Bike Activists to Ride Paul Revere-Style to Bloomberg’s House in Effort to Save City
The L Magazine
July 29, 2010
Jonny Diamond

http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2010/07/29/bike-activist…

Four and a score of tricorned cyclists will be pedaling their two-wheeled steeds up the east side tonight, from a downtown community garden all the way up to Mayor Bloomberg’s house on 79th Street. They will have cardboard horse heads affixed to their bikes. That’s right, cardboard heads.

You see, the good people at Time’s Up (our favorite activist group in the whole darn city), are worried about the future of the city’s 600 community gardens, most of which exist thanks to former Mayor Ed Koch’s decision to allow locals to cultivate vacant lots. Technically, the gardens are all protected under the provisional 2002 Garden Settlement, which expires in September, and despite claims by both the Department of Housing Preservation and the Parks Department that the status quo shall obtain, Time’s Up member Benjamin Shepard wants to make sure people know about this deadline, and that the gardens will be granted permanent status. As he told the Daily News:

We are bringing Bloomberg a gift from the gardens, flowers and cucumbers. He is supposed to make this city green. I hope he will live up to his rhetoric.