A few posts back I wrote about photographing the 6th and B Garden, a lush tangle of trees and flowers on the corner of East 6th Street and Avenue B. A paradox of these community gardens sprinkled all over the Lower East Side–but particularly between Avenue A and D where the worst abandonment in the neighborhood was–is that most of them are dense thickets of vegetetation, not really open spaces at all. In a sense, they echo the forest of richly decorated tenements around them, though not the regimentation of the rows of buildings. Aesthetically, they are chaotic, however lovingly tended, and express the civilized anarchy that brought them into being in the first place.

Urban wilderness at East 6th and Avenue B

The most striking thing about the 6th and B Garden is the tall wooden structure festooned with various found objects. I couldn’t find the name of the person responsible for this famous folly, but a photograph on the garden’s website referred to it as “Eddie’s sculpture.”