The sun shone over the Rainbow Garden of Life and Health in Melrose on Saturday, Aug. 3, but that didn’t stop its members from continuing their activities as usual.
Argie Ortiz tended to his bed of herbs and tomatoes while Angel Garcia struggled with the giant sunflower that helps keep falling with each storm. Milagros Rivera Negron holding a freshly cut pe each that had been given to her, close and face from its center and a small woman dressed in a princess dress, crowned with a tiara, enjoying a sticky chocolate chip cookie: a smart life and it’s all about getting better.
On August 3, Council Member Rafael Salamanca, Jr. , with his wife, Jessenia Aponte, Bronx County Commissioner for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and their son Aidan, joined members of Rainbow Garden to cut the ribbon on your newly paved driveway.
“A girl in a wheelchair tried to enter the grass, and I told them, ‘come in,'” Rainbow Garden founder Maximino Rivera told attendees. “But as soon as the woman entered the lawn, her wheels locked. At that moment I said that one of my projects was to get [an apartment] because we don’t exclude anyone.
In July 2022, the councilor presented Rainbow Garden with a check for $415,000, intended to equip the network’s lawn with an irrigation formula and any equipment or infrastructure. The funds from this check were used to load the cement road, however, the irrigation formula is not yet complete.
Established in 1978, NYC Parks GreenThumb is the largest urban gardening program in the country and the entity responsible for offering the watering formula to Rainbow Garden, so members have to use the chimney hydrant along Melrose Avenue to water their plants.
However, Rainbow Garden had bigger concerns. Next to the vegetables, trees and flowers is a Superfund site, a contaminated domain that requires long-term cleaning of dangerous tissues. The hazardous fabrics came from a now-shuttered dry cleaner at 753 Melrose Ave. , where the vacant, weedy lot now stands. And the poisonous zone was identified through the Department of Environmental Conservation in a fact sheet dated 2022, not on the Conservation Agency’s “Superfund National Priorities List. “the environment.
According to the DEC’s Citizen Engagement for Recovery Purposes Manual, some of the needs similar to cleaning up a Superfund site are that the Division of Environmental Remediation (DER) will have to “improve public access and understanding of issues. “the remediation procedure for that site, and to provide citizens with early and ongoing opportunities to participate in the DER site repair procedure and to be informed in a timely manner of such opportunities.
Garcia and other turf members told the Bronx Times that they had noticed recent perforations in the turf and that when they approached the workers, they were handed a business card with DEC data.
Contact ET Rodríguez at etrodriguez317@gmail. com. For more coverage, hit us up on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram@bronxtimes.
E. T. Rodriguez is a contributing editor covering food, arts and culture for the Bronx Times. Having spent 10 years in the hospitality industry, ET is passionate about food and drink: she will visit bars, restaurants, breweries, and pool tables. Originally from the Bronx, ET earned her Master’s Degree in Journalism with a minor in Arts and Culture from CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in December 2022.