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Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Albert's Garden and the Trust for Public Land


Studding the city are small gardens like little green jewels. Many are community gardens established on vacant properties, looked after by community groups, and never entirely safe from development.

Albert's Garden looks just like such a space, but isn't. The property on 2nd St. by the New York Marble Cemetery in Manhattan's East Village was secured back in 1999 by the Trust for Public Land, an organization devoted to the noble cause of "conserving land for people." If there's a higher calling than that, I'm hard pressed to think of it.

It was in the course of a failed attempt to visit the Marble Cemetery that we discovered Albert's Garden. A listing in Time Out New York said there'd be a rare opportunity to visit the cemetery that day, but alas, the boneyard proved to be locked up tight and silent. But then Albert's Garden appeared. Owned by the Manhattan Land Trust, which has over a dozen such properties around the island (including Parque de Tranquilidad), Albert's is a lush, nicely cared for garden. That's all there is to it, and all there has to be.

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