Youths cultivate N. Side open lot, and themselves
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One of the city's 17,000 vacant lots succumbed this summer.
If you were around Boyle Street when the season was young, you might have seen a clutch of teenagers unearthing head-high weeds and lugging bricks and concrete to a pile. Weeks later, they were installing rain barrels and planting vegetables in the raised beds of locust boards they had hammered together.
Sometime in October, the Boyle Street Garden Project will celebrate its harvest with its partners who helped transform the 1,900-square-foot lot beside the Young Men and Women's African Heritage Association in the Central North Side.
It's one of dozens of community gardens in the city, one of a score devoted to youth and one of a few that offers them a wage. But it is the only one that got a 14-year-old named Travis Black hooked on the herb sorrel, the only one that inspired Maya Quezada Szejk, 16, to consider a career in the local-sustainable movement.
The project came together in synchronicity.
First, the lot's owner, Barbara McCants, approved the use of her land out of fondness for the heritage association and its work, said her sister, Annette Green.
"Her entire immediate family is pleased with the forward-thinking project and especially with the organization shepherding it," she said.
The next move was made by Women for a Healthy Environment. The group wanted to add to the momentum of a program on food safety and nutrition it conducted last year with public school students and their families at the Kingsley Association.
Executive director Michelle Naccarati-Chapkis said the group homed in on community gardens. "We wanted to do it on the North Side, and we decided the Children's Museum was a natural collaborator."
The group's pitch to the museum dovetailed with the fact that gardener Kimberly Bracken, coordinator of youth and community programs there, knew about the vacant lot beside the heritage association.
First Published September 26, 2011 12:06 am
