THE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK 



WHERE GARDENING HELPS CITIZENSHIP 



THE Avenue A Gardens in New York have well passed the 

 experimental stage. Started a few years ago with only a 

 few plots, there were last year under cultivation by children of the 

 tenements six hundred small gardens and several community gar- 

 dens for the production of crops on a larger scale. 



Few New Yorkers and fewer visitors to New York ever see 

 Avenue A. It is not a bit like Avenue 5, better known as Fifth 

 Avenue. The magnificent shops and residences which line the 

 latter are replaced on Avenue A by coalyards, machine shops, ex- 

 breweries, things of that sort, and tenements, especially tenements. 

 The side streets which cross Avenue A reek with tenements. And 

 wherever there are tenements there are children — lots of children. 



Those children, such of them as survive in their surroundings, 

 are going to be American citizens. What kind, of American 

 citizens they are going to be depends largely upon what they are 

 doing with themselves now. If their play-time, in New York or 

 in any other city, is spent in the streets or backyards, left to their 

 own devices and bad suggestion, it's a fair wager they won't turn 

 out very well. 



Almost all children like to have a try at gardening. Whether 

 they keep on liking to garden depends a good deal on the success 

 of their early experiments. When once they see something of 

 their own planting beginning to grow, the liking is established 

 and that child has acquired an interest in life which is far more 

 promising for its future than stoning cats, robbing fruit-stands, 

 or corner loafing. 



The gardens are located on grounds loaned by the Rockefeller 

 Institute at Sixty-fifth Street. When the Plant, Flower and 

 Fruit Guild undertook this venture, the three city blocks had been 

 a dumping ground for the builders of the Institute. The boys of 

 the neighborhood were organized to clear the ground of the mass 

 of sticks and stones. A neighboring stableman gave the gardens 

 the needed fertilizer. Six hundred gardens, each 5x10 feet, were 

 mapped out for the children. Besides these there were com- 

 munity plots for bigger crops on shares, and plots for families. A 

 woman superintendent and a man gardener attend to the organiza- 



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