Good morning. It is Wednesday. We’ll find out why a block in Crown Heights is the greenest in Brooklyn. And how much has inflation pushed up food prices in New York? Scroll down for an example of New York staples that cost more.
It’s not the longest, the widest, the fanciest or the meanest. But Lincoln Place between Nostrand and New York Avenues is the greenest block in Brooklyn.
So said the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Again.
The garden today announces that Lincoln Place is the winner of an annual competition started in the 1990s to promote urban gardening. The competition was canceled due to the pandemic in 2020 and last year the garden only held a competition for flower box gardeners. It brought back the block contest this year, receiving 100 entries from 27 neighborhoods and winning them to 11 finalists.
Personal visits by the jury followed. They had their criteria, including the variety and suitability of the plants on each block, the caliber of gardening, and the level of community participation. “It can’t just be a few sidewalks,” said Adrian Benepe, the garden’s president and one of the judges.
“With every block I thought, ‘This is the best block,’ until we got to Lincoln Place and — oh, oh,” Benepe recalled, snapping photos along the way, including the one above.
“There are plants everywhere you look,” he said, adding that he was particularly impressed with hanging baskets made from recycled materials.
The word on the block was persistence. Perri Edwards, one of the gardeners, said she and her neighbor, Althea Joseph, got “very serious” about the contest in 2017 after Joseph took third place in the window box competition. They started an ad hoc group called Plant – Preserving Lincoln’s Abundant Natural Treasures – and won in 2019 as the greenest block in the housing category.
And Edwards, who has lived on the block for 35 years, honed her skills by attending workshops in the garden.
“At the first workshop I went to, everything I did for my tree was wrong,” said Edwards. “We put a metal fence around the tree – cars hit it when they tried to park, but the tree outgrew it. We put it in the ground. That was wrong. Apparently the ground is holding the moisture and rotting the bottom of the tree “, causing trees to fall. And ivy grew in the tree. That was wrong. They said it was a ladder for rats.”
Frequently asked questions about inflation
Frequently asked questions about inflation
What is inflation? Inflation is a loss of purchasing power over time, meaning your dollar won’t go as far tomorrow as it did today. It is usually expressed as the annual price change for everyday goods and services such as food, furniture, clothing, transportation, and toys.
By the time the jury came out this year, Lincoln Place had a butterfly bush, elephant ears, gardenias, roses, a rose of Sharon and many other plants. “We have one that we love, but it’s like weeds,” Joseph said. ‘Crawling Charlie. It is beautiful. And we also have Creeping Jenny.” (Creeping Charlie is a variety of ivy, while Creeping Jenny is a brightly colored perennial.)
Edwards said climate change was one of the reasons people nearby were willing to get involved in urban gardening. “It’s really noticeable in our block that the temperature is much cooler,” Edwards said. “People walk up to our block and say that. It’s the trees. If everyone did this, it would make a difference.”
Weather
Expect showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon and evening. During the day it is partly sunny with temperatures in the mid 80’s. At night, temperatures drop to the mid-70s.
ALTERNATE PARKING
Valid until Monday (Feast of the Ascension).
New Yorkers are faced with sticker shock everywhere they look. Monday we discussed shockingly high rents and the affordable housing shortage. Today we will focus on another consequence of inflation, painful increases in food prices.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices in the New York City area rose in May at their fastest annual rate in 41 years. In June, the increase slowed, the most recent inflation report showed, but food prices in New York were still 9.1 percent higher than a year earlier. This is the only bright spot, though it’s hard to call it that: The increase in New York was slightly less than the national increase of 10.4 percent.
My colleague Nicole Hong found a bakery in the East Village where a scoop of strawberry ice cream costs $3.75, 25 cents more than last summer, and a tiramisu $7.50 cents more than a year ago. And there’s the $19 chips with guacamole at a bar near Times Square that added $1.25 to the price after avocado prices skyrocketed. The bar also raised the prices of drinks like the neon blue gin and vodka cocktail to $20 after months of discussion among the managers.
Many restaurants and bars that survived the pandemic resisted raising prices last year, afraid to scare away customers who remained wary of eating out as virus variants surged. Now many companies are raising workers’ wages to fill jobs amid rising food and energy costs.
And people like Ali Apdelwyhap, who runs a street cart in Queens, are raising prices. A cup of coffee was $1.50, down from $1 on a recent Monday morning. He was hesitant to go beyond 50 cents, fearing that his regulars—including a large number of construction workers—would let him down.
Before the pandemic, Apdelwyhap had a place in Midtown, where lawyers and bankers seemed less sensitive to price increases. But because most office workers no longer commute five days a week, his business collapsed. He moved to the Northeast Waterfront in Queens after spotting nearby construction sites, hoping for clients to be in person at work.
One of those who bought the $1.50 coffee and a $3.50 bagel was Mamadu Jalloh, who works at a nonprofit that helps formerly homeless adults. Jalloh, who lives in the South Bronx, drives five days a week. He said food and gas prices have strained his budget, so much so that he sometimes skips breakfast or lunch to earn his $700 a month rent.
His hourly wage recently increased 5.4 percent to $25.95 from $24.62, as part of a citywide adjustment to the cost of living for certain nonprofit workers. But Jalloh said that did little to cushion the impact of inflation. “It helps,” he said, “but it’s not… For real help out.”
METROPOLITAN diary
The ride home
Dear Diary:
I was in the middle of my weekly trip from Gowanus to Washington Heights on the A. Sometimes I call an Uber to avoid the 90-minute train ride home. But on this day I couldn’t justify the cost.
On 42nd Street, a small woman got on the subway and sat down next to me. She had the poster for ‘A Strange Loop’.
I had recently seen the show and this woman seemed as fascinated by it as I had been. I asked her what she thought of the show, and a flood of thoughts came out.
Before we could imagine, the conductor announced that we had to find a new train: this A would only run to West 145th.
“Where are you going?” I asked
“Dyckman Street,” she said.
“Me too!”
It turned out that we lived on the same side of the same street and were only two buildings away from each other.
“Want to get a car in town?” I asked. “I pay.”
We climbed the stairs from the subway and waited for the driver to arrive.
— Katherine Lenhart