There was a beautiful and homey little garden on the Lower East Side for over 22 years, known as the Esperanza Garden (Garden of Hope in English). Not so little, actually, once you went inside. It was started by a lady named Alicia Torres and her family, and it was open to the children of the neighborhood. They grew up there, and their own children would play and chase each other and fight and do homework and blow out birthday candles there, and eat hot dogs and other junk food, and the adults would celebrate every holiday major or minor, and there was a gorgeous jungle rooster who lived in the garden and would hide from all the people. He is brown, red, yellow, and black, and lovely beyond description. Esperanza was always being used. People would bring Alicia plants that were dying and she would nurse them back to health. The place was known at first for its sunflowers, later for roses, including a 20-year-old rosebush….

After 113 gardens were put on the auction block in 1998 and were snatched from destruction the day before the auction was to be held last May, everyone thought all the gardens were safe, purchased by Bette Midler. But there were 400-500 other gardens in the city that were not up for sale then….

Donna Alicia's Birthday with her family.

We were led out of the corpse and down a ladder to the street. Later I learned there were sharpshooters on the building pointing down at all of us! (Is that true? I'll find out.) Kim was yelling from a window down to us. Later she was taken too. 31 people were arrested, those who linked arms and those who sunk their arms into concrete and those who sat high up in the air, all went through the system. That means as Leslie Kauffman pointed out (from the floor of a cold cell!), that instead of some of us being given desk appearance tickets, i.e. a date to return to court, and being sent home, all were treated equally (badly). This is a new wrinkle in the tradition of civil disobedience. So, she asked, what's the incentive to holding anything back? And in fact, when we got to the Tombs (central booking), there was a woman being put through the system for a PARKING TICKET!!!!

So we arrived at the precinct house and eventually, the men went one way, the women another. We then were split into two groups and those groups scattered into a few tiny cells. One cell had 4 or 5 people in it, all lined up on a steel "bed" so that some of them, exhausted, lay on the floor in front of the toilet just to get some rest. The idea was that we'd be fingerprinted and then taken down to the tombs for processing (photos, etc.) and dinner. Lunch was out, and the precinct told us they didn't have food there anyway. They said the normal stay was 8 hours, and you can do without food for 8 hours, no problem. (They said.) Well, that's true! But my fingerprints wouldn't take! It took 2 hours, 3 cops, and many many recalibrations of their fancy electronic computerized fingerprinting machine to get a half-assed version of my prints. So we missed our dinner engagement at the tombs. While I was standing there waiting for them to learn this new skill, I overheard two interesting conversations. One cop told another about what he'd seen that day. He said, "Man, it took them 15 minutes to level that whole garden, trees, little house, some kind of frog thing, an all. 15 minutes! I never saw anything like that in my life." He sounded not only amazed but a little dismayed at seeing something so beautiful go so fast. The other conversation: "They said down at central booking that they were only taking 8 people. I don't mean 8 at a time, either. 8 people altogether, that's all they're taking. And we just sent 18 down there." About 3 hours later they piled the rest of us (13) into a van and we headed off to central booking. Of course, there were 4 vans sitting in front of hours. It was true, the doors were closed to us! Apparently Giuliani(our mayor, to those from far-off lands) had become so enraged at the way he was being portrayed in the media that he was punishing us. 3 hours in the van, no food, no water, nothing. The cops who drove us got hungry and bored and went to McDonald's and came back and smoked and ate in the front of the van. (How do we know that? We smelled it.) One of the women got sick, dehydrated, and thought she would vomit, so we helped her lie down and we banged on the wall for them to come. One of them came, pissed off at dinner being interrupted, and said he couldn't do anything for her. So two of the women started calling him names and it looked really bad for the sick girl because he could have made everyone suffer for their namecalling. But he just silently closed the door, and we were back in the darkness, and then reappeared with bottled water. Eventually the shift changed and some jovial and clumsy cop showed up and bought us 4 bags of buttered popcorn and some water. He wanted us to know how nice he was. He mentioned that fact a few times. And that he paid for the food himself. Man, that popcorn and water were one of the best meals I've ever had in my life. After 16 hours, it was four-star. So then we got into the big building and got our pictures taken and our possessions searched and got yelled at and hurried and -- the usual, nothing personal. Then into a little room where an EMS worker asked questions about health, like do you smoke, etc. When I said I didn't eat meat, he said he didn't either. I said it's wrong to use another's body like that. He said yes, emphatically. And that we have to care for the earth. So I told him why we were all there. And we both lived in the same building in the 60's, this old man and I, when we were both younger.

Some men were being led down the hallway and one looked at us and then turned to another and said, "The demonstrators." Next, into a big room, with "La Bamba" (the movie) playing loudly and lights on and people (women) lying all around the place, some of them into withdrawal, others sitting talking on benches. Again, two people said, "You the demonstration?" How did you know, I asked. "It was all over the TV," one said. Along came the parking ticket lady, and then breakfast (milk, Rice Krispies, and oranges). So I ate the orange.

Then we were all moved to a holding cell, 60 feet away from the courtroom. And then finally to the courtroom itself. We started being released (pending the next court date). Our new lawyer, Ron Kuby, showed up. Kunstler's partner, beautiful Ron Kuby, civil rights lawyer. And Joel Kupferman, our other lawyer, dear friend Joel, wisecracker with a big heart. Well, an open warrant from 1969 fell on me. As Kuby said to the judge, "Your honor, I myself can't even remember the years 1969-1973." But that didn't get me off the hook. A few hours later I was out too. We all waited until the last one of us got freed (he too had an outstanding warrant, as he is an outstanding guy, Brad). And then we all cheered. When the court officer got angry and told us to be quiet, we then howled, as we walked out with Brad safely with us. Yep, howled. It was great to see the rest of our wolfpack! Mark, Deniz, Seth, everyone I've forgotten to mention. I saw you.

I went back to get my sleeping bag, with Alicia and Taito and they opened the alleyway so I could see for myself the big gash in the earth that was Esperanza Garden. Now the fence that blocks the view from the street is being covered with poems, flowers on the sidewalk, pictures of el coqui and other ways of telling Alicia how much we loved her garden. I love her, too, very very much.

I walked home up Avenue C, and the other garden is now gone too, all bulldozed, except for a sliver along the wall where the mural of Puerto Rican history and poetry of resistance was preserved. All else is gone. Mario called to talk to me later, and said one of the kids on the block asked him, "Where is the coqui? What happened to the garden?" Another said, "Mr. Giuliani shouldn't have taken our garden." I finally fell asleep, the first time since Sunday night. (It was now Wednesday night.)

A few hours after the bulldozing, which took place immediately after the siege itself (by Capoccia's workers, before he had the deed to the property), the Attorney General of the State of New York ordered a preliminary injunction against the sale or destruction of any community garden, pending the next date, March 1. The date for the appeal for Esperanza itself was next Tuesday, Feb. 22. The destruction was illegal. So we are fighting even harder, with Esperanza, not a loss, but a sacrifice. That word means "to make sacred." And perhaps the coqui will return, with the phoenix by his side.

Love, for the earth, for us all, JK