Nick Wiseman, a life-long District resident, is a line cook and food journalist. He recently started Roadside Organics to celebrate local food culture across the globe.
Save Virginia Avenue Park from Roadside Organics on Vimeo.
I recently returned from a four-month culinary tour of Southeast Asia. Since stepping off the plane, folks ask about what impressed me most. My answer is always the same: farms, farmers, farming. I can’t count the number of farmers markets I’ve visited in the US. I loved the farm-to-table idea, but the act of farming itself – painstakingly coaxing treasure from dirt – seemed remote and abstract. Until I trekked distant Asian roadsides, far from the reigns of the supermarket.
Kneeling in dusty, sun-baked fields, just a few miles from where I had enjoyed my last meal, I could feel that food wasn’t just a product of rich soil. It grew too on the care and passion of those who grew it – who in turn seemed to find an important piece of themselves in providing for their neighbor’s table. So different from home – where grazing is limited to supermarket aisles, and farms so remote they seem almost a literary fiction.
It needn’t be this way. In fact, in some fortunate parts of our city, it isn’t. Just days after returning from Asia, I read that the Marines might occupy one of the city’s premier growing spots, the Virginia Avenue Community Garden. From the controversy that erupted, you’d have thought the Marines had choppered in, already locked and loaded. After four months walking and talking with farmers half-a-world away, I could understand why.
For years, the land the park now occupies withered with urban decay—an unused city lot at 9th and L Streets SE. But the Barracks Row neighborhood now buzzes with hip new restaurants, bars, and boutiques. Just a few blocks away, the Virginia Avenue Park has undergone a stark transformation too, from derelict lot to fruitful garden.
Over the past six years, a diverse caste of District families banded together to rebuild the Park. When I visited this past weekend, the spirit of the gardeners was intoxicating: a resolute group that believes this space is central to their revitalizing neighborhood. The gardeners represent a broad cross section of the city – old punk rockers, young families, government workers, retired military personnel – each with their own stories. But all their stories share a common theme: how the park with its fertile soil grew and enriched the soul of their community.
Sure, you can spend fifty dollars at the Dupont Circle farmers’ market, and gather ingredients for a special meal. But for fifty dollars a plot per year, the Virginia Avenue Community Garden not only makes fresh, organic food available to a far-broader cross-section of District families. Its beauty, its shared sense of growing something important together, can anchor a community far better than any number of new bistros and bars. We should keep the Garden.
