Shanti Nagel - New York Botanical Garden

emma
Shanti Nagel ’98 cares for 40
gardens, two small parks, and
85 trees in her New York City
neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen.

photo: Bob Handelman
BY LIZZIE STARK
Shanti Nagel ’98
cultivates community,
one garden at a time
h~me
at
in
hell’s kitchen
“It’s so beautiful out here,” a middle-aged woman
yells from a rooftop garden two stories above Shanti
Nagel ’98. “It’s getting there,” answers Nagel, 31, who
created and maintains the lush sanctuary.
Fall 2011
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Down where we’re sitting, in a courtyard
garden that Nagel also designed, she explains
that this is the best part of her job. “e
payback is awesome,” she says. is aordable
housing building was renovated just two years ago, and
a lot of older women live here,” she tells me. “ey come out
and talk to me about plants all the time. And they love watching
our progress.”
Nagel lives and works in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of
New York City, where she is on a mission to improve the neighborhood
one garden at a time. She is ever-present on the streets,
the sidewalks, and even up on the roofs as she chisels more
precious green space into a vast concrete desert, transforming
the environment outside of buildings that house low-income
residents, some of whom are formerly homeless. Nagel also lives
in one of the buildings where she works, which makes her job
much more than a job; it’s also her home.
e woman on the roof points at a squirrel down in the
courtyard, amazed to nd a real animal in a garden boxed in by
buildings. “is little guy. He’s trouble,” says Nagel. “He’s eating
everything. He’s digging everything up.” She tosses an empty
paper cup at him and he doesn’t inch. “And he’s not afraid of
anything!” she laughs. e squirrel scampers up an ornamental
bush and begins eating the berries. Even the squirrels love what
Nagel has done to this property!
Nagel works for the Clinton Housing Development
Company (CHDC), a New York City housing association that
manages about 60 buildings for the city, transforming them
from dilapidated derelicts into aordable housing with green
space. Many of the CHDC’s buildings are located in Hell’s
Kitchen, also called Clinton, a large, diverse neighborhood on
the west side of Manhattan, stretching from 34th Street to 59th
Street and from 8th Avenue over to the Hudson River. e
neighborhood contains commercial and residential space and
houses a diverse range of people—from actors and other theater
people who commute to the nearby theater district, to yuppies,
to populations from the “old days” as immortalized in the
musical West Side Story, which was set in this neighborhood.
e CDHC’s buildings contain about 750 apartments and
house more than 1,000 people of varying income levels, including
some formerly homeless people and families. In addition,
many sta members, including Nagel, live in these buildings.
For that reason, Nagel approached this job—managing
green space in the buildings—with caution. She worked at the
CHDC for a couple months before moving into an apartment
in one of the buildings because she wanted to be certain she
liked the job and the environment. “My home is very precious
to me,” she said, “and to put my home on the line for a job—
I had to be very sure I wanted to be here.” at was three
years ago.
emma
Almost all of the CHDC’s
buildings have green space that
Nagel handles. Sometimes, it’s
just a touch—a few window
boxes out front, or a “tree
pit”—a street tree surrounded
by plants and rimmed with
wrought-iron edging. Other
times, it’s a rooftop garden,
a backyard, or a courtyard
garden. In total, Nagel cares
for some 40 gardens, plus two
small parks, and 85 street trees
with their surrounding tree
pits. It’s a big job, but one
that is integral to the way the
CHDC approaches its buildings.
According to Nagel’s
boss, Joe Restuccia, the executive
director of the nonprot,
green space is “not a luxury,”
even when it comes to aordable
housing. “We don’t build
barns; we build homes, a place
to live,” he said.
As it turns out, green space
has a real impact on citydwellers.
Studies have shown
that areas with green space
have less property and violent
crime and more healthy social
interactions among inhabitants,
perhaps because greenery
alleviates stress and anxiety,
which are precursors to crime,
and because people gather in
green space, which puts more
eyes on the street. Green space
isn’t a nicety, it’s something
that humans need to feel at
home and safe.
Certainly living in a
CDHC building changes the
nature of Nagel’s job. For one
thing, she says, “You have a
dierent concern for the tenants
because they’re not just
clients; they’re your neighbors
and they’re people you live
next to all the time and see on
the street.” Employee concerns
and tenant concerns can be
one and the same.
“I think one of the interesting
things about living in
one of these buildings in the
middle of Manhattan is that
you live with tenants who are
real people,” she says. “ey’re
people with kids, they’re
families, they’re older people,
they’re normal working people.
e building next to us is a
super-fancy glass castle, and
the people coming out of there
look very dierent. I’d much
rather live with the people in
my building.”
Having sta live in the
department’s buildings also
means more eyeballs on everything,
including the gardens.
Nagel pointed out that the
super of the building we’re in
drinks his coee in the garden,
and “he calls me up and tells
me when anything is wrong or
when anything is right.” e
supers help take care of green
space, primarily by watering
it. “I would be nothing without
them,” Nagel says. But
the supers benet from the
arrangement as well, because
residents and people on the
street praise the plants. “ey
get all that feedback, especially
the ones that live on the premises—they
get the plant bug,”
Nagel explained.
It’s no mystery why the
supers like Nagel either. Of
course, she’s young and attractive,
which doesn’t hurt, but
more than this, her enthusiasm
for her work is evident, and
not just its botanical component—she
loves working with
people. Her re for community
organizing is part of why
Restuccia hired her, he said.
As Nagel walks me through
the neighborhood, past tree
pits, parks, and window boxes,

she talks about the plants, the
people, and the history of this
neighborhood.
We tromp up ve ights of
stairs—this is how she stays in
shape, she says—to a rooftop
garden lined with pots exploding
with greenery. is is her
boss’s building, she explains,
and it’s not easy to keep rooftop
gardens so lush. Watering
is a challenge in the city, where
hoses often live in basements.
Nagel’s boss learned this rsthand.
For years, he kept up
this garden with an elderly
neighbor woman who spent
hours each day lugging watering
cans to the roof. When she
passed away, many of his plants
oundered. Now Nagel has
introduced him to the marvels
of irrigation—there are small
metal rings in each of the pots,
which are hooked up to a central
water supply— and all this
resulting greenery has made
him a convert.
Restuccia and Nagel share
a gardening aesthetic, favoring
gardens that look wild
and natural instead of rigidly
organized. Restuccia came up
with the tree pit concept, while
Nagel designed and executed
it. Forget dull rows of begonias
or impatiens. Nagel’s tree pits
look wild and biodiverse, full
of reedy owers, lush variegated
leaves, and other plants. e
CHDC’s work is spreading like
a beautifully invasive vine, and
envious neighboring buildings
have approached Restuccia
and Nagel for advice on how
to edge their tree pits in iron
and ll them with plantings.
It’s not easy to nd the
right plants to grow in the
city. “When you get a gardening
book they don’t tell you
what plant can handle hours
of heavy bus exhaust,” says
Nagel, or hundreds of dogs
peeing on it each day. “ese
are the kind of environmental
issues that we deal with here
in the city,” she added. “And
we’re really homing in on
the plants that can handle it.
Some of them are a surprise.”
Like Japanese anemone,
which tolerates hours of
bumper-to-bumper exhaust
each day, since she’s planted
it on a block that leads to the
Lincoln Tunnel.
Oftentimes, Nagel tries
to sneak an edible—like a
potato or Swiss chard—into
plantings, just to generate
conversation. While working
on an edible food project for
New York University a couple
of years ago, she noticed that
while owers provoke aesthetic
reactions—“Oh, pretty
owers!”—vegetables in the
city induce a whole conversation.
People, particularly older
ones, dredge up memories of
the farms from their youth,
she says, and everyone asks
questions like, “Who’s going
to eat vegetables?” or “What
happens if someone steals
the vegetables?”
“ My home is very precious to me,
and to put my home on the line
for a job—I had to be very
sure I wanted to be here.”
Vegetables are Nagel’s
rst love. She grew up outside
Saratoga Springs on her
family’s 10 acres. Her parents,
whom she describes as
“incredibly skilled vegetable
gardeners,” cultivated food
on about half the land. Each
weekend, she and her siblings
had to work in the garden for
a few hours. As she got older,
working in the garden stopped
being a chore, and she stayed
and weeded and pruned with
her parents long after she’d
nished the mandatory weeding.
After graduating from
Emma Willard, she spent
almost a decade farming,
then studied at the New York
Botanical Garden School of
Professional Horticulture for
a few years before joining the
CHDC’s sta.
Now, even though her
schedule is hectic thanks to
the intense logistics of keeping
up so many gardens in New
York City, Nagel still nds
time to grow food. Across
the street from the CHDC’s
oce, at Metro Baptist
Church, she’s organized a
rooftop vegetable garden.
It was hard to carry all the
materials up to the roof of this
ve-story building since there’s
no elevator, but church members
and volunteers helped
haul soil and baby pools to
use as containers. e produce
from this garden—tomatoes,
basil, cucumbers, zucchini,
peppers, beans, peas, and
more—goes to a local food
pantry. Downstairs, inside the
church, there is produce available,
too, though it wasn’t
grown on the roof. Nagel has
organized a local CSA share.
(CSA stands for communitysupported
agriculture and
allows people to buy vegetables
directly from the farmer.)
Eventually, Nagel hopes to
nd grant money so that the
local food pantry can take a
share of the crops. And while
altruism is part of her motive,
so too is her love of farmgrown
vegetables. She wanted
a CSA that was convenient to
her, and this one’s just across
from her oce.
For the time being, Nagel
says, New York City is her
home. She’s got a local CSA,
a bevy of close girlfriends who
date from her time at Emma
Willard, and plenty of room
to garden and, through gardening,
to create community
in her neighborhood. Living
where she works has transformed
the experience of New
York for her. Unlike many
New Yorkers, she knows her
neighbors and her neighbors
know her. “I can walk around
Hell’s Kitchen,” she says, “it
can be 42nd Street and 8th
Avenue (near Times Square),
super-urban, total New York;
I can walk around those
streets and people stop me
and recognize me and talk to
me about plants.”
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