In the Spring, the Wakefield oasis greens the Bronx while bringing the community closer together. Here is a video of teenagers having a garden party: doing community service to earn money for school trips.
On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons you can buy apples or callaloo from a retired, suspender-clad man sitting beneath his small farmer’s market tent on Baychester Avenue. If you want a better selection, come early. If you want to take home a crate full of corn and as many cabbages as you can carry for fifty cents, come when he’s closing.
Bissel Gardens is Russ and Teresa Le Count’s way to keep the concrete at bay in their corner of the Bronx. Nine years ago the couple, active members of the block association, started cleaning the unpaved street and planting trees.
When he smiles, between the twinkling of his eyes behind round eyeglasses and his generous white mustache, Le Count is just a beard shy of being Santa Claus. He is known among neighbors for handing out presents in the form of plants and the goodies that grow on them. Willie Frasier, whose house overlooks Bissel Avenue, stopped to pick green beans off the vine growing up the garden fence on his way home. He said he planted them himself, from seeds Le Count gave him. “He is very kind to everyone. He gives people bags of seeds to plant in their yard if they want: cucumber, cantaloupe, string beans,” Frasier said.
Bronx Historian Lloyd Ultan said that many years before the Le Counts adopted the lot, the land was once a farm. Thirteen years ago, people actually took advantage of the vacant lot on the northern Bronx border very differently. Drugs and prostitution, punishable with jail-time just north in West Chester, are misdemeanors within New York City limits, so the dirt path was a last-call refuge for those crimes.
Sanitation cleared the lot, hauling away four 18-wheeler trucks of stolen Coke machines and car parts debris. In its place: woodchips, wild raspberries, and neighborhood children skipping down the trail to school and back home.
The fruits and vegetables grown in the garden are donated to soup kitchens. The trees and flowers are donated to public gardens, especially, he said, for butterfly gardens.
One area holds one thousand seedlings waiting in pots to get a little older, they are like orphans to the Le Counts: “We hold them, try to find a home for them” Mr. Le Count said.
Twenty feet above the garden, hopper cars rest on the tracks, full of garbage from every platform on the line from Brooklyn to the Bronx. “When the wind blows, just where do you think the trash goes?” Le Count said, pointing to a plastic bag nested in one tree. “The MTA is a comedy of errors,” he said, shaking his head and trudging further down the trail.
The Tulip Poplar is “the messiest trees you ever want to see,” vigorously shedding branches as it grows a trunk 40 feet around. It will reach 100 feet tall if given the chance, and live to watch the 2 Trains below run relentlessly back and forth for 150 years— if people are still taking trains.
In the spring, volunteers replaced countless bottles and litter between the fence and sidewalk with 126 small trees and flower bushes. The MTA flattened nearly every one of them, following their weed-plowing routine. Le Count plans to plant more this coming spring.
“You have to play games with these agencies. If I plant trees out here every year, ultimately who’s gonna win? If I plant 100 out here and one survives, I win.”
A few blocks away, in a brownstone house worn on the outside but grand within, Mrs. Le Count spends her day commandeering nonprofit organizations and politician support for her community endeavors, working from her wheelchair centered in the living room, surrounded on all sides by piles of paperwork, a restlessly ringing phone, and pet parakeets bantering in the kitchen.
Photographs of her maid’s children crowd the bureau tops and Le Count, who has no biological children, calls them her grandchildren. Multiple Sclerosis did not prevent her giving birth to her brainchild, though. Bissel Gardens, she said, was her idea.
If able to stand, Mrs. Le Count would be inches shy of five feet tall. The business woman who has made it for herself, getting her BA in economics and her MBA in finance from Rutgers, has one far-reaching goal: to make Bissel Gardens a land trust so it goes on serving the people even after she is alive to be sure they are served.
A dozen years ago, Mrs. Le Count asked her husband to walk her down all these blocks. He pushed her wheelchair down the blocks which all dead-end into the dumping lot. “I was sick and tired of everyone dumping on it— drunks, dead bodies,” she said. Her dog Sparky, posted faithfully at her side, whined as though in agreement.
“Like Sparky, it too was abandoned,” she compared the Bissell Garden to her adopted dog. “All people did was complain. Bissel Gardens is a triumph of doing.”
She has seen the demographics change in the neighborhood over the years she has lived there. Once a predominately Italian area, it is now scented with the smells of West Indian food frying along White Plains Road, textured by the colorful Jamaican shawls. “They all want to come here. This nation was built on people that weren’t wanted.” The Bronx adopts so many.
