October 2008
By Jordana Gustafson
City Hall Garden Provides Bumper Crop of Inspiration
In a nod to its past—and, some hope, its future—the city of San Francisco approved a Victory Garden on the front lawn of City Hall this past summer. The last time the lawns were dug up in favor of leafy greens was in 1943.
By mid-August, gardeners were harvesting kale, bok choy, broccoli, beets, collard and mustard greens, and fifteen types of lettuce—all of it donated to a local foodbank.
“We wanted a diverse array of plants to demonstrate the potential of what you can grow in San Francisco in your own backyard,” says John Bela, who designed and manages the garden. Bela expects to pick squash, cucumbers, bush and pole beans, and corn by Labor Day.
The temporary installation is a joint project of San Francisco Victory Gardens 08+, a program funded by San Francisco ’s Department of the Environment, CMG Landscape Architecture and Slow Food Nation (SFN). SFN developed and funded the garden as the centerpiece of its summer-end event.
Enclosed by a hay bale fence, the artfully designed plot sits just yards in front of the grand, 83-year-old Beaux Arts style City Hall. Bela says the garden’s location – at the core of the city’s civic space – is the perfect place to showcase the potential of local, urban agriculture while producing high quality food for the needy.
SFN Spokesperson Anya Fernald says the garden is meant to encourage people to grow their own food and to ask more questions about where their food comes from.
“Food has become so detached from human culture, so that we see it as independent from our values,” says Fernald. “People worry about what cars they drive, but they also need to think about the impact of their food choices.”
During the height of the Victory Garden movement in 1943, San Franciscans planted community gardens all over the city – appropriating space in Golden Gate Park and at City Hall.
San Francisco's gardens were part of a larger World War II effort in which Americans were encouraged to plant vegetable beds. By reducing pressure on food supply systems, they were told, they were contributing to the nation’s victory in the war effort abroad. In City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America, Laura Lawson writes that in 1943, 20 million gardens were producing eight million tons of food – more than 40 percent of all vegetables consumed in the country.
Bela hopes that San Franciscans and city-dwellers across the world will soon claim another kind of victory – one over crumbling cities and what he calls an unsustainable food supply system.
“The victory garden was about people working together for a common purpose,” he says. “Now people are seeing our common purpose of making our living systems more sustainable.”
Photo Caption: Workers plant San Francisco's Victory Garden, a summer vegetable garden installation in front of City Hall. (Photo by Scott Chernis).
