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 her bed of herbs and tomatoes while Ángel García struggled with the giant sunflower that helps it continue to fall with each storm. Milagros Rivera Negron holding a freshly cut peach that had been given to her, close and face to her center and a small woman dressed in a princess dress, crowned with a tiara, enjoying a gooey chocolate chip cookie: an intelligent life and it’s all about improving.
On August 3, Councilmember Rafael Salamanca, Jr. , with his spouse, Jessenia Aponte, Bronx County Commissioner for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and their son Aidan, joined Rainbow Garden members to cut the ribbon on their newly paved road.
“A girl in a wheelchair wanted to get on the lawn, 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 City Councilman presented Rainbow Garden with a check for $415,000 to stock the network’s turf with an irrigation formula and any equipment or infrastructure. The budget for this check was used to load the cement road, but the irrigation formula is not available. still complete.
Established in 1978, NYC Parks GreenThumb is the largest urban gardening program in the country and the entity responsible for offering the irrigation formula to Rainbow Garden so members don’t have to use the chimney hydrant along Melrose Avenue to water your plants.
However, the Rainbow Garden had bigger concerns. Adjacent to the vegetables and trees and flowers sits a Superfund site – a polluted area that requires long-term cleanup of hazardous materials. The hazmat stems from a now shuttered dry cleaner that sat at 753 Melrose Ave. where the vacant lot now sits, overgrown with weeds. And while the toxic area was recognized by the Department of Environmental Conservation in a fact sheet dated 2022, it cannot be found on the “ superfund national priorities list” of the Environmental Protection Agency.
According to DEC’s Citizen Engagement for Recovery Manual, some of the needs similar to cleaning up a Superfund site are that the Division of Environmental Remediation (DER) will need to “improve public access and understanding of the issues. ” the site repair procedure, and provide citizens with early and ongoing opportunities to participate in the DER site repair procedure and to be promptly informed of such opportunities.
Garcia and other members of the lawn told the Bronx Times that they had noticed recent punctures in the lawn and that when they approached the workers, they were handed a business card with DEC information.
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. After 10 years in the hotel industry, ET is passionate about food and drink: she frequents bars, restaurants, brasseries, and pool tables. ET, a Bronx native, earned his master’s degree in journalism with an emphasis in arts and culture from CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in December 2022.