Photo: Todd Quackenbush / Unsplash
From the sidewalk the building on Alder Street looks like every other walk-up on the block: brick, fire escapes, a door that sticks. From the roof it looks like a farm. Tomatoes in kiddie pools. Beans climbing an old TV antenna. A fig tree, against all advice, in a bathtub dragged up six flights by people who no longer remember why they agreed to it.
There are more of these gardens than anyone has counted. You find them by looking up at dusk, when the people who tend them come home from work and the rooftops fill with silhouettes carrying watering cans.
Six flights of soil
Everything up here arrived by stairs. Soil, by the bag. Water, for the first two summers, by the bucket, until a tenant who used to be a plumber ran a line up the side of the building in a single heroic Saturday. The landlord has been told about the garden in the general way that landlords are told about things.
What grows best is whatever the wind allows. The roof is ten degrees warmer than the street in July and ten degrees colder in October, and it is always windy. The gardeners have learned to plant low and plant close, and to tie down anything that might take off.
“It’s the only place in the city where I know everybody’s name.”
The harvest
In September there is a dinner. Tables are carried up, lights are strung between the chimneys, and everything that grew is cooked by whoever lives closest to the stairs. Neighbours who passed each other in the hall for years without speaking end up arguing about the right way to roast peppers.
Then the tables go back down and the roof goes quiet for the winter, except for the fig in the bathtub, wrapped in burlap and old blankets, waiting to find out whether this is the year it finally doesn’t make it. It has survived four winters so far. Nobody up here is betting against it.