Today marks the 25th anniversary of the destruction of New York’s Garden of Eden, an earthwork created by Adam Purple in the 1970’s and 80’s. The Garden once covered five city lots on Manhattan’s Lower East Side between Eldrige and Forsythe St.
In 1975 much of the Lower East Side was a crime-ridden wasteland, but Adam Purple looked around him and saw the opportunity to reclaim the vacant spaces around him with the natural. Purple had taken over the lot for the landlords who had abandoned them and left them vacant. He set out to plant a garden behind his tenement building at a time when much of the area around him was being raised. The site where he began his project was covered in rubble from the demolition of two adjacent tenement buildings. By the end of the project, Adam would have cleared almost 5,000 cubic feet of debris using only simple tools and his own muscle power. He also set about creating his own topsoil from materials on-site and around the cit. By combining traditional composting with horse manure from central park he was able to create a fertile growing material which was eventually home to many crops, fruit bushes and flowers, including over 100 rose bushes and 45 fruit and nut trees. (Adam made daily seven-mile round trips on his bicycle to bring carriage-horse manure to the Garden, carrying about 60 pounds on each trip from central park.)
By 1986, his world famous eARThWORK had grown to 15,000 square feet and over 5 city lots. The circular design of the site meant that as nearby tenements continued to fall, the garden could grow exponentially with the addition of each new ring of plant beds. Adam, a long-term social activist and urban gardener AND revolutionary, “zenvisioned” the Garden eventually expanding and pushing out all the skyscrapers of the city.
In the early 80’s the Garden was slated for demolition to make way for a federally funded housing project. At the time support poured in from various sources, including many prominent New Yorkers who wrote letters and delivered statements of support for Adam and the Garden. In 1984 the Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo hosted an exhibition called “Adam’s House in Paradise” which showcased various alternative designs that would have spared the Garden or incorporated it into the new structure. Unfortunately the city paid no heed to the protests and The Garden of Eden was razed on January 8, 1986. It took 2 days for a bulldozer to break through the outside wall of the garden and another hour and fifteen minutes for a highway leveling machine to raise the agricultural masterpiece sheltered inside. At the time the city had never recognized the site as anything other than a vacant lot (a problem still faced by many NYC community gardens). The new housing project did not include an apartment for Adam or space for a new garden.
The Garden of Eden was destroyed 25 years ago and the FusionArts Museum aims to ensure that Adam Purple and his unique artform are not forgotten, and are instead revived in theis time of pertinent urban discussion about the future forms our city takes. Documentation of the expansion of the Garden from 1978 to 1985 (by Harvey Wang), as well as a few rare prints of Adam’s own 1975-76 negatives will be on display in February at.
FusionArts Museum (Gallery B),
57 Stanton Street, New York
February 2-20, 2011
Opening Reception: February 3 from 6-9 pm
For more information:, click here.
To hear an interview with Adam conducted for the StoryCorps Oral History Project, click here.
To view a gallery of photographs of the Garden, click here.
