In Memoriam: Tom LaFarge

Tim Nottage's Tribute

On my first day as a resident of New York, on a walk in Brooklyn Botanic Garden with our  mutual friend Eliza, I met Tom and his partner Wendy. Tom learned that I had just moved to the  neighborhood and invited me to a potluck at a community garden on Maple Street, just a few  blocks from my sublet. What timely good fortune I had to join the garden a week after arriving from California, a fresh faced and optimistic graduate student eager to learn about cities and  what it takes to make a thriving, sustainable community. Both my initial idealism and the intellectualism of critical academic theory I was learning at The New School were tempered by  the more nuanced and embodied experiences and interpersonal dynamics of the community  garden. In contrast to the performative wokeness and lambasting of neoliberal policies parroted  by some classmates and professors, through Tom and other garden members I witnessed a less  dramatic and more mundane form of activism: writing emails, keeping notes, organizing regular  meetings (with very long agendas), not to mention regularly shoveling food scraps and keeping  watch over the space as Tom wrote or read in the shade of the willow. In my understanding, Tom  invested hours in external and internal communications to keep gardeners and community  members connected, organizing to fight off the deed thieves trying to build luxury housing and serving as a leading voice at general meetings and in many of the advocacy efforts to secure the  land as a collectively managed public green space. I remember him explaining what a precious  thing our garden was, simply by refusing the more common arrangement of individual garden  plots. When the drama of who maintained which beds and how unearthed the tensions of a  gentrifying neighborhood, I saw how difficult a thing it was to really put into practice. Like a  garden, a community requires regular tending. Yet Tom was, among other garden elders,  adamant about collective management; I suspect he knew something that is not given credence in  the hyperalert era of cancel culture, that conflict can be constructive and generative when  partnered with patience and rooted in an understanding of place. Or perhaps he simply saw what  so many of us bemoaned: a world of ever-increasing privatization of the public realm. 

Tom got me started on compost and land use, which is a good chunk of what I wrote my master's  thesis on, and as a young artist and writer he and Wendy got me odd jobs when they could.  When he started treatment, I drove him on errands or went with him for walks in the park to keep  him exercising. He spoke about New York history, landscape, ecology, art, gentrification, and  avant-garde writers I had never heard of. In the hustle of trying to “make it” in this city, these  hours here and there encouraged me to slow down and listen; to birdsong, to what was blooming,  to the weather, to the rhythms of a changing city through an elder's eyes. He had a teacher's  patience, an intellectual's mind, and a community organizer's uncompromising principles. It was  a cruel irony to witness a brain so brilliant ultimately betray his body, a cancer that befuddled his  thoughts and speech. Many others knew him better than I, but I'm still in a bit of shock. A great  paradox of our time on Earth is that we cannot ever truly understand our imprint on the world; I  know that Tom has left his on me, and that I am the better for it. I know that the garden which we  love so dearly would not be Parks land, would not connect old and new residents to the  neighborhood, would not be the precious example of a collectively managed commons that is it,  without him. 

I am so grateful for you, Tom. Thank you for the seeds; I promise that I will tend them well.

Zhenia Nagorny's Tribute

I remember riding my bike on that chilly April afternoon in 2016 and I noticed an older man shoveling food scraps into compost bins. I stopped by the gate and asked if he needed help. We struck up an engaging conversation about urban gardens, compost and the history of this garden I had just stumbled on that day. He finally introduced himself as Tom LaFarge. 

I agreed to meet Tom in the garden every Wednesday for a couple of hours. We met for months during which time he shared bits of his life with me and I did with him. We had a nice time just being in the garden together and welcoming any visitors that stopped by. He also told me about the battle that was ensuing between the gardeners of Maple Street Community Garden and the deed thieves that were planning to bulldoze the garden and build high rise apartments in its place. Naturally, I was interested to help in whatever way I could. 

A few months later, Julie, who was then the Secretary of the garden, asked me if I would step in to lead the compost committee for Tom since he had to step down for health reasons. Even though his health was failing, Tom continued to lead general meetings and educating everyone he could on what was happening. I remember him handing out drafts of letters asking us to send them to community leaders and local politicians whose attention we had to capture or the garden would fall into the wrong hands. He was so committed and worked so hard to make sure that community members and gardeners showed to the community and court hearings so that we, collectively, could make the case for why this garden was so important to us. So many people rallied around to keep this garden protected and one of those people was Tom LaFarge.

Thank you, Tom, for all the ways you helped to keep this garden in the community. Your kindness and dedication will not be forgotten.

Nancy Hoch’s Tribute

I was present on that sweltering summer day in 2012 when a group of neighbors decided to clean up the garbage-strewn lot at 237 Maple Street. Tom LaFarge, who lived over across Flatbush Avenue on Beekman Place, may have also been there pulling up giant mugwort plants and hauling out debris, but if he was, I didn’t notice him. In retrospect, that seems emblematic: though he became a prominent leader of the Maple Street Community Garden, he was never showy about it. Instead, he worked quietly and often behind the scenes, organizing the community with one hand and spending long, solitary hours phone-calling and letter-writing with the other, all in an effort to turn an abandoned and then developer-contested lot into our beloved Garden.  

The first time I interacted one-on-one with Tom was on a cold winter day. I was doing my regular Thursday compost shift, sorting and transferring food scraps from the collection containers into the compost bins. The ground was frozen that day, but the compost pile gave off steam wherever I dug into it. Tom had come into the Garden to do another task, but when he saw me wrestling with the food scraps, some of which were frozen to the sides of the containers, some balled up in an icy wad with plastic bags and other undesirables, he came over without being asked and began to help. Right away I felt comfortable and at home working with him; he didn’t take over, just found a way to fit in with my effort and energy.  

I love the way the Garden gives me a chance to get away from my desk and do something physical. Tom, a writer and retired high school English teacher, clearly felt the same way. If you were to stop by the Garden at any point in the many years when he was active, you would likely see him fixing or hauling or digging at something. One picture we have is of Tom in the brown fedora he always wore working alongside founding member Earl Bonus and another gardener, the three of them rolling a huge tree trunk out of the garden. The enjoyment is palpable.   

At some point Tom and Julia Stanat, another early member of the Garden who has since moved away, called a meeting at the Crown Heights Public Library.  Over the next two hours, Tom and Julia walked the rest of us through a series of questions about how we wanted to organize ourselves. It was hard, sometimes yawn-inducing work, but by the end of the meeting, the Garden had its first set of bylaws. Around the same time, largely at Tom’s impetus, we began to hold regular bi-monthly meetings at which Tom generally served as both chair and notetaker. Every meeting would start with a vote to approve or amend the previous meeting’s minutes. At first such formalities seemed out of place for a scrappy group of guerilla gardeners, but Tom persevered, remarking quietly at one meeting that having accurate notes “is more important than I can say.”  In retrospect, it’s clear that Tom and Julia were taking the steps needed for us to develop into a sustainable community organization, one that would be able to hold together as we grew and that would also be able, as the struggle to turn the land into a neighborhood greenspace intensified, to present itself as a force to be reckoned with.

From the perspective of the present, it is hard to believe that the property at 237 Maple Street could ever have been slated to be anything other than a GreenThumb garden and city park, but for the six years before January, 2019, when the city finally purchased the property, it was anything but a sure thing. For years, every meeting involved a report from Tom on how things were going on the legal front. “At some point and we don’t know when,” he would explain to newcomers, always putting hope in the forefront, “the city will take the property by eminent domain.”  

Before Tom’s optimistic prediction would prove true, there was a lot of drama and a lot of work to be done. During one six-week period at the height of the growing season we were locked out of the Garden. This was when we were fighting the Makhani Brothers who—fraudulently, as far as we could tell—had claimed ownership of the property and had already submitted plans to build a five-story luxury apartment building on the lot. It was around then that the court dates began. Tom, in close touch with our pro bono lawyer and neighbor Paula Segal, would put out the call and whoever could would show up at the courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn.  In the hallway someone—often Tom—would pass round the bag of Maple Street Community Garden tee-shirts and we’d pick one out and pull it on over our clothes before filing into the courtroom where we would sit in a block facing the judge.

Tom made endless phone calls and arranged lots of meetings with local officials including our Councilmember Mathieu Eugene. He also organized an extensive letter-writing campaign to members of the New York State legislature after our local state representatives—Jesse Hamilton and Diana Richardson—introduced legislation to turn 237 Maple Street into a state park. For that campaign, Tom set himself up one afternoon at the counter of Pels Pies, a little restaurant on Rogers Avenue, with a piece of savory pie and a stack of postcards and invited community members to come by.  Long-time progressive activist and Maple Street resident Dorothy Burnham (100 years old at the time—she’s now 105) and her daughter Claudia came in to sit at a table and help fill out cards. Tom understood immediately how important a duo these two were, and went out of his way to extend himself to them. That was characteristic: Tom was always interacting with people, letting them know about the Garden but also listening with real interest to their stories. He also made it a practice to keep in close contact with the neighbors who lived nearest to the Garden. People knew if they had a problem with anything we were doing or if they saw anything untoward going on in the Garden when we were not around, they could call on Tom to help resolve the issue.   

For a while after Tom was diagnosed with brain cancer, he was able to continue with his work in the Garden, but in August of 2018, he finally pulled back. That fall and winter Zhenia Nagorny organized a group of garden members to bring a weekly dinner over to Tom and his wife Wendy. Once when it was my turn to drop off a meal, I learned that Tom’s most recent bout of radiation treatments had caused him to lose the ability to read. Because he was a wordsmith, this seemed incredibly cruel. Tom, however, was already hard at work on solving the problem. With some excitement, he showed me a book on archaeology that he was using to teach himself to read again.  He was slowly copying each page into a composition notebook, lingering over words like ‘fire’ and ‘wood.’  “Basic words,” he told me, “good words to start with.”  As he said this, I saw a little bit of the joy I had seen when he was doing something physical in the garden or talking with a neighbor. And, too, it reminded me of the way Tom had approached most of our Garden’s struggles, how he had generally chosen the direction of hope, of possibility, how he had kept determinedly putting one foot in front of the other, despite the odds.

After Tom pulled back, Zhenia and I stepped up to help guide the Garden.  It took two of us and then some to even begin to fill Tom’s shoes. The city bought the property in January of 2019, just a few months after Zhenia and I began to serve as Co-Secretaries in Tom’s place, and after declaring that our bylaws, the ones Tom and Julia had helped us hammer out all those years before, were “absolutely excellent,” the city welcomed us into the GreenThumb family. Our membership has grown, perhaps because nowadays the Garden, its squatting days over, has the look of an established and going concern. New leaders have arisen and our leadership structure has expanded to include more people and more diversity, reflecting both the change in our legal status and also in the world around us.

In South Africa they have the expression "ubuntu" which is often translated to "I am because you are."  I have that feeling when I think about Tom.  I feel grateful to him for his vision and for all the hard work he did to help us on our way.  I feel glad to have known him, glad for his friendship and all he taught and shared, and glad, too, for the Garden which he helped so much to create.

Bob Treuber's Tribute

Today, the cohort who are making the garden a living and vibrant part of our neighborhood and doing it the Brooklyn way are clearly the right people for the needs of this time.  Many have seen the photos of the early years when a different crew pulled down a drooping chain link fence and cleaned out an abandoned lot/garbage dump.

Some of the following times were not as photogenic and so are not as easily captured and recalled. There were many people who drove the process that resulted in the Maple Street Community Garden becoming "legit". Tom Lafarge was at the heart of that advance guard. 

Tom was the letter writer, personally penning letters to every residence on Maple Street inviting the neighbors to become involved and easing the natural wariness seeing strange faces swarm onto the block with an unknown agenda.

In those formative times, Tom was the virtual recording secretary, taking the minutes, communicating with Green Thumb, the Parks Department, the Community Board, the City Council, our State Legislators and the Borough President.  When a court appearance was scheduled, Tom was sure to be present wearing one of the shared Maple Street Garden t-shirts.  That's right, we kept them in a bag in the shed because there weren't enough to go around.

 Tom was patient, committed and tireless. His life was so much more than the Maple Street Garden and people who will never know his name will enjoy some of the good he did here. For a few decades, an infinite energy cycled through the Earth and we called him Tom Lafarge. One can only imagine what he will do next.

A Poem

Turning the compost

Mix in wise words, warm spirit

Thank you Tom, for this.

~David Cohen

Paula Segal’s Tribute

Tom went to every court appearance fighting for the garden with me. He was there to take it all in, and to keep me tethered in the sea of bullies in the tightly packed hallways of the Kings County Supreme Court and in the eerie long silences of the Appellate Division. In those vast seas, Tom was my beacon of kindness and rightness. He was dedicated to the garden, to vision, to justice for the Kirton family, and to being fully present, heart and notebook out, for every moment of our journey. I last saw him in the garden, sitting under the willow tree, smiling his small calm smile. Tom smiling under that tree set the baseline for calm, sweet, diligent contentment. He set the tone, and we still sing the song.