During New York's great fiscal crisis, arson and abandonment left the cityscape scarred with crumbling buildings and rubble-strewn vacant lots. Rather than improve their properties, landlords would abandon them; thieves would move in to strip the copper plumbing from the walls and floors; pipes would overflow, and water would freeze and crack the floors; addicts and homeless people would take over the tattered hulks, and street crime would destroy the fabric of entire neighborhoods. The city's response was to bulldoze the worst of the abandoned buildings and put cyclone fences around the vacant lots. This was the decade in which the term “South Bronx” became a synonym for urban decay all over America.

A popular response was a movement to create “community gardens.” Armed with bolt cutters and pickaxes, groups with names like “Green Oasis” and “Green Guerillas” colonized derelict lots with vest-pocket gardens. These activists offered free plants and trees to neighborhood volunteers and lobbed bags of peat moss and packs of wildflower seeds into fenced-off lots. “It was a form of civil disobedience,” recalled an early Green Guerilla member. “We were saying to the government, if you won't do it, we will.” By the late 1970s the community garden movement had won over important sectors of city government to its cause, enlisted the help of Cornell University's Cooperative Extension Service, and convinced the state and federal governments to provide financial support for new green spaces in the city.