Should one search for heaven in this city?

words by Megan Robinson
edited by Ellie Lawton
photography by Paul Rochford

El Jardín del Paraíso is the largest community garden in the Lower East Side of New York City. The garden spans three-quarters of an acre—about the size of a football field—tucked between the quiet residential streets of East Fourth and Fifth, between Avenues C and D. El Jardín sits squarely within a rich Loisaida cultural network— bordered by the Jacob Riis Houses to the east, and anchored to the west by Casa Adela, a historic Puerto Rican restaurant, and La Sala de Pepe, a longstanding community arts space. 

In summer, music playing from the garden’s casita draws in an older crowd of drinkers, smokers, and domino players, who bring their own chairs and ice boxes and listen to Cano Estremera and Tito Rojas from sunrise to sunset. Meandering among these longtime figures, the garden hosts a few younger volunteers, usually neighborhood transplants, tending to the communal areas of the garden. Some garden members have been around long enough to be granted a plot in the allotment. The plots—not all equally cared for—form a haphazard patchwork around the Puerto Rican flag in the center. It may attract college students, who recline and read on the bench encircling the willow tree—the Babylonian tree of paradise—that once held a tree house and served as the site of many local children’s birthday parties. Myths surrounding the willow tree claim that Liz Christy, founder of the 1970s Green Guerrilla movement and patron saint-esque figure of community gardens, is said to have planted it. Later in the day, socializers, stragglers, street hucksters, and strangers meet in the casita, talking late into the evening, buying and selling stolen Amazon parcels. 

I came here searching for community. I quickly found El Jardín and was immediately drawn to it by its utopian ethics of permaculture gardening, community care, and its heritage as a 1970s homesteading and lot-squatting movement. I later learned that, like many community projects, the garden is fraught with challenges, conflicts, and tensions. And, like the biblical Garden of Paradise, El Jardín is full of a motley congregation of saints and sinners. 

There are familiar figures found in any divine comedy or telenovela. The fat, bearded drug dealer with the cherubic face, named Gabriel, has threatened other members and reportedly hides guns in the sheds. There’s Adam, a young man from the NYCHA housing on Fifth Street, who once took angel dust and ran naked through the streets. People still talk about it. And there’s the chorus of elders who hold court from the casita, commenting on everyone’s business. I pass by and see them gathered under fairy lights, powered by a neighboring apartment’s electricity someone stole. The question remains: Should one search for heaven in this city? Does it serve a purpose to suffer to build paradise here? 

David Schmidlapp, one of the founders of the garden and a long-standing board member, thinks so. Schmidlapp has been trying to build a stormwater collection pond since the early 2000s. The vision is rooted in permaculture gardening—creating self-sustaining gardening systems that are beneficial for the environment and its surrounding community. The pond would channel flood water from neighboring buildings into the pond, providing a regenerative source of water that could both fill the pond and serve as a means to irrigate the entire garden. The system was designed to handle a twelve-inch rainfall event, equivalent to the storm brought by Hurricane Floyd, which caused overflow in New York’s already precarious sewage system. The pond would model a blueprint for other community gardens across the city to create sustainable and renewable water systems while also offsetting the burden on the city’s sewage systems. 

It was a well-meaning endeavor, yet its vision was never realized. Far from providing a sustainable water supply, the pond relies on city water, drawn from both hoses and fire hydrants over the years to fill it. The birth of the pond gave way to a struggle over water for the past two decades, creating tensions between El Jardín and the city. With conflict between members of El Jardín themselves, and between the garden and the community at large, El Jardín’s ongoing struggle over water makes the difficulty of building and maintaining a small slice of utopia in NYC all too clear. 

With conflict between members of El Jardín themselves, and between the garden and the community at large, El Jardín’s ongoing struggle over water makes the difficulty of building and maintaining a small slice of utopia in NYC all too clear.

The garden was founded by Loisaida homesteaders in 1981, in the wake of New York’s housing and economic crisis, which gave birth to the Housing and Development Finance Corporation (HDFC). The HDFC granted residents vacant lots and apartment buildings in the Lower East Side for one dollar on the condition that they eventually make the spaces liveable. Out of this emerged homesteading. Many apartments and community gardens in Loisaida originated as HDFC properties, squatted by the community and built up over time. 

As a water feature, the pond is a sight enjoyed across the community. Yet, for many garden members, it’s a burden. The creation of the pond brought about several unwelcome guests, most notably twenty-six razorback turtles and a rotating quantity of goldfish deposited as unwanted house pets. 

The pond was able to sustain its marine life by keeping the small reservoir full using water from nearby hoses, but this was only an option during the summer when the Department of Parks & Recreation allowed city water to be used in community gardens. In the winter, when the Department turns off the water, the pond freezes up, and with no incoming source of water, the pond loses what remains to evaporation and soil absorption. The pond has faced mounting pressure from some local residents, who criticize the garden on the grounds of animal welfare. 

El Jardín’s fight for water has also led them into some legal trouble. Sometime in the early 2000s, much of the garden’s caretaking was done by an unhoused member who lived in and tended to the garden but also used public water to start an illicit car washing business. This resulted in a water abuse violation by the NYC Parks Department in 2015, which, in response, shut off their water supply for a total of nine years. Annalee Sinclair, one of the garden’s longest-standing members, used her husband’s industrial valve wrench to illegally turn on the public mains water from a single fire hydrant on Fifth Street—keeping the pond full and pond-life and animal-rights advocates content, but risking further problems with the city.

Annalee Sinclair, one of the garden’s longest-standing members, used her husband’s industrial valve wrench to illegally turn on the public mains water from a single fire hydrant on Fifth Street—keeping the pond full and pond-life and animal-rights advocates content, but risking further problems with the city. 

In 2023, the water was restored through an alliance with GreenThumb, a NYC Parks program that supports community gardens, which successfully advocated to the Parks Department on behalf of El Jardín. In October 2023, 66 Avenue C, a neighboring HDFC residency and long-time garden nemesis, served the garden with a legal notice claiming the pond was responsible for flooding their building’s basement, although further investigation tests showed no evidence linking El Jardín’s pond to the floods. 

The pond was meant to ease the city’s water burden by collecting stormwater. Instead, it has become dependent on it. Though the design could help address sewage overflow, the project has stalled, held back by legal pushback from 66 Avenue C, a lack of coordination with neighboring buildings, and mounting penalties from the city. Within the garden, tensions around the pond reflect a broader strain in how the community works together, where disputes often seem to arise from deeper, unresolved divides. 

Those rifts can often be traced to where one stands in relation to Gabriel and his family, who control a significant portion of the board seats of El Jardín, and as one member put it, “act like they own Fifth Street.” Gabriel’s family has deep roots in the garden’s history. His father was an early member, well-respected in the community, and his influence allowed Gabriel to conduct his business of selling illicit substances, storing weapons in the garden shed, and embezzling membership dues, without much resistance. 

After conflicts with Gabriel escalated, including several female members receiving unsolicited dick pics from Gabriel, secret meetings were held to discuss ways of voting Gabriel off the board. But with his family controlling a high number of seats, efforts felt futile and risky. Even if Gabriel were removed, his family would still live on the block, maintaining a foothold in the garden. Some members have left the garden entirely. As one local police officer put it, “Fifth Street runs itself.” 

These tensions—whether around the pond or over power—are rarely addressed head-on. Keen to avoid another conflict with the Parks Department, members tend to minimize problems and avoid issues. No one wants to jeopardize the garden’s already tenuous standing with the city or or delay access to support. Without a culture of open accountability, informal workarounds emerge: David organizes his own workdays and recruits his own volunteers, pushing ahead on the pond without waiting for collective approval. 

However, the same reluctance to confront conflict about the pond also keeps members from addressing deeper fractures, like the unchecked influence certain members wield over decision-making. The garden’s vision for sustainable water systems has stalled—not only due to city bureaucracy or legal battles, but also because of an internal culture of silence and frustrated cooperation. As long as conflict dictates the garden’s governance, whether fear of losing water or fear of retaliation, the dream of El Jardín as a model for community resilience remains tenuous. 

And yet, it is precisely these tensions that make El Jardín what it is. A community space growing not in spite of conflict but through it—contending with difference, dysfunction, and the hard realities of sharing land. Despite everything, the garden endures because of the people who keep trying: fixing the pond, planting vegetables, attending meetings, and nurturing the collective space. As flooding risks rise and city infrastructure strains, members’ commitment deserves to be met with real, structural investment from the city. Without support from the city, and hard conversations about how power is held and resisted within the neighborhood, community projects stall. 

Without support from the city, and hard conversations about how power is held and resisted within the neighborhood, community projects stall.

In the meantime, as they tend their little slice of heaven in Loisaida’s Garden of Paradise, members continue navigating what it means to build community in New York City—and what they’re willing to risk for it.

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Megan Robinson is a freelance writer and graduate student in Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism at the New School for Social Research.