there had an English gardener lady, and the bedraggled bed in the center of the side yard had once held prize-winning roses.

Now and then, on the weekends, I made a small effort to clean up the yard and plant a few things. I didn't consider myself a gardener, it was just something to do. There were babies and then toddlers in the house, and my busy job as a corporate lawyer didn't allow for much recreation or vacation.

Along the edge of the yard, in front of an old slate wall, was a tangled jungle of vines -- Virginia creeper mingled with poison ivy and other things I never learned to name. Hacking away at these vines was sort of enjoyable, and at their base, I found some scrubby shrunken shrubs. I don't recall if I knew what they were, and the poor, miserable things were barely clinging to life, but they seemed to be evenly spaced and set into a straight line, so I cleared away everything around them, fed them a little holly tone, and waited for the next year.

The following spring they had filled out a little and showed a few flowers. I realized they were azaleas, of course. I had never really thought much about photosynthesis, until I saw how these little shrubs transformed themselves over the next few years. It seems like a miracle to me, the way invisible light is transformed into green, oxygen-producing leaves. But it's a miracle with a cruel underlying reality -- that one plant's existence was at the expense of another's health.

Once I had cleared the vines and the weeds, the azaleas could grow again. As they grew out (again) we were eventually rewarded with a remarkable show each spring. The English gardener lady predecessor had chosen and placed with care. The colors were brilliant and juxtaposed with each other perfectly, a blend of yellow and purple and pink, a wall of color every year. I would not have had the time or vision or knowledge to select the varieties that I found there, so I could not have created the wall of azaleas from scratch. But I was there to rescue them; I saw their potential and nurtured them back to health. I did not create the glorious display that re-appeared every spring, but my efforts had made it possible.

Over the course of my business career, I was occasionally confronted with messy situations. Once it was a law firm on the verge of financial collapse. Another time a client and friend had allowed himself to become mired in a disastrous real estate situation. Once I was invited to be Board Treasurer of a non-profit, only to find they were in crisis. This is not the place to belabor all the details; only the participants would care. Each time, there was a great deal of stress, hard fought battles, delicate alliances, uncertain outcomes and, in most cases, eventual success. Now I know this seems unbelievably corny -- but each time I thought about those azaleas.

Shortly after I acquired the Fullerton Mansion, I was talking to a young landscape architect. I explained that I needed to add some azaleas to the property. She didn't seem very enthusiastic. Maybe they aren't trendy any more. "But, you have to understand", I said, abusing a famous quote from Socrates, "life without azaleas is not worth living." I thought she would fine the line funny, instead, she looked at me as though I were stark raving mad, then regained her composure and changed the subject. I didn't have a chance to explain. I hope this blog makes everything clear, because we are going to save Newburgh, and the azaleas hold the key.

Bud Light and Butterflies

August 23, 2011


Today I planted a butterfly bush on Liberty Street. The one I planted last summer did not survive, probably because of the ice-melting salt that had been used on the sidewalk and street over the winter, but this time I tried to choose a safer location, set back a few feet from the sidewalk, in a corner of the property where two privet hedgerows meet. The privet had been overgrown, leggy and covered with vines, but a little pruning and weeding has done them much good. Something that produces flowers seemed called for.

The house next door seems pretty much deserted, and its yard overgrown, so the privet corner with the buddleia represents a border in more than one respect.

The plant's blooms are a deep royal blue. I gave an identical plant to my friend Stu, to be planted behind his place on Lander Street, in a small yard that is abuts a large vacant lot, both surrounded by an eight-foot chain link fence. The formal name of the plant, buddleia, sounded to Stu like "BudLight", which seems like an appropriate name

Lander Street is even tougher than Liberty Street. Newburgh needs butterflies.

The book I Never Saw Another Butterfly first appeared when I was a teenager. It was a collection of poems and drawings by children in the Teresienstat concentration camp. Since then, my mind has always connected butterflies with the holocaust, as though the eternal war between good and evil could be reduced to these two ideas.

To me, the conditions inside America's most blighted cities are tantamount to a holocaust. There are a great many children trapped in these modern ghettos. They are surrounded by rampant drug use and alcoholism, and violence is an everyday fact of life. Prostitutes ply the corners; physical abuse of women and children is taken for granted. The fathers, or "baby daddies", tend to be frequent guests of the state correctional system. In fact, a man who has not done his "bid", as a term of incarceration is called, has limited cred on the street.

There is a mistaken impression that ghettoes are all black, but my observation is that the colors are mixed, and while African-Americans are the dominant group, the culture of despair and hopeless disaffection cuts across a wide swath of ethnic backgrounds.

It may not seem like much to plant a butterfly bush on Liberty Street, but if the plant survives, perhaps a butterfly or two will drawn there, and then perhaps a child will have a moment of wonder and hope.