The golden age of the shed—New York City’s outdoor-dining boom, circa summer, 2020—produced some impressive structures. At Carbone, the fancy Italian place, people ate rigatoni in a cabin made of navy-blue wood siding with red velvet curtains. Balthazar outfitted its shed with antique pendant lights, to make diners “feel like you’ve taken a train to Paris,” according to a restaurant spokesperson. Bookworms were covered, too. Three branches of the Brooklyn Public Library installed outdoor reading rooms, designed by the firm Aanda Architects. The Roadway Readeries, as they came to be called, were painted the bright blue of Yves Saint Laurent’s Jardin Majorelle, in Marrakech, with lyrical barrel-vault ceilings that evoked the breaking of a wave. They also had good Wi-Fi.
But what went up had to come down. New standardizing regulations swept a lot of sheds away. (“Last call at the rat shack,” one al-fresco detractor wrote on Reddit.) With the Readeries facing demolition, the brains behind them cast about for a way to recycle. On a recent warm evening, a squad of architects gathered at the Success Community Garden, a two-and-a-half-acre plot in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to canvass local gardeners about how the dismantled reading rooms—now stored in a warehouse in Queens—might be refashioned into garden structures.
The discussion took place inside a large gazebo, painted Tiffany blue. Nearby were beds of purple basil, Swiss chard, okra, dill, cilantro, and multiple breeds of tomato. “I might have put six kinds down, but tomatoes are very aggressive,” Robyn Glenn, one of the gardeners, said. She was wearing a loose shirt and a pink hat, and she clutched a bunch of parsley. She was optimistic about the architects’ plans. “I’d like more people coming in to relax, read,” she said.
Annie Barrett, one of the architects, stood up and handed out sketches of a triangular shelter—still electric blue—that evoked an airy community hall. Inside, she envisioned movable seats and modular planting beds, of various heights. The distinctive curved ceiling of the original shed peeked out from under an awning.
“It has this kind of Januslike quality,” Barrett said, referring to the two-faced Roman god.
Jaffer Kolb, another architect, added, “It creates a lot of shade and a sense of enclosure, but without being enclosed.”
The floor opened to comments. “I love it,” Ora Goodwin, the garden’s manager, said, peering at the page. “The only thing that needs to be fixed is it needs a lot more concrete. It’s easier to maintain the structure of a concrete base than it is of soil.”
Glenn said, “And it’ll be easier for the wheelchairs, too.”
Ivi Diamantopoulou, a third architect, grabbed a pencil and started sketching. “What we did, perhaps mistakenly, is end the concrete right underneath the roof,” she said. “I think what you’re saying is bring the concrete out, to have, like, a porch.”
“Something like that,” Goodwin said, and pointed to a spot on the drawing. “A Weedwacker could fit there.”
“It’s a gazebo full of ideas!” Diamantopoulou said.
“We came to a garden and learned that people love concrete,” Kolb said with a laugh.
“You’d be surprised,” Goodwin said. “You have some kids who don’t like grass.”
Someone asked if they could have a surface to serve food on. (The garden hosts Sunday dinners and frequent cookouts.)
Kolb suggested repurposing some flower boxes as a prep counter. “They don’t all have to be one thing,” he said. “It’s not all plant or all counter.”
A Parks employee with a bandanna around her head piped up to say that the Central Park Conservancy had recently donated some leftover bluestone slabs. “They’re really nice,” she said.
“I don’t want to turn away anything,” Goodwin said.
Diamantopoulou loved the idea: “How beautiful is it to think you have a little bit of Public Library, a little bit of Central Park?”
As the forum wound down, Glenn handed each guest a small mixed bouquet of Italian basil, Thai basil, and parsley. Diamantopoulou looked around the space with an architect’s eyes. The Success Garden, which also has a chicken coop and a stage, hosts seventy-five community events a year, including a summer school, a food pantry, and a parents’ day. “If this garden is a collection of geometries, it’s like triangle, triangle, slanted line, square,” she said. “And we’re giving them circles. That’s why they’re so excited.” ♦
