A man named Seneca Scott built a sense of community in West Oakland, California, by building a community garden. While Bottoms Up Garden lost its crops during the COVID-19 pandemic, the community it built is still there.
Scott was no farmer when he moved to West Oakland from inner-city Cleveland via Cornell. But his neighbor, Jason Byrnes, was from rural Michigan and knew how to manage chickens, goats, and vegetable patches. They started talking, they argued over politics, and eventually, they took action. They helped turn West Oakland into a neighborhood where baby strollers were safe on the street at night.
How could planting turnips lead to that?
It happened organically, so to speak. They started planting in an abandoned plot in 2014. Neighbors stopped by to chat, lend a hand, and munch on tomatoes. Scott and Byrnes gave keys to the garden to anyone who took an interest.
There was little formal structure, but it had what Scott called “a clear message”: Everyone is welcome to make a positive contribution, but no negativity will be tolerated.
Volunteers from ages 5 to 75 started showing up. As they got their hands dirty together, they built a shared pride in the fruits of their labor.
Scott and Byrnes wanted to teach people to grow vegetables so they would know how to do it in their own backyards. But their deeper goal was to create a “third place”—a place where everybody knows your name, but it’s not home or work. Their success with that goal was spectacular.
People began to hang out at the garden instead of coming just for work days and giveaway days. They would get hungry, so people began to cook and eat there. Onions got caramelized, and goat milk got made into cheese. That attracted more people and more cooking. It all happened on camping stoves until Byrnes built a kitchen structure.
Then they started selling breakfast to the public, made from ingredients grown on the site. The “Bottoms Up Cafe” was extremely popular until it shut down because of a lack of permits. By then, great chefs had been nurtured. Three highly respected Oakland restaurants began as pop-up restaurants in that garden.
Other skills were nurtured in the garden, too. From beekeeping to massage therapy to arts and crafts, people gathered to share what they knew. It became a place where each person’s skill was valued and then amplified by its contribution to the whole.
And then there were parties. It started with a Halloween party that attracted a huge crowd. People spilled out from the garden into the street, so the next party began by blocking off a street. The crowd size grew with each event and so did the sense of community in West Oakland.
Scott knew he had succeeded when a fourth-generation Oaklander was moved to tears at the sight. He often told stories about the neighborhood back in the early 1960s. He was a biker in his younger days, and he remembered the joy that filled the streets when his biker pals held events.
“You’ve brought the magic back,” he told Scott. “But this is different because it’s for everyone.”
Scott and Byrnes are still a presence in the garden, but they’re stepping aside to let a new generation take the reins. There’s a lot to be done because of recent setbacks. The garden’s irrigation system was destroyed by rats eating the tubing and by toxic foam used to put out a nearby fire.
In a sense, the garden is going back to its roots. It began with long political discussions between Scott and Byrnes—discussions so epic that neighbors went to the garden just to listen to them. Now the pair find themselves having political discussions with the new crop of volunteers. They hear a lot of anti-police rhetoric, so they engage in the kinds of conversations we’re all wishing for: civil conversations where all opinions can be expressed.
Scott objects to the habit of yielding to criminality. Life experience has taught him that “it’s hard to get the genie back in the bottle.” He sees how the rule of law benefits everyone. He hopes to use public office to make the city government accountable and to improve the quality of life through respect for neighbors and for the law.
