Public Employee Press

Transforming mean streets to Greenstreets

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

Seasonal City Parks Worker Kathy Lynn Parham visits more than 100 lush islands a week without ever leaving New York City. Her job is a verdant reality where she and about 40 DC 37 members help transform the city’s mean streets into Greenstreets.

Greenstreets is New York’s award-winning urban beautification program, which former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern began in 1986 with the goal of creating 2,000 landscaped spaces citywide by 2001 in place of empty concrete park entrances, traffic malls and the triangles where three roads intersect.

Today, under Commissioner Adrian Benepe, the plan still blooms, despite cutbacks and staff shortages, due to hardworking employees such as truckers in Local 983, City Parks Workers in Local 1505, Gardeners in Local 1507 and their Supervisors in Local 1508 — full time and seasonal Parks Dept. employees and DC 37 members — and a few hundred welfare recipients in the Parks Dept. jobs training program.

“I didn’t know anything about gardening until I started this job,” Parham admits. But with training from seasoned Principal Parks Supervisor Frank Colella and 26-year horticulture veteran Roy Dayton, Parham has developed a lush green thumb.

So, how do 2,000 mini-gardens grow? To cultivate gardens from concrete, grit and weeds, DC 37 members first have to break through cement, literally. Teams of workers then seed, weed, plant and maintain bleak traffic triangles until they blossom with life-affirming greenery.

Gardeners and their assistants grow about 200,000 plant specimens at the hothouses of the Queens Horticulture Dept. The annual and perennial plants are transported by truck and planted by hand to form pockets of paradise. Driving a watering truck to douse the gardens, DC 37 members weed and prune using personal pride and a solid work ethic as guides to botanic perfection.

Tranquil oases of blooming daylilies, and beds of geranium, begonias and marigolds flower summer long under leafy shade trees as traffic rumbles overhead on the Horace Harding Expressway in Queens. Along Manhattan’s West Side Highway a river of fuchsia fairy roses and maiden grass dance, wave and bow to drivers.

The mini-parks DC 37 members build and maintain provide sanctuary for thousands of New Yorkers citywide. Greenstreets break the city’s warp-speed hustle and give office workers, seniors and children a nearby space to chill on a park bench surrounded by nature and inhale a honeyed scent from the lace caps of buttery phlox.

An attraction to people as well as butterflies, squirrels and birds, New York City Greenstreets are another testament to the great contribution DC 37 members make to communities citywide.