Posts published in “Parks & Waterfront”

One teacher’s three-year project brought some joy to part of Long Island City with a garden, a little free library, and a mystery stack of books. It was damaged overnight in June.

The intersection of Jackson and 11th Street is the bridge over the old Penn freight lines which used to run to today’s Gantry Plaza State Park. Someone made a planter out of cement blocks which fell into ruin. They used to just sit there stacked, holding back dirt that wanted to spill into the sidewalk. They fell over often. The rest of the corner was, in Robin’s words, “entirely grey and full of trash.”

Robin is a teacher in the neighborhood and lives close enough to Trollystop that she’d walked past it for years, wanting to fix it up. The garden had a previous caretaker, an elderly man who had written the names of every dog in the neighborhood on those same cement blocks. When he passed away, the garden went with him, slipping into disrepair. Robin got to know his widow a little, in the way neighbors do. “She was always so sweet, supportive and happy to see someone continue taking care of the flowers,” Robin said.

It takes (many) classrooms

Robin’s students, four and five year olds, were starting a unit on construction, and she wanted them to build something real, something outside the classroom walls they could point to and call their own. They started with the blocks. Later in the year the curriculum moved to water, then flowers, then trees, and Robin realized the garden was doing double duty as the lesson itself. “It turns out that a little garden is a perfect teaching tool,” she said.

Robin brought her class out in the mornings as part of the day’s lesson, but four and five year olds only have so much attention, and some of the maintenance simply didn’t fit within their schedules. So she came back after school, and on weekends, alone, to finish what the class had started. “The children were delighted, and the parents at the school were so supportive,” she said. “I was truly happy to invest the extra time.”

Three years worth of students later, the corner had painting, the planters were weeded, a Little Free Library, and a small rotating cast of parents who’ve stepped in on their own by donating paint or new flowers. Robin still brings her class out regularly, and treats the garden as a safety lesson as much as a nature one: gloves for trash, staying clear of traffic. “I absolutely could not have maintained this project without that critical support,” she said of the parents.

The library box became its own small mystery. Someone, unprompted, once left a stack of four or five books in it that Robin swore felt handpicked for her specifically. She never learned who. “I don’t know who my library fairy is but thank you!!” she said. She took the whole stack home and started reading immediately.

Then, sometime on or around June 29th, someone destroyed the box. Robin was traveling for much of the summer; this piece was reported and written once she returned.

Rebuilding Trollystop

Robin wasn’t the only one who noticed: multiple Facebook group chats and reddit threads were made asking what happened.

The damage is reparable, but classrooms of kids had built Trollystop who’d wanted to share their books with the world. “I was so devastated,” Robin said. But the response came fast: people she knew and people she’d never met reached out within a day, parents, former students’ families, people who just happened to walk that corner sometimes. “I knew we had to rebuild immediately,” she said. A new box is ordered, and Robin plans to have it installed before the new school year starts.

She’s already thinking past the rebuild. More upgrades are coming to the corner this year, she said, and if you happen to walk by while she’s out working, she’d like you to say hello.