Speer's Toothpick.. Today the paper of record carried a couple of stories about the new design for the "Freedom Tower" in downtown Manhattan. The minute people start talking about building monuments to freedom I get nervous. Generally, governments that build monuments to abstract concepts, like freedom, are actively engaged in taking it away from us and giving us the freedom tower as a tombstone.Appropriately, the proposed monument looks like something from the drawing board of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect. The best monument to freedom in this country is the law and impartial administration of justice and the rights it preserves and protects. Rights that this administration feels less and less compelled to uphold, and laws that it feels are outdated impediments to its imperial power. How can there be justice without a government that is bound by law? How ca n there be freedom without justice? Meanwhile, let's name that building downtown something else. How about WTC2?

U.S.C. TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 47 § 1001. (a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, WHOEVER, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully— (1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by ANY trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) makes or USES any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both. (b) Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party's counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding. (c) With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to— (1) administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or (2) any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.

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Taking up space. The building next door to our garden needs to repoint their brickwork and wants to close one our 90th Street Garden gate and a quarter of the Public area 8 am-4 pm weekdays for about three weeks during the work. We found out about the scope of the project a scant three weeks before the beginning of our annual Tulip show. A large part of the Tulip display would have been in the closed off area. After a meeting at the Garden, the building agreed not to begin the project until later. So now we're negotiating for August dates and we would like them to contribute a sum of money to pay for new plants plus an amount to reimburse us for the loss of use of a quarter of our Public area Monday through Friday during the work. The building points out that if we were just another building they would not be expected to put up any money for stepping on our roof top, and any damage would be paid out of their insurance. They are right, but we are not a roof top. We are a Garden which can't wait several months for insurance to pay for lost plants and trees and shrubs. At this point, they have pretty much agreed to a small sum to replace lost plantings. It's the lost use of public space that is giving us problems. It's a hard concept. We are open daily, and the 90th Street gate and area to be closed during the work is the most accessible for the handicapped. Many disabled people come to the Garden every day, many pushed in wheelchairs or helped along by their Aides. They will not go around the block to the 89th Street Gate, they will just go someplace else, and after being turned away a couple of times many will stop coming to the Garden for this season. So what is the value of that? I'm having a hard time convincing the building that public access and public use of the space has value. I can point out that we will lose donations, but even that is hard to quantify. Our Corporate purpose, covenants running with the deed, and agreements with the City of New York all mandate that two thirds of the Garden be open to the public daily except during icy conditions. So what is the loss of a quarter of our Public Space worth? What is the worth to the 50 or so people who cannot walk around the block to a more inaccessible Gate, and how do we make the loss up to them? What is the value of the loss of pass-through egress to the hundreds of people that walk through the Garden daily on their way to work, or as a pleasant short cut while running errands? What is the value of open space to the public in a City anyway?

It takes a village to support a Garden... Well I've been distracted for the past month with our annual Garden benefit. The Garden needs about $30,000 a year to operate and maintain. We only charge $15 yearly dues, and $25 for members with vegetable plots, so you can see there is a constant fundraising component built into our continued existence. What does the money go for? Well there's utilities... right now Con Ed is charging us over 200 a month to light four lights. Then there's the tools, Newsletter costs, insurance, soil amendments, greenhouse supplies, plants and perennials that we buy, our annual picnics, the Arts Festival, and of course the costs of raising money. Finally, there is maintenance. Plumbing ( always a headache) brickwork at our gates, iron work on our railings and fences, sidewalk patching, doors to the two toolsheds, locks, keys, etc.etc.etc. We're open daily to the public so everything has to be maintained top notch. No one in the organization gets paid, but we have to pay our plumbers, ironworkers, and other craft people. Anyway, we raise money from grants- (too many to list here) booksales, neighborhood supporters and the annual benefit. It helps to be in an affluent neighborhood on the upper west side of Manhattan with good restauraunts nearby that donate food. Our members also make fabulous dishes- stuffed pork loin, shrimp appetizers with endive, spiral cut ham with plumsauce, asparagus with proscuitto, cakes and cookies. About 25 Garden members worked on the benefit this year- everything from setting lanterns the morning of the event, and working the food prep tables to designing the invitations in February. and inviting local officials and celebrities to be a part of our "Benefit Committee and Supporters" in January. Any way it's over, the garden is beautiful- and we can look forward now to our Shakespeare in the Garden Performances in July and August. Check out the website, westsidecommunitygarden.org for pictures of the Garden, membership forms and the latest schedule and coverage of events, and thanks to everyone who worked on this excellent Midsummer Revel.

Lucky tree...Last week we noticed ominous lines of pencil sized holes in the bark of a large poplar on the southern border of our Garden on 89th Street. The tree was already large when the West Side Community Garden was established in 1975, and survived the various building cycles which resulted in a neighboring townhouse development and the landscaping of our permanent Garden site. The Poplar tree was almost a goner when lightning struck it in August 1988. It survived, and now bears a long pale vertical scar along the north side of its trunk, as a reminder of the summer storm. Tom Thies, head of our Flower and Greenhouse regiments, noticed the holes first and alerted me during a walkthrough last Wednesday with some of our funders and supporters. Heavy hearted, I called 311 after the visitors left, and asked for the Asian Longhorn Beetle hotline. The young man manning the line is part of the Parks Department, and we went over the specifics of location and types of nearby trees. The beetles not only enjoy Poplar, they also would like our Birch trees, Plum and Crab Apple trees. I didn't think to ask him about the airy Sappora trees that shade the table or the rare Tibetan Cedars. While I was on the line I also checked the other Poplar tree in the property, located on the border of the vegetable garden and the 90th Street playground.. That tree is very large and grand and probably the largest tree below 110th outside of Central and Riverside Parks. It has no holes. Going back to the 89th Street Poplar, the hotline guy asked me to take a pencil or pen and see if it fit into the holes, and to check their depth. The tree looked healthy and our garden Mockingbird twittered in the branches as I approached. The holes were about a third of an inch deep. There was no sawdust about. The hotline mentioned there is also a possibility the holes are from birds, and promised to send an inspection crew out to look things over as soon as possible. This morning I heard again from Tom, who had contacted our regular tree pruning guys to come and take a look. They tell us it is highly likely that the holes were drilled by Yellow Sapsucker birds dropping by for a snack on their way north this spring. Keep your fingers crossed... lucky tree.

Memories of Buffalo... The recent stories about the Buffalo Fireman who regained his memory , and the proposed sainthood of Father Baker brought back memories of second grade back at PS 68 on Westminster Avenue in Buffalo. The ultimate threat from a teacher - even in public school- was " if you're not good we'll send you to Father Bakers." Father Bakers was widely known in Buffalo children's culture as a correctional orphanage for bad boys. The threat had teeth, because we all knew that parents who had too much to handle could make arrangements to ship an errant son off to Father Bakers. Big boys in the neighborhood working on their cars in the back yard would regale us with tales of deprivation and whippings at Father Bakers. Once a year the Buffalo Courier Express featured a story about the yearly Christmas party at the orphanage, with pictures of thin little tykes getting toys, and the older boys getting socks. It was said the boys slept in dormitories, and wore hand me downs. We'd make fun of kids in the playground by saying they got their clothes from Father Bakers. Now that time has padded some distance on the Father Baker story - and a symbol of terror from my childhood is being exalted. What else is weird is seeing the "Our Lady of Victory Basilica " getting press. Our Lady of Victory Basilica is a huge Italianate over- the- top structure on the border between Buffalo and Lackawanna. Originally built in white marble, pollution from the steel plants and factories turned it bright yellow. The whole area was engulfed in a horrible stink from sulfide gas. The nearby Buffalo river was so polluted that it caught on fire. The surrounding Lackawanna and South Buffalo neighborhoods consisted of workers hovels - A cheap two story wood frame house built in the twenties would have a tunnel of two or three tiny shack like houses built on the back of each other, extending into the back yard and filling the entire lot. The area was so low class that nice people ignored the Basilica as a sort of a Folly. My father would take the route past it on the way to the beach when the lake road was blocked with traffic, and occasionally we would visit the South Park Conservatory and Gardens located across the street. When the steel plants and factories went out of business, the smell abated and people rediscovered the Basilica on Buffalo's south side as a pilgrimage destination. The trip is actually enjoyable, and you can get world class "Beef on Weck" while you're there.

Kruschev arrests bicyclist... page 2 of Metro section of the paper of record carried a shocking picture of assistant Chief of Police Smolka forcibly arresting a bicyclist who was walking while straddling her bike at a Critical Mass gathering. To us cold war veterans, Chief Smolka bears an astonishing resemblance to Kruschev, leader of the evil empire back in the sixties. Naturally, this picture and the accompanying story will further inspire car drivers in their ongoing campaign of rudeness towards bicycle riders. Today I saw a huge SUV frustrated in a left turn onto Broadway from 110th Street honking and inching forward towards a man crossing the street with his little girl with the light. Police parked on the opposite corner did nothing- the SUV hadn't actually run anyone over yet. As soon as the man and his little girl walked far enough toward the curb to provide room for the SUV to get through, the driver surged ahead with a little burst of annoyed speed, only to wait for the signal at 109th street. I am so sick of drivers in the City who threaten us daily. Rushing us out of crosswalks so they can make turns, honking at lights the minute the light turns so they can race ahead, tunneling down Amsterdam Avenue at breakneck speeds to catch the lights any unlucky pedestrians crossing at the end of the light, and honking while they pass within inches of bicyclists trying to negotiate passage around cars double parked in the bike lanes. Let's reassign Chief Smolka to traffic cop duty. Maybe then he'll see who the real enemy is.

Methane Hydrate and global warming... Update on the apocalypse theme. I just read a book that takes place at and around the South Pole. It has a somewhat fantastic, overly complicated plot, but it gives the reader a picture of what it must be like to live and work in that region. One of the plot lines turns around a substance called Methane Hydrate, a mineral sometimes found under the glaciers at the South Pole. Interested, I googled the mineral just to see how much the book exaggerated climate risks posed by release of methane into the atmosphere from glacier melt. The 2005 information turned up was more alarming than the plot of the potboiler-written in 1999. Methane Hydrate is a crystalline substance composed of methane and water crystallized under pressure and cold. It's found at the presurrized cold at the bottom of oceans and glaciers, including the east coast continental shelf, and is a component of permafrost found in Canada, Russia, Alaska, China, and Antarctica. There's a lot of methane in the environment locked up in crystal form. When it "melts," one liter of Methane Hydrate forms 20 liters of methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than Carbon Dioxide. Several scientific web sites discussed the mass extinctions at the end of the Permian Age as a result of a global warming caused by sublimation of methane hydrate into large quantities of methane into the atmosphere. Other web sites discuss how the permafrost in northern climes is rising in temperature, leading to instability and release of Methane. Another web site discusses how drilling for oil in the far northern areas may have an unsettling effect on Methane Hydrate, and could release methane. [If we could figure out a safe way to mine it, it would be the perfect fuel.] At least one website talks about release of methane hydrate as a destabilizer of the ocean floor on the coastal shelf, which could lead to an east coast Tsunami. At least one large tidal wave occurred in Norway and Greenland from a gas release. The theory is that once we warm up to a certain level, methane hydrate begins sublimating into methane, which rapidly escalates global warming, unlocking more and more methane and creating radical fast climate changes. Scientists from the Pentagon warned the Shrub about this possibility, but secure in his belief system that Jesus wouldn't want that to happen, the warning was shrugged off. Now I'm wondering why people who swallow the Left Behind fairy tale totally reject the idea that global warming may affect our civilization in some radical way because it is based on scientific extrapolations. If, as the ocean temperature levels and perma frost summer temperature levels indicate, there is a global warming effect taking place, why would a prudent world leader not take all possible steps to avoid a possible catastrophy? And why are people so prepared to accept extrapolations about the end of the world taken from the book of Revelations, but unwilling to accept in the tiniest way the possibility that continuing in our present course of fossil fuel usage could endanger civilization?
Some websites with methane hydrate information:

http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/gas-hydrates/title.html
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Durham.html
http://healthandenergy.com/methane_hydrate.htm
http://www7430.nrlssc.navy.mil/7432/hydrates/index.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1215-24.htm