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A tree may grow in Brooklyn, but 20 different varieties of heirloom tomatoes, not to mention salad greens, beets, eggplants and herbs, grow in Cabrini-Green. It all sprouts on an acre of farmland, built on rubble, called City Farm—the only working farm in city limits, and certainly the only one to grow on top of abandoned housing projects.
City Farm, a project of the nonprofit organization the Resource Center, started in 1970 on an abandoned lot at the corner of East 70th Street and Dorchester Avenue in the Grand Crossing neighborhood. There, the farm realized its goal to convert abandoned city land into a rich source of food—tended to by young members of the community. But in 2000, in response to the Resource Center’s plea for a bigger space, the City of Chicago offered up the current plot, on the corner of Clybourn Avenue and Division Street. Like the previous plot, the Cabrini-Green space is leased for free, on a year-by-year basis, with the city promising to give at least six months’ notice should it ever need the space.
And if the city ever does ask them to leave, that will be no problem. “The whole idea is that we’re mobile,” says Tim Wilson, City Farm’s project manager, who believes this is the first urban farm of this scale in the country. He’s referring to the relative simplicity of building a farm in the footprint of former housing projects. First, a layer of clay is laid, followed by a two-foot layer of compost. (The clay protects the compost from absorbing any toxins from the rubble.) After laying paths throughout the farm with wood chips, it’s ready to be planted.
To do all that planting, City Farm recruits 10 to 14 teenagers from Cabrini-Green to spend the summer farming and learning about agriculture. The teenagers get a stipend for their work, making the farm “one of the largest employers in the community,” according to Wilson. In addition to learning to plant, sow and weed, the teens also rub shoulders with the city’s restaurant elite: More than 24 restaurants, including Frontera Grill and North Pond, purchase produce from the farm. Add to that number the handful of people who belong to the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture program and all the customers who walk in and buy vegetables from City Farm’s market stand in the summer, and you have one of Illinois’s most thriving farms. So thriving, in fact, that the Resource Center is working on transforming another lot nearby—just one more step in making Cabrini-Green actually, well, green.
Cultivate more knowledge about City Farm at resourcecenterchicago.org/70thfarm.html.
