Sunnyside’s rogue community garden is soon to be replaced by affordable senior housing. But the gardeners wonder: Does it have to be one or the other?
BY COLE SINANIAN
cole@queensledger.com
SUNNYSIDE — On the morning of June 27, 2020, a team of guerilla composters arrived at a padlocked vacant lot at 41-12 45th Street in Sunnyside, armed with bike trailers full of plants and soil, ready to transform the space into a community composting hub.
Led by Queens locals Gil Lopez, Daniel Wendlek, and several others, the group quickly got to work, planting seedlings and unfurling banners that read “Resistance is Fertile” and “Food Justice=Social Justice” on the plot’s chain-link fences.
This was the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Eric Adam’s Administration had halted the City-administered composting program, leaving local gardeners with heaps of surplus compost. Footage shared by fellow composter Rachel Brown shows the ensuing confrontation with owners’ rep Michael Otterman — a member of the family that owned the property as Norcor Management — who, as it turned out, was a composter himself.
After some negotiation, the Ottermans agreed to sign an agreement with the composters with the local nonprofit Sunnyside Community Services (SCS) acting as lease-holder, allowing them to use the lot for their food scrap collection and composting program, as long as they respected the terms of the lease and vacated the premises when asked.
Fast forward six years and that day appears to be fast approaching. In November 2024, SCS announced that the Ottermans had donated the lot — now a full-blown community garden — to the nonprofit for the development of an affordable senior housing complex. According to SCS Executive Director Judith Zangwill, the lease transfer is still underway and the project is still in its funding phase, meaning it is expected to be years before construction begins.
But for the gardeners who use the space, the news brought heartbreak, and has raised difficult questions about green space and affordable housing in a borough that lacks sufficient public access to both.
“It’s always been a part of this deal that we leave when we’re asked to leave,” said garden volunteer and eight-year Sunnysider Michelle Wey. “We just didn’t want to think about it.”
About a year after the composters’ 2020 occupation of the space, the Otterman family patriarch, Harry Otterman, approached Zangwill and SCS President Lisa Deller with a proposition: an affordable housing complex for Sunnyside’s seniors, named in honor of his parents, David and Dina Otterman.
“It’s a legacy project for them,” Zangwill said. “He has really benefitted so much from the community that he wants to give back.”
While SCS has control of the site, the deed has not yet been transferred. SCS is currently engaged in interviews with prospective architects, Zangwill said, with the intent to ultimately build between 75 and 90 units of affordable senior housing. About $4.2 million have already been secured for the project, primarily from the offices of City councilmembers Julie Won and Julie Menin, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, and outgoing State Senator Michael Gianaris.
“Affordable housing is the issue of our moment, particularly senior affordable housing,” Deller said. “And at Sunnyside Community Services we have a senior center, we have a home care program. The idea of senior affordable housing and the work that we do as a center really lines up.”
But until they get their vacate notice, the 45th Street Green Space’s some 50-100 regular volunteers will continue tending to the towering compost piles ripe with earthworms and caring for the dozens of food crops exploding in bursts of green across the dense rows of trellises and garden beds. In addition to a variety of food crops like peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and long beans, the space counts several mulberry trees, a water catchment system and a “bean dome” — a jungle-gym-like structure woven with bean-bearing vines. The garden — which is privately run by the composters and not part of the NYC Parks Department’s Green Thumb program — hosts a Sunday food scrap dropoff and regular community potlucks and has open hours four days a week, during which visitors are free to help prune, weed, or harvest whatever’s in season.
“People love that our space is open to anyone, that it’s public,” said Brown. “People with kids, they’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is like the only place with grass where I can let my kids crawl or run around and play in the dirt and grass.’”
On a recent Sunday in August, about a dozen volunteers were out working the garden among the peak summer harvest as neighbors stopped in to drop off their scraps and left with armfuls of shisito peppers, cherry tomatoes and dark purple long beans, which hung like stalactites from a trellised arch in the garden’s center.
“To pit green space against affordable housing is so frustrating,” said Wey. “It shouldn’t be one or the other.”
Ryan Flemming, meanwhile, who’s volunteered at the garden for two years and lives just a block away, recalled how they first got involved after walking by on a Sunday and letting their curiosity get the best of them. While the produce is great, Fleming explained as they munched a freshly harvested runner bean, it’s the community that keeps them coming.
“I’m here for the people,” said Flemming, who uses they/them pronouns. “It’s nice to meet your neighbors and hang out. I met people in my building that I never met anywhere else other than in this garden.”
In the spring, Flemming said, the mulberry trees flower and their sweet berries fall to the ground, to the delight of volunteers and their children.
“The kids will climb the tree,” they said. “I’m just eating berries off a tree like I’m Yogi Bear. Where else can you do that?”
