Membership in the Rooftop Gardeners is thirty right now, with the committee considering 101 new applications. These are only a small portion of the 2,500 to 3,000 New Yorkers who use the short-sized rake and hoe on skyline acreage. Many are rich, many are humble.
The busiest and most knowledgeable top-floor husbandman is Hal Lee, a freelance writer on horticulture. He has more than 2,000 plantings on the eleventh floor at 1394 Lexington Avenue, near Ninety-second Street. His crop includes figs, bananas, strawberries, peaches, cherries. He maintains a rich compost heap of leaf mold and kitchen leavings.
The Rooftop Gardeners eat under whispering leaves with flower scent drifting across their candle-lit tables. Some sleep in their gardens, under the stars. Some have forsaken the country entirely; just live on their green roofs. One gentleman, a United Nations delegate, has worked a broad putting-green into his garden scheme.
And there's an advantage in having neighbors under you when you're gardening. Last spring Mr. Lee got a telephone call from a tenant three flights down. The man said: "Mr. Lee, get your spray gun handy. Tent caterpillars just passed my window, headed up." It took another hour or so, but Mr. Lee met the invasion at the parapet. The tent caterpillars never established a roof beachhead.
—Meyer Berger, 1958
Photo:Â Bob Hansen for Look magazine via MCNY (1947)
