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A Onetime ‘Jungle’ Feels the Winds of the Past
THE crime occurred early on the morning of Wednesday, May 21. Mike Young, a handyman who is president of Padre Plaza community garden, arrived to find his saws, power drills, clippers and shovels — 24 items worth a total of $1,352, according to the list he keeps in his wallet — had been stolen.
Mr. Young discovered the theft when he was walking by the garden on his way to pick up his tools en route to a client’s house. A member of the garden called out to ask if he had left the shed open. Mr. Young said no but thought the question was odd. When he went to check, he saw to his dismay that the shed was empty.
Mr. Young is a stocky 46-year-old with a thin mustache and matching goatee who wears his work boots even on Sundays and spends much of his time maintaining the garden, a third of an acre at St. Ann’s Avenue and 139th Street in Mott Haven in the South Bronx.
During the night, someone had apparently broken into the garden’s aluminum shed, which was locked, and taken nearly everything inside.
“I sat down,” Mr. Young said the other day, ensconced beneath a canopy of redwoods, “and tears came to my eyes.”
The theft was an unsettling echo of the garden’s troubled past. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the surrounding area was plagued by problems, Padre Plaza was infested with drugs.
“It wasn’t a garden; it looked more like a jungle,” Mr. Young said. “There was one guy working in here, and his nickname was Flex. He had no ladders, no tools. He had a pair of scissors.”
One day last spring, Mr. Young offered to bring over his tools, and the two started working nights, cutting branches from overgrown plane trees, pruning unruly shrubs, trimming bamboo and pulling weeds, their work accompanied by the music of Marvin Gaye and KC and the Sunshine Band. Members of local nonprofit groups, along with residents and passers-by, started asking if they could help.
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