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A Garden Caught in a Housing Squeeze

Gardeners look at the corner of Crimmins Avenue and East 141st Street in the Bronx and marvel at the transformation of a vacant, garbage-strewn lot frequented by drug dealers into the garden of their dreams. There are flowers, vegetables and herbs. There are tables for dominoes, a scampering puppy and even a chicken coop.The other day they planted a tree, a Canadian hemlock. ''We are here to tell heaven and earth we are planting a new tree,'' a man said in Spanish, as two dozen people stood in a circle. ''This will be its home.'' Not for long. Others look at the site of the Crimmins Group Association Garden and envision houses rising from the spot where two six-story apartment buildings burned down more than a quarter-century ago. They endorse the Giuliani administration's decision to turn the city-owned lot over to a nonprofit group in November for construction of three two-unit homes -- the continuation of a housing renaissance that has added 30,000 units to the borough over the last decade.

And housing remains a critical need, particularly in this tattered corner of Mott Haven, where there are just six vacancies among 921 housing units, said Lee Stuart, lead organizer for South Bronx Churches. Her group is to build the homes on the garden site. ''There is literally no place where people can move,'' Ms. Stuart said. ''It's just tight, tight, tight.'' Both gardeners and builders are convinced that they are helping the neighborhood. The community gardeners point to their history of coming into devastated slums and transforming them with sweat into urban oases. Housing advocates assert that the city's greatest need is affordable housing, though many commend gardeners for filling in the temporary voids with blossoms. For years, the two sides have maintained something of a truce. But City Hall has begun pressing for faster development of city-owned vacant lots, partly because of tightening space for housing. To further this goal, it recently transferred the bulk of the 750 community garden sites to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Although the city has no immediate development plans for most of the sites, the gardeners fear that their dream has begun to wither. Beginning in the early 1970's, as squatters, they began to reclaim vacant lots one by one. The process was institutionalized in 1978 when a city agency, Green Thumb, was established to oversee the gardens, using Federal anti-poverty grants. The number of gardens grew to 410 in 1983. Then the growth slowed, and began to reverse in the last year, according to garden organizations. ''Community gardeners have earned the right not to have to fight for their gardens,'' declared Steven Frillmann, executive director of Green Guerrillas, a principal advocate. ''They are like poster people for the quality of life.'' Although there have been demonstrations and court battles over the loss of gardens on the Lower East Side and Upper West Side, those are aberrations. In most cases, the gardeners leave quietly. The strongest response from most gardeners at the Crimmins Avenue site was that they just wished it was not happening.

''Maybe they give me another one,'' Cruz Concepcion, the garden president, said quietly. ''We are poor. We need a place like this.''When the group is evicted in November, it will be the second time it has been kicked out of a garden.