Plant two trees and call me in the morning.

you'll see it here first folks - probably not the best idea to post something i'm looking to have published in The Next American City, but i'd like to know what you think of this... i'm taking "environmental writing" with fred strebeigh and my "lead" is due tomorrow... whadya think?

Plant two trees and call me in the morning.
With support from a local non-profit, residents of Blake Street in New Haven, Connecticut met one another, organized, and planted 19 street trees in a span of 3 months. Their experience provides a new prescription for ailing urban neighborhoods.­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

“Sammy, watch your toes!” I said to a little girl of four with her hair tucked in neat braids and clacking beads. Despite my continued requests that Sammy protect herself with closed-toed shoes against our shovels and heavy wheelbarrows, her sandaled feet were an adorable safety hazard week after week.

We were planting two trees on Blake Street that day, behind a large brick building whose industrial backside radiated the summer heat and offered not even a hazy window to relate its contents to the world. Shovels, brooms, and a pick-ax leaned against the offending brick wall, waiting for their turn to manipulate the urban soil or perhaps pry up a particularly stubborn bit of fill. The group had just finished “turfing out” the area we would plant – removing the top layer of grass and weeds with shovels and shaking most of the dirt off before stowing it in giant paper bags to be composted later. This shaking was Sammy’s job because it was easier for her to bend down for the grass clumps than it was for anyone else and because I didn’t have to worry about her tootsies.

The trees had been unloaded and were laying like awkward giants on the strip of packed soil between the road and the littered sidewalk, each trunk propped at odd angle to the ground and the burlap root ball chocked precariously against rolling. A group of men and women stood hunched over an increasingly larger hole between the pavement, taking turns digging and chopping at the substrate which consisted of soil, rocks, and asphalt, but also an astounding quantity of broken glass, winking in the sunlight filtered by maneuvering bodies and tools. This was the second time the group had come together to plant, and Sammy worked with her mother, Fayan Robinson-Sims, and her teenaged brother Kyle as well as about ten of their neighbors on this sunny Saturday in July.

The group – now known as the Fairlawn Neighborhood Planters – originated by grant application to the Urban Resources Initiative, a New Haven non-profit that provides planting materials to neighbors who come together to ecologically restore their public spaces and to build community. And while this particular group has some unique social obstacles, their working-class socio-economic status and high ambitions for improving their neighborhood are common in every city the world over. The beginning of their story (indeed, so far, there is only a beginning!) can teach us much about softening decades-old social and political scars and healing a barren urban landscape.