HISTORY

Espiritu Tierra Community Garden is a public park located at 201-203 South 2nd Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. The garden was constructed in the 1990s by a group of community gardeners and volunteers as part of a project led by the local community group El Puente. The project aimed to provide the South Williamsburg community with a public green space in partnership with the New York Department of Parks and Recreation.

The garden was built on a vacant lot that was once used as farmland by early Dutch farmers. The land was later parceled into property lots by Garrit and Grover C. Furman in 1825, who leased and sold the lots as single-family homes until 1911. In that year, two six-story brick tenements were erected on the site, consolidating the four lots into two, and were owned by Jacob Schwarz. These tenements housed 35 families with storefronts on the first floor, most of whom were Eastern European families, until the 1980s when the property was foreclosed and became city-owned. The tenements were later destroyed, and in the 1990s, local youth cleared away the rubble and debris on the site, leading to the creation of Espiritu Tierra.

Since its inception, Espiritu Tierra Community Garden has partnered with several organizations to provide the community with green space. The garden is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the community gardeners and volunteers who built it and continue to maintain and improve it for the benefit of the South Williamsburg community.