New York City 100 years ago: “Where City Lots Raise Richer Crops Than Taxes”

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“When a farmer within the city limits is making $30,000 yearly out of potatoes alone, it is time to think of vacant lots in connection with the cost of living”

The New York Tribune Magazine
Jan. 14, 1917

Excerpt:

In the three metropolitan boroughs of New York – Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn – Brooklyn alone has vacant land suitable for farming and gardening purposes. The Brooklyn land has been used for hundreds of years or more by farmers, beginning with the old Dutch landsmen, and the soil has been made productive by constant fertilization. In Manhattan there are practically no vacant lots. The vacant lots in the Bronx are fast disappearing and what remain are rocky and unproductive. In Queens there are acres and acres of vacant land, but Queens to all intents and purposes is still a rural district. Brooklyn, therefore, is the only part of the metropolitan section of New York City that contains farmlands and truck gardens.

Suppose we had 7,500 acres of vacant lots in Brooklyn

A Club in Minneapolis

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