The sun was beaming down on the Rainbow Garden of Life and Health in Melrose on Saturday, Aug. 3, but that didn’t stop its members from conducting business as usual.
Argie Ortiz was tending to her plant bed of herbs and tomatoes while Angel Garcia was struggling with the giant sunflower that keeps falling every time it storms. Milagros Rivera Negron was holding a freshly plucked peach that was gifted to her, near and dear to her heart and a little girl in a princess-like dress, topped with a tiara enjoyed a gooey chocolate chip cookie – life was good and it was about to get better.
On Aug. 3, City Council Member Rafael Salamanca, Jr., along with his wife, Jessenia Aponte, Bronx borough commissioner for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and their son Aidan, joined the members of the Rainbow Garden to cut the ribbon on their newly paved walkway.
“A lady in a wheelchair wanted to come into the garden — and I said, ‘come in,’” Rainbow Garden founder, Maximino Rivera, told the people in attendance. “But as soon as the woman entered the garden, her wheels became stuck. From that moment on, I said one of my projects is to get [a floor] because we don’t exclude anybody.”
And get a floor they did. On Saturday, Rivera’s sister was sitting in her walker under the gazebo and the shade of a mulberry tree with her wheels sturdy on the cement.
Back in July 2022, the City Council Member presented Rainbow Garden with a check for $415,000, meant to provide the community garden with an irrigation system and any necessary tools or infrastructure. Funds from that check were used to add the cement pathway, but the irrigation system has yet to be completed.
“I’m a little disappointed with the GreenThumb folks because they promised me that the water should have been done already,” Salamanca told the Bronx Times.
Established in 1978, NYC Parks GreenThumb is the nation’s largest urban gardening program and the entity responsible for providing the irrigation system to Rainbow Garden so that the members don’t have to use the fire hydrant along Melrose Avenue to water their plants.
However, the Rainbow Garden had bigger concerns. Adjacent to the vegetables and trees and flowers sits a Superfund site – a polluted area that requires long-term cleanup of hazardous materials. The hazmat stems from a now shuttered dry cleaner that sat at 753 Melrose Ave. where the vacant lot now sits, overgrown with weeds. And while the toxic area was recognized by the Department of Environmental Conservation in a fact sheet dated 2022, it cannot be found on the “ superfund national priorities list” of the Environmental Protection Agency.
According to the DEC’s own “Citizen Participation Handbook for Remedial Purposes,” some of the requirements in the clean-up of a Superfund site are that the Division of Environmental Remediation (DER) must “enhance the public’s access to, and understanding of, issues and information related to a site and that site’s remedial process, and provide citizens with early and continuing opportunities to participate in DER’s site remedial process and timely notice of such opportunities.”
But Garcia, member of the garden and of the grassroots Melrose Environmental Awareness Committee, said that the community is in the dark.
“We said, ‘can you give us a timetable for what’s going to happen?’” he said. “They wouldn’t give it to us.”
In March, the garden submitted a petition to the DEC of 650 signatures asking them to be transparent of the work being done on the empty lot.
“We did reach out to them. They told us that they’re aware of it, but they were not ready to move forward with it,” said Salamanca.
Garcia and other garden members told the Bronx Times that they saw recent drilling on the site and that when they approached the workers, they were handed a business card that had the DEC’s information on it.
The Bronx Times reached out to the DEC who responded via email on Aug. 8 stating that they have finalized the Enhanced Community Engagement Plan for the former Melrose dry cleaners and will distribute the final version with the community as soon as possible.
This article was updated on Aug. 8 at 11:05 a.m. to include a comment from the Department of Environmental Conservation.
Reach ET Rodriguez at etrodriguez317@gmail.com. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
