First published in The Record, Aug. 18, 2022

These buffalo gardens - and their black gardeners - defy white supremacy

 “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

— Jack Gilbert, “Refusing Heaven”

 BUFFALO — Oh, there is ugliness on Box Avenue. This cannot be denied. On Box Avenue, boys fire machine guns at other boys. Men race four-wheelers in the too-tall grass. An empty house on Box Avenue, useless to the world, becomes to drug dealers a place of endless utility, its porch a stage for all-day parties, its weeds a place to stash heroin and hide stolen cars.

One dealer was found dead in the fire pit behind an abandoned house on Box Avenue. Her remains had been divided into trash bags. The bags were laid separately upon the fire. 

The crime happened down the block from Samantha White, who lives with her husband and daughter in one of the last occupied homes on Box Avenue. The terribleness of it changed her. She walked into her garage. She poured gasoline into the tank of her black riding mower. She hit the starter, and drove the machine bouncing down Box Avenue’s uneven asphalt. She mowed every abandoned lot on her block.

Some lots on Box Avenue — just blocks from the scene of a racist mass shooting in May — belong to landlords who live in California. Most are owned by the city of Buffalo.

White cut them all, roughly but short, short enough to break her mower’s blades on concrete chunks and old sun-hardened lumber, stuck like cement in the fallow soil.

“I’ve broken my mower three times this summer. I’ve spent $600 fixing it,” says White, standing in one of the abandoned lots she maintains. “You don’t understand. This place just gets wild.”

After the mowing, White returned with shovels, some sprigs of hosta, and a dozen volunteers. They asked no one’s permission. They dug into the ground. They spread bags of mulch. They planted pink lilies in clumps by the sidewalk. For water, White obtained a city permit, which allows her to wrench open the fire hydrants.

Ugliness remains. But the grass is low, and the pink lilies grow, and the drug dealers and city leaders of Buffalo may finally understand that people on Box Avenue do not accept its demise.

They will have beauty, damn you, even if it means spending time they do not have, working land they do not own.

"We're guerilla gardeners," White says. "I'm not going to live in blight anymore."

Buffalo is a small city, a quarter of a million people across 52 square miles. Perhaps no other American city has experienced such a violent clash, in so confined a space, between the visionaries of urban loveliness and the forces of decay.

In the early 19th century, the Erie Canal made Buffalo the richest city on the western frontier. The region's white leadership used that wealth to transform Buffalo into one of the most beautiful cities in North America.  

But as Black people migrated to Buffalo and other northern cities after World War II, white institutions systematically stole that beauty back, and replaced it with ugliness. Redlining forced most Black families to live east of Main Street, where white-controlled banks refused to lend, and where government agencies run by whites destroyed a gracious parkway — the jewel of Buffalo’s park system — to build a highway in a pit.

“Humboldt Parkway had an international reputation as one of the most beautiful streets in America,” says Francis Kowsky, a professor emeritus of architectural history at Buffalo State College who has authored several books on Buffalo’s lost parks. “So people lamented the destruction not only of the street, but the subsequent destruction of the neighborhood.”

Now, several generations of Black and Latino people on the East Side are fighting to reclaim the prettiness they were denied. They use what they have, mostly hand trowels, donated seeds, their own free labor sweat, and whatever work can be enticed from nephews and cousins with offerings of pizza and Pepsi.

On Buffalo’s East Side, gardening is an act of defiance.

“We are just like you. We enjoy beautiful things,” says Iris Costner, an East Side homeowner who spent 20 years transforming her weedy yard into an oasis for cilantro, pear trees and Monarch butterflies. “This garden says, ‘We’re not going anywhere. And when you get your act together, we’d sincerely appreciate you maintaining your properties.’”

Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.”

— Ian Hamilton Finlay, 'Detached Sentences on Gardening'

Gandhi stands among the purple geraniums in the predawn light. Mohammed Ali smiles beneath the beech tree. A few feet away, Thurgood Marshall, John McCain and Pope John Paul II rest against wooden stakes pounded into the spongy grass. These people, and a hundred more, are the personal heroes of Walter Myles, a retired railroad conductor turned real estate investor who’s become the most famous gardener on the East Side. He’s the type of man who speaks with such volume and intensity, many strangers believe he’s always angry, even when he is happy, as he is now, at 6:30 on a Saturday morning, on his porch, sitting in his favorite plastic chair, drinking a cup of microwaved instant coffee, watching the sun rise over his creation.

“I spend over $20,000 a year of my money on this garden! Yes!” says Myles, 72. “They got pictures of my garden in one of the hospitals downtown! Yes! I get cyclists come through here twice a year from Cheektowaga! They always stop for pictures in front of my house! This garden is known all over the world!”

In a gesture of boisterous, gleeful defiance, Myles has arranged his photographs of Gandhi, King, and all the rest of his heroes to face the same direction: east, toward the sunken Kensington Expressway, known to everyone on the East Side as the hated 33.

Hated by everyone, perhaps, except Myles, who loves the roar of Harley-Davidsons grumbling down the freeway in front of his house.

“The highway?” Myles says. “It don’t bother me.”

Buffalo has benefited not from one of the most important city planners in American history, but three.

First was Pierre L’Enfant, whose street grid for Washington, D.C., included tree-lined avenues connected by circular parks. This plan was borrowed by Joseph Ellicott, a surveyor on L’Enfant’s project, who mimicked the federal city’s design as he laid out Buffalo’s streets in 1804. Six decades later, Frederick Law Olmsted visited Buffalo and declared it, “the best planned city… in the United States, if not in the world.”

Olmsted had just completed New York City’s Central Park.

Working with his partner, Calvert Vaux, Olmsted extended Ellicott’s street grid with three large parks, sewn together by a network of wide boulevards. The widest and most beautiful was Humboldt Parkway. It traced a line 45 degrees northeast from downtown to Olmsted’s largest park. The parkway was 200 feet wide. It included a landscaped trail for riding horses.

“It defined the city,” says Kowsky, the architectural history professor.

As a boy a century later, in the early 1960s, Myles experienced the parkway’s ruin. A distant family member, whom Myles remembers as a light-skinned Black man, owned a large home along the parkway. The man ran an illegal gambling operation, and Myles worked for him as a courier. Every day, Myles rode his bike around Buffalo, collecting bets in his backpack. In the afternoons he delivered the slips of paper to the big house on Humboldt Parkway.

Getting there required Myles to cross the muddy site where construction workers were turning Olmsted’s masterpiece into a six-lane highway.

Getting out alive required he leave before sundown.

“Because this was a white neighborhood then,” Myles says.

The Kensington Expressway opened in 1965. Most white families in the neighborhood followed it to the suburbs. Their homes were bought or rented mostly by Black families.

The pattern endures. Myles lives five blocks from the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue, where a white supremacist murdered 10 Black people in a terror attack on May 14. The neighborhood is 76% Black and overwhelmingly poor. The average resident earns $20,000 a year. A quarter of the neighborhood lives below the federal poverty line, including 43% of all children. The average home was valued at $100,000 in June 2022, according to Realtor.com.

Two miles away, in the Elmwood Village neighborhood, three of Olmsted’s lesser parkways remain intact. There the median home sells for $353,000, according to Redfin.com. The average person makes $50,000 a year. The neighborhood is 66 percent white.

Buffalo is one of the most segregated cities in the United States, according to research by Henry Taylor, an urban planning professor at the University at Buffalo.

“The East Side of Buffalo is a community where people are stuck in place,” Taylor says. “Only those Blacks who buy houses in white spaces will see their homes appreciate in value.”

Redlining was banned by the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. In Buffalo, the practice appears to survive. Mortgages sold to non-white residents account for 9.74% of all loans written in the Buffalo region between 2016 and 2019, even though minorities comprise 20% of the population, according to a report published in 2021 by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Two local banks, Cornerstone Community Federal and Fairport Savings Bank, together issued just eight mortgages in majority non-white census tracts, the report found, comprising less than 1% of each bank’s mortgage portfolio.

Iris Costner and her husband Donald work full-time jobs, she in healthcare, he for Erie County, which includes Buffalo. She is pursuing a doctorate degree. Their garden is tidy and serene. Their mortgage is paid off. 

Recently the Costners applied for a home improvement loan. The bank said no.

“We’ve been with that bank for years. We’re both professionals,” Costner says. “And our house is paid for!”

The Kensington Expressway did not cause all this destruction. But for many Black residents, the highway remains the city’s most visible reminder that the white establishment hoarded Buffalo’s beauty for white people, and relegated Black people to live in ugliness and squalor.

“Access to greenspace is what democracy is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be free and open to everybody,” says Jillian Hanesworth, Buffalo’s poet laureate. She is 29, Black, and grew up on the East Side. “Nobody in my generation has gotten to experience that anywhere in Buffalo,” she says.

“Gardening is a way of sticking it to the man, to assert your humanity in dehumanizing conditions,” says Kenneth Helphand, professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon and author of a book titled “Defiant Gardens.”

Myles’s yard includes photos of Sydney Pottier and Nelson Mandela, and of his mother, his father and Buffalo police officers killed on duty. It includes a koi pond, a waterfall, a trellis loaded with grape vines, about a hundred American flags, four stuffed lions, and two peacock statues painted gold.

Like its gardener, this garden is loud. It rises above the gray highway and shouts in color. 

“It’s my favorite garden,” Hanesworth says. “To still see beauty that is rooted in our blackness, in the same space where our culture was wiped out to create infrastructure for white people, that is so powerful.”

“They never should have destroyed those old parks. They were beautiful! Breathtaking!” Lois Young, a Buffalo resident, says on a Friday afternoon as she tours Myles’s garden for the first time. “Now this garden is here. And I love it. He made this place beautiful again. He ain’t waiting on nobody.”

Unlike many of his neighbors, Myles accepts the expressway as it is. What he does not accept is a plan by New York State, the city of Buffalo and leading charitable groups — most still funded and controlled by white people — to cap the sunken expressway with a park. In July, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the state will spend up to $1 billion to build the cap, with construction to begin in late 2024.

“The Kensington Expressway project represents a historic opportunity to right a wrong of the past,” Hochul said in a press release.

Some experts doubt the cap’s corrective power.

“A cap would be better than what’s there now,” Kowsky says, “but I would prefer just to put the park back the way it was.”

Many East Siders doubt the project’s intentions. Myles sees it this way: In the 1950s and ’60s, when white people wanted to live in the suburbs, the city built them a highway to the suburbs.

Today, many white people want to live in houses like his: Big, lovely and close to jobs downtown. Myles believes this is the true reason why Buffalo’s white philanthropic organizations want to spend a billion dollars building a park for the Black East Side: in a few years, perhaps the neighborhood will be white again.

“They ain’t building this cap for me! No!” Myles says.

Many East Siders view Myles’s garden as an act of defiance against the highway running past his front yard.

Forget that old business, he says.

To Myles, his garden is a weapon.

If Buffalo’s white leaders help his Black neighbors get mortgages and home equity loans to stay in the neighborhood, Myles says, he will encourage the people who admire him to support the cap.

But if the cap becomes just another Kensington Expressway, another big government project to further enrich white families and impoverish Black ones, Myles says, he will sell his houses and his land. He’ll use all his money, plus his clout as the man behind the loudest garden on the East Side, to fight the cap to a standstill.

“A lot of these people will follow me,” Myles says of his neighbors. “If the city wants this cap to happen, give these people money to fix their houses up. If they don’t, we’ll go to court. We’ll tie this thing up for two, three, five years. Cost those people a whole lot of money.”

“… and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table…”

— Billy Collins, 'Today'

Reggie Garner drops the purple coleus bush into a wheeled bucket and commences to stroll down Jefferson Avenue.

“I’m a little different,” Garner says, strutting his plant past vendors selling lemonade and earrings at the African market, an event held every Saturday in summer on a stretch of pavement three blocks from the Tops supermarket. “I walk my plants! Everybody know!”

“I know!” says Jeffrey Moore, who comes to the flea market every Saturday to sell soap. “That’s why your plants grow so good!”

Garner is Buffalo’s garden evangelist. His plants are silent. So Garner gets loud on their behalf.

“I’m the mayor of Pottsville!” Garner shouts to everyone and no one, pushing his purple bush down the sidewalk. “My motto is: Plants on the Move!”

Turning to a visitor, Garner drops to his normal speaking voice, which is high-pitched and soft.

“To people who are struggling, plants are a luxury,” he says. “If they can’t eat it, wear it, or sit on it, why are they spending $50 on it? I gotta get their attention. I gotta have a gimmick.”

Garner pushes his plant down the block, then returns to his booth. After three hours and no sales, the mayor of Pottsville finally gets a bite. Rafiq Salim holds a big red dog by a slack leash. He pauses by Garner’s stand to inquire about perennials.

“What can you tell me about the white gladiolus here?” Salim says.

“It bloomed on April 12 of this year,” Garner says. 

Salim nods.

“I ain’t crazy about lilies,” he says. “I want to show you my maple. My Japanese maple. It broke off, and I’m going to grow it back.”

Salim taps open his phone. He scrolls past photos of his garden, in the Kenfield neighborhood of East Buffalo. The two gardeners speak of damaged trees, and the healing power of trellises and Miracle-Gro fertilizer sticks. Salim stops his finger at the picture of his damaged purple tree, planted in a narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street.

Garner makes a clucking sound.

“A lot of people complain if you garden on the treeline,” Garner says.

“Lots of people complain about beauty. Who cares?” Salim says. “If you want to do something revolutionary? Plant a garden.”