Westview Community Garden demolished, but not the neighborhood’s dreams

UPDATE 10:30 a.m.: The FDIC responded to Creative Loafing’s inquiry this morning. According to FDIC spokesperson LaJuan Williams-Young, the property at 1439 S. Gordon should soon belong to the Westview community again. “Yesterday, FDIC and Westview Community Garden agreed upon a purchase price and the transaction is supposed to close in the near future,” Williams-Young said.

A bulldozer uprooted a garden of dreams in Southwest Atlanta two weeks ago. Now a community at the crossroads is desperate to buy back its future.

The half-acre of property at 1439 South Gordon Street was known as Westview Community Garden until it got leveled on Tuesday, March 31. As a Bobcat bulldozer flattened rich beds of soil where kale, collards, and fruit trees once grew, neighborhood resident and volunteer garden coordinator Abiodun Henderson’s eyes filled with tears.

“I didn’t know this was happening,” said Henderson, recalling later that day how her heart sank when she walked to the garden from her home two blocks away to find an independent contractor tearing up the ground she’d helped cultivate with neighborhood children. “I was literally traumatized and when the woman that was there working with her husband saw me crying and saw other people coming, she said to him, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ They realized this is something that’s cared for and loved by the community.”

How the garden went from harvesting kale to getting run over by a bulldozer can be traced to a bank failure and the fallout that follows. The incident has sparked concerns that the neighborhood could lose a one-time eyesore it’s turned into a community resource — all at a time when the neighborhood is on the rebound and interest is growing in southwest Atlanta.

Barely a half-block away from the garden sits the gulch where the Atlanta Beltline’s Westside Trail is under construction, a constant reminder of what some hope will bring new development — and others fear could result in inevitable displacement resulting from higher property values sparked by the $43 million path. What’s happening in Westview highlights how something as small as a half-acre of land could have huge implications for the identity of a neighborhood in transition.

Since the garden started five years ago, it’s become a source of pride in Westview, a community on the rebound after being decimated by the foreclosure crisis and resulting home vacancies. The garden has served as a focal point of the rejuvenation. The site is part of the neighborhood’s annual STEAM empowerment summer camp, geared toward many of the underprivileged kids between the ages of 7 and 17 who call Westview home. And the garden has received more than $7,000 in grants, including the Love Your Block grant jointly presented by the City of Atlanta, the Neighborhood Fund, and Hands On Atlanta.

“It’s a community-building institution,” Henderson said, estimating more than 30 kids currently volunteer in the garden.

But the neighborhood association has operated the community garden without a lease for the past two years. The last lease the Westview Community Organization held on the property ran from 2010 to April 2013 through E.R. Mitchell, a founding member of Capitol City Bank. After Mitchell died in Jan. 2012, the WCO’s executive board repeatedly tried to reach someone at the bank to discuss renewing the lease to no avail, according to Sherry Bailey, chair of the WCO’s zoning and code enforcement committee. When the African-American owned bank went under this February, the FDIC sold the bank’s assets to Raleigh-based First-Citizens Bank & Trust.

On March 6, a “No Trespassing” sign appeared in the community garden. Bailey called the Florida-based property management company listed on the sign the same day. She eventually tracked down someone with the FDIC who informed her that it would be four-to-six weeks before an appraisal on the land was completed, at which time the neighborhood could then place a bid to purchase the property. In the meantime, Bailey says, she was told that the garden wouldn’t be touched and there was no need to worry.

The FDIC representative did, however, let her know that the tool shed on the property would be torn down because it had “‘grafitti’” on it, she said. Bailey then explained to him that it wasn’t random graffiti but the work of a neighborhood artist they’d enlisted to paint a colorful “Westview Garden” mural on the tool shed. The FDIC rep told Bailey he would inform the property management company to leave the shed alone, she says, and to contact him in another six-to-eight weeks to discuss the neighborhood making a bid.

But less than a month later, the bulldozer arrived and the damage was done.

“Before I could ever call him, neighbors called me from the garden in tears because somebody was out there with a bulldozer bulldozing our garden,” Bailey says. “So I immediately called him, got him on the phone, and he said, ‘No, they shouldn’t do that.’”

Over the past week, Creative Loafing has attempted to get a response from the FDIC, First-Citizens Bank, and the property management company listed. An FDIC media spokesperson said she would have to research the property before responding to press inquiries. The property management company claims it no longer oversees maintenance at 1439 S. Gordon.

In the meantime, the neighborhood association put in a bid to buy the property after a spirited unanimous vote at this week’s monthly WCO meeting. During a session that lasted nearly two hours at the Calvary United Methodist Church, neighbors spoke passionately about the need to fight for the garden’s preservation.

“This is an opportunity for us to do more than just complain,” stated a homeowner who moved into the community with his wife 18 months ago and prefers to remain anonymous. “We need to send a direct message to all the business people looking at this community to know that you don’t come in this community and bully people around.”

People pledged financial support on-the-spot in dollar amounts ranging from $100 to $1000 in order to raise the necessary funds before the property gets sold to a potential real estate speculator. Some people fear is that the community may already be too late.

“They bulldozed the garden because someone wants it,” another member of the WCO shouted out during the meeting.

According to Bailey, the FDIC rep stated that the reason the garden was bulldozed is because it posed a safety liability due to an adjacent vacancy, which could attract addicts and prostitutes. But such criminal activity is not an issue near what’s considered the main entrance of the neighborhood, homeowners argue. So not only is the garden getting ripped up, but the people making the decisions have a skewed perception of the community.

By the looks of the meeting, it’s an extremely diverse community today, with a healthy mix of longtime residents and relative newcomers — young, elderly, black, white, single, married, gay — equally invested in the upkeep of the neighborhood.

“For many years, we couldn’t beg people to come live in our neighborhood,” says Bailey. “We couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal to try to get somebody to purchase something in our neighborhood — much less a raw piece of land.”

While the coming of the Beltline may have added to the attraction, it’s also likely to attract in increasing the amount of investors less interested in maintaining the community’s soul. The neighborhood is pleased that the public-works project is finally moving dirt in its area, “but it’s also bringing vultures that are not necessarily the people we want to do things in our neighborhood,” says Bailey. “They don’t really care about the integrity of the neighborhood and the diversity we have and the camaraderie we have with our neighbors. And we don’t want our elderly to be pushed out of the neighborhood because somebody’s pushing prices up.”

The community hopes that by bringing attention to this issue, the FDIC will be less likely to sell the land to a speculator. In the meantime, the WCO has put down its own bid in the hope of securing the land for a future garden.