BY NICHOLAS GORDON 

The line of stylish people snaked around the plaza of Borough Hall in downtown Brooklyn and out into the street. Buzz circulated about outfits, designers, and which celebrities were in attendance. The crowd had come early on this pristine early autumn evening, and eagerly waited hours to get into the inaugural ‘The People’s Runway’ fashion show.

A collaboration between Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Brooklyn Arts Ambassador Colm Dillane, the show featured the work of five local fashion designers chosen from more than 700 open call applicants. Over 1,000 people attended the free event on Sunday, September 15. 

“I have never seen a fashion show of that size. It was a once in a lifetime experience,” said designer Ahmrii Johnson, who showed her Caribbean-inflected collection “Everlasting Love.”

Owning Their Moment

Diversely talented, packed, and backdropped by the dramatic neoclassical columns of Borough Hall, Brooklyn’s night of high fashion was a runaway runway success. With the goal of elevating local talent and “keeping arts central to Brooklyn’s identity,” the show’s organizers expressed awe and gratitude for their resounding result.

“Shout out for closing down the entire Brooklyn Borough Hall!” said Dillane, addressing the crowd after the show. “It looks like about eighty thousand people showed up,” he quipped. Dillane, founder of the label KidSuper, recalled how Reynoso had stopped by his shop in Brooklyn and they’d discussed supporting artistic talent in the borough. “There was always a disconnect between government funding and the young creatives,” Dillane said. “I talked with Antonio about being a conduit with this project.”

Reynoso added, “Government should be working with everyone but especially up-and-coming designers from the great borough of Brooklyn.”

The five featured designers were: Kent Anthony (“Icons”), Shriya Myeni (“In Pieces, Still Whole”), Rojin Jung (“Broken Patterns”), Ahmrii Johnson, whose brand name is Ahmrii Lorraine (“Everlasting Love”), and Daveed Baptiste (“Soaring High”).

 

Brooklyn’s worldly bona fides on display

The designers wove elements of their heritage into their designs. Johnson, a first-generation American, celebrated her family’s roots by using the bold color palette of the Bahamas, notably gold and cobalt blue. She highlighted handmade craftsmanship and tropical-patterned textiles. Her show referenced elements of Junkanoo, a vibrant Bahamian street festival she experienced while growing up. Her collection explored the tension between joy and grief, and cultural memory and renewal, with garments “as vessels of hope, resilience, and eternal love.”

“They gave us so much creative freedom in this show,” Johnson said in a phone interview. “Colm really helped me lean into my identity as a designer.” She also credited the show with deepening her ties to the artistic community. “A lot of designers I know feel constricted by budget or resources, or we’re shy to put ourselves out there. But I’m learning to immerse myself in the community,” Johnson said. “The designers in the show gave me new strength. We all really leaned on each other, sharing feedback and resources.”

The Energy and Atmosphere

While the dazzling fashion show had the audience rapt—a sea of phone cameras was constantly held aloft snatching photos and videos, like lighters at a concert during a torch song—the crowd itself was also a spectacle. Individuality shined. Sleek suits and sequined gowns brushed elbows with cutting edge streetwear, that proud New York staple. Self-made clothing abounded, offering a window into the borough’s eclectic, creative set.

Brooklyn United drumline and dancers performed before and during the show. The students captivated the crowd with their propulsive sound, swagger, and crisp choreography. The all-female dancers appear to be headed for the pros.

Kaileah Hunter, a wedding merchandiser, said that after finding the show online, she researched the designers and liked what she saw. “Their clothes were exciting and I wanted to see what new stuff they had,” Hunter said. “All of the collections tonight felt very specific to the designers. I could tell who made each line as it came out. My favorite was “Soaring High.” I really liked the cultural element of that collection.”

Hunter, a Brooklyn resident and Parsons School of Design graduate, also said she enjoyed the energy and the atmosphere of the event.

Indeed, “Soaring High” reached the show’s zenith. Inspired by the imagined metamorphosis of a Haitian boy navigating migration and Black American culture, the show’s bracing looks spanned fresh athleticism, academic excellence, and dapper man-about-town.

For the encore, all five collections paraded the runway with their smiling designers in tow. The crowd was ecstatic. 

Capping the borough’s glorious night, Reynoso said, “In the words of the great Brooklyn poet Christopher Wallace, known as the Notorious B.I.G., ‘spread love, it’s the Brooklyn way.’” 

BY CHRISTIAN SPENCER

The hottest place in New York City was the Hot Sauce Expo, which took center stage on September 20 at Industry City.

Hot sauce enthusiasts from across the country gathered under one roof at the Sunset Park complex to test palates and promote their craft.

Now in its 12th year, the convention reflects how consumer interest in flavorful heat has exploded, fueling a booming industry that’s literally heating up the foodie scene.

Styled as part festival and part tasting, the Hot Sauce Expo drew regional and national brands with the same cult-like energy as a garage band performing for die-hard fans.

Several sauces featured have made their way onto Hot Ones, the viral YouTube talk show where celebrities are interviewed while eating wings doused in increasingly fiery sauces. Attendees were able to sample many of the very same bottles, and more, that scorched the stars.

The expo also spotlighted the craft with divisional awards for top hot sauces and high-intensity eating contests, where competitors tore through chicken, pizza, and tacos at blistering speed.

Crowds snaked through rows of vendors offering samples balanced on tortilla chips while games, raffles, and heavy-metal beats filled the converted warehouse with a mix of county-fair ease and culinary brinkmanship.

In the abundance of condiments, many of the sauces were as diverse as the companies themselves, ranging from garlic-forward and sweet to those that leave throats raw and tongues numb.

For Scott Nuhfer of Torchbearer Sauces in Pennsylvania, his family-run company’s hot sauces were designed not just to be tasted but to be endured.

“It’s about flavor first,” Nuhfer said, holding up a bottle of Sucker Punch featured in season 23 of Hot Ones. “But we know people come here for the heat.”

Hundreds of attendees, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., stretched their stomachs with an intense array of flavors. For Ben Williams, whose queer-owned Mastodon company serves consumers seeking rich tastes with a kick subtle enough not to be mistaken for pure fire, the focus is on flavor as much as heat.

“I think that the hot sauce industry is so big and there’s so many makers. I think there’s room for everybody and we’re all doing different things, even though we’re focused on different things. I think launching a company especially—we could certainly make a super hot sauce and make things that are just based on heat,” Williams said. “But in the end, I believe that hot sauce can exist as a condiment company or as a condiment in general. And it’s for me really about enhancing your meal and not destroying it. And so we really wanted to focus on things that lift flavors.”

Hot sauce isn’t just a fiery condiment; it’s one of the fastest-growing industries in the country.

Nuhfer said, “It’s about flavor first. It’s one of the number one growing industries in the country right now. They’re predicting about a 25 to 50 percent boost over the next 10 years. From the numbers I heard, it’s about $3 billion a year in hot sauces all over the world, if not more.”

According to recent market research, the global hot sauce market was valued at $3.6 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow at a 6.3 percent annual rate, reaching nearly $5.87 billion by 2032, fueled by rising consumer interest in spicy foods, artisanal flavors, and social media-driven food culture.

The aforementioned Hot Ones is a key player not only at the expo but in the broader hot sauce culture in New York. The show partners with Heatonist, a specialty hot sauce company that curates and sells many of the sauces featured on the hit series.

“So Heatonist started—our founder, Noah Chamber, started Heatonist in 2013 as a pushcart, and then shortly after that opened the Brooklyn store. And the whole thing is we carry a lot of small-batch, all-natural hot sauces made with really unique ingredients and flavors. So just kind of spotlighting all of the small-batch makers. And then he ended up meeting the folks that work for Hot Ones and produced the show. And so we struck up a partnership with them, and he now helps curate the Hot Ones lineup for the show,” said Brianna Quaglia, marketing director.

The expo organizer, Steve Seabury of High River Sauces, described the hot sauce scene alongside the once BuzzFeed-produced show promotion as the land of misfits and friends supporting each other. No one is really in competition with each other because the sauces are generally about giving consumers a desired reaction to their specific needs.

“I love the small vendors. I always want to support the underground. You know, I first started out one day, and someone helped me out, and it’s my turn to return the favor, you know. So always pay it forward, help people out, and good things come out of it, you know,” Seabury said. “I figure the pie is big enough for us all, so we always help everyone out, and I just think it’s a good thing to do.”

Whales are increasingly common in New York City’s waterways. Boaters should take note.

BY COLE SINANIAN 

In a now-famous photo taken just yards from Rockaway Beach in September 2013, a humpback whale named Jerry thrusts his barnacle-encrusted head skyward, in near perfect alignment with the pinnacle of the Empire State Building towering in the distant haze. 

Also known as NYC0011, Jerry’s yearly jaunts through the Big Apple’s waterways were closely tracked by Gotham Whale, a local organization dedicated to documenting the city’s substantial marine mammal population. Jerry hasn’t been seen since 2022, but his regular visits marked the beginning of a strange new trend: amid a changing ocean ecosystem brought by rising sea temperatures and pressures from human activity, as well as successful conservation efforts, whales are arriving to New York City’s waters in historic numbers. Most notable are humpback whales, which can be seen by the dozens in the spring and fall just off the Rockaway Peninsula for what may be the first time in recorded history. But also present are fin whales, minke whales, and the critically-endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, of which only 370 remain on Earth. Although great news for urban whale enthusiasts, scientists are concerned: what happens when some of the largest animals on Earth visit one of North America’s busiest cities? 

A 26-foot female minke whale died in August after being struck by a private boat in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey. The graphic collision left blood in the water and sent one of the boat’s passengers overboard, an unfortunately not-uncommon occurrence in the waters of the New York/New Jersey Bight, where few boaters are expecting to encounter large marine mammals. 

“A whale in shallow water and high traffic areas where people are not used to seeing them at all is a really dangerous scenario,” says Carl LoBue, a marine scientist with The Nature Conservancy. 

According to Gotham Whale Director of Research, Danielle Brown, regular humpback sightings in New York are quite new, beginning in the early 2010s, and are the result of a complex set of factors. Atlantic menhaden, once-overfished, have returned to the area in large numbers after the success of fishery regulations put into place by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in 2012. Meanwhile, as prey populations decrease in their typical feeding grounds off New England, migratory humpbacks have begun straying from their usual routes to chase menhaden schools into New York harbor. 

“There’s not a lot of evidence that humpback whales were ever common here,” Brown says. “So this all seems to be relatively new, relatively recent, likely related to the changing waters up north in the Gulf of Maine and Canada. The ocean has been warming dramatically over the last decade, so that’s going to change fish. It’s going to move fish to new areas and the whales are going to follow the fish.”

New York City’s migrating humpbacks present a particular risk to boaters, LoBue says, as those seen closest to shore are usually young animals straying from their families further out to sea.They are focused on feeding, young and inexperienced with boats, and are likely to congregate in the same areas as fishermen. A May 2025 study suggested that a majority of humpback whales in the New York/New Jersey Bight exhibit either propeller or entanglement scars. 

Jerry was especially recognizable during his New York visits for a jagged set of propeller gashes just below his dorsal fin. LoBue adds that whale collisions are almost as dangerous to humans as they are to the whales, comparing it to striking a large deer or moose with a car. 

“I know as a boater and a fisherman myself, no one wants to hit a whale,” LoBue says. “Imagine having your kids on the boat and you hit a whale. It’s brutal and it’s bloody. They scream like we do.”

After witnessing too many close calls out on the water, LoBue and his colleagues at The Nature Conservancy, in partnership with the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island, Gotham Whale, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the Wildlife Conservation Society, began work on a whale-safe boating course. Called Boating with Whales, the free online course offers “not a comprehensive guide to IDing whales,” LoBue says, but instead a primer in identifying when the mammals are nearby and how to operate a boat safely in their presence (such as by reducing speeds).“We’re giving people the skills they already want to have in their toolbox,” LoBue says. 

The current New York State boating course does not have a whale safety section. In order for Boating with Whales to be taken by a majority of New York boaters, the course would have to both be integrated into the existing state boating course for new boaters, as well as spread widely among already-licensed boaters. 

“It won’t completely eliminate the risk, but it’ll lower the risk,” LoBue says. “It’ll make the boaters safe. It’ll make the crew safe and it’ll make the whales safer. So that’s what we’re striving to do.”

A global exhibit brings Gaza’s artists to Brooklyn

BY COLE SINANIAN

In the film Escape from Farida by 27-year-old Palestinian filmmaker Yahya Alsholy, a young man, attractive and clean-cut, sits down for a tea with his girlfriend to the backdrop of palm trees and a sparkling Mediterranean Sea. He shows her his newly taken passport photo, she mocks him for it and the couple share a laugh. Then the mood turns. She looks at him longingly: “I feel like the only thing I’m scared of is what’s going on in your head,” she says. He tells her he’s leaving to pursue a life abroad, and that once he leaves, their relationship must end. “We dreamed for so long, but now we have to wake up to reality,” he says. 

The film depicts a timeless human experience imbued with extraordinary weight; their home is the Gaza Strip, where an Israeli offensive has killed at least 66,000 people in under two years, where one of the world’s most densely populated territories has been reduced to rubble and ashes in a matter of months, where drone strikes routinely blow limbs off children and newborns die before their first breaths. In leaving his girlfriend, Alshoy’s protagonist may be, perhaps selfishly, saving his own life. 

It’s showing Thursdays through Saturdays until December 20 at Recess, an art space in Brooklyn Navy Yard, along with dozens of other artistic works from Gaza in a roving exhibit called the Gaza Biennale. Currently on view in Athens, Istanbul, Ireland, and Valencia, the Biennale’s Brooklyn exhibit represents its first North American location and a rare opportunity to view the artistic output of a population facing what a growing chorus of global scholars has deemed a  genocide. 

Gaza-born Osama Husein Al Naqqa is a painter, but once the bombardment began painting became unfeasible, so Al-Naqqa turned to digital drawing on his smartphone. As he explains in an interview shown at the Biennale, his intricate black-and-white line drawings — a child’s swollen face against a pillow, blood streaming from his nose; hands gently holding a girl’s lifeless head — tell the incomprehensible stories of loss, pain and destruction that words cannot describe, that only the body understands. 

“It’s a tool that means resisting oblivion, documenting history,” Al Naqqa says of his art. 

In a heartfelt letter titled “Message to friends,” artist Sohail Salem explains that he’s alive, but his “friends, relatives and neighbors have disappeared,” and “Beautiful Gaza has been destroyed.” He tells how his art has been reduced to pen-ink sketches in a student notebook: A woman brushes her hair in a mirror that reflects not her face, but a bombed-out mosque. A photographer with a press helmet photographs the moaning faces of the dead. “The idea of drawing seemed absurd,” Salem writes. “What could I draw in such conditions, and why?” 

Al Naqqa’s work has reached far beyond Gaza’s borders, with exhibitions in Bahrain, Mexico, Italy, Canada and France. Salem has held residencies in Amman, Geneva, and Paris. The art has broken the siege its homeland has been under for a generation, something its creators cannot do. Many of the artists featured in the Biennale remain in the enclave, continuing their work among the destruction as best they can. The question of how such works can be displayed worldwide thus becomes one of the exhibit’s key features. Viewers will notice an ephemeral quality— Salem’s sketchbook, recreated via a series of imperfect photocopies. Or Al Naqqa’s digital line sketches, drawn on his phone between bombardments. The Biennale’s organizers, a collective based in the West Bank called the Forbidden Museum of Jabal Al Risan, prefer to describe the works not as reproductions but as “in a displaced form,” or ex situ, a Latin phrase that refers to the conservation of an endangered species outside its natural habitat. With its pavilions fanning out across the globe, the Gaza Biennale is itself in a perpetual state of displacement; its artists are under siege in Gaza while digitized and photocopied renditions of their works carry their cries far and wide. 

Also on display at the Biennale is the vibrant work of Murad Al-Assar, who grew up in Gaza’s Deir al-Balah refugee camp. To Al-Assar, displacement is a fact of life, as he explains in a film on view at the Biennale. His parents had lived in refugee camps, as had his grandparents, first after the 1948 dispossession of Palestinian land by Israeli forces during the Arab-Israeli War, then again during the 1967 Six-Day War. The universe inside these tent cities, where countless tragedies and microdramas unfold daily, is the subject of Al-Assar’s paintings. A child struggles to carry jugs of water that are bigger than him. A wide-eyed boy covers his ears as bombs rain down from above. Despite the desperation they depict, the paintings are an affirmation of hope, proof that the Gazan spirit lives on among the corpses and rubble. 

“As an artist, I stepped into the flow,” Al-Assar says in the film. “I felt an urgent need to create, to express. I wanted to send a message to the world: I’m alive in Gaza. I haven’t died yet.”

 

Facing eviction from a beloved community garden after a neighbor complained about its values statement, gardeners have accused the City of discriminatory enforcement

COLE SINANIAN 

It’s 10am on a bright and breezy late-summer Sunday, harvest season at Jardin de Santa Cecilia Gentili, a community garden in Ridgewood, Queens. Originally named “Sunset Community Garden” due to the view atop its gently sloping hillside, from which the towers of Midtown can be seen bathed in gold at sunset, the garden is already buzzing. Stewards shovel compost and pick cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, purple basil, and other crops available to all members of the community. 

“Everyone is welcome here,” says Indalesio Téllez, one of the garden’s few dozen members. “We’ve just started harvesting,” Téllez calls in Spanish to a pair of women passersby pushing strollers. “You’re welcome to come by anytime to pick up some food!” A toddler with a dripping nose, accompanied by a young man wearing a gold Star of David around his neck, reaches giddily for a watering can that’s nearly his size. 

Many of the garden’s members hail from Ridgewood’s immigrant, trans and queer communities, and view it as a safe space in a world that’s often hostile to marginalized groups, says Téllez, whose family is from Mexico. 

Still, the garden is, first and foremost, a garden. A highly productive one. Piper Werle, who’s been a garden steward for the past year, doesn’t do much shopping for produce anymore. She’s proud to admit that most of her fruits and vegetables come from the garden, planted by either herself or one of her neighbors. In the past year, gardeners have processed nearly 7,000 pounds of kitchen scraps into compost and produced hundreds of pounds of fruits and vegetables, available to all community members. 

As a source of pride and community for Werle, Téllez, and dozens of other gardeners, it’s understandable, then, that when she found out the City was evicting the garden, Werle’s reaction was to burst into tears. 

It all began when a disgruntled neighbor reported the garden’s values statement — which urges garden members to interrupt “violent behavior or rhetoric that expresses all forms of hate,” including Zionism, anti-semitism, nationalism and transphobia” — to the City’s parks department as discriminatory. After a drawn-out negotiation and several inaccurate hit pieces from The New York Post, the City moved to terminate the garden’s license in May. 

In July, a New York County judge decided that the gardener’s activities were discriminatory — a charge that the gardeners and their lawyers vehemently deny. The garden’s legal team then brought the case to federal court and has since managed to delay eviction until October 3rd. But for Téllez, Werle and the other gardeners, this is about more than just keeping the garden open. The City’s efforts to close the space could set a troubling precedent, they say, where vibrant community spaces are vulnerable to closure at the request of a single well-connected neighbor.  

“The City claims to care about community-building, especially around community gardens,” Werle said. “But here is this vibrant, diverse community that’s been built to take care of the land and to feed ourselves, and it feels like they’re trying to tear it apart instead of offering even basic conflict resolution.”

The complaints

Sunset Community Garden sits behind Grover Cleveland High School track and field complex at the intersection of Onderdonk and Willoughby Avenues. According to Carlos Martinez, the director of NYC Parks’ Green Thumb program — which administers the City’s community gardens — the garden originated in funding awarded to the neighborhoods surrounding the Newton Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant.

The funding was secured in a lawsuit against the plant, after which the Ridgewood and Greenpoint communities,  guided by the NYC Parks Department, began a yearslong visioning process. Dozens of potential projects were identified, and over 500 people were involved in the discussions. By 2016, Green Thumb had secured $500,000 of funding for a community garden in Ridgewood. After a few more years of discussion between the community and the City, the location was settled and the garden opened in 2023.

A local woman named Christina Wilkinson, who is president of the Newtown Historical Society, was involved in the initial visioning process back in 2016, Martinez said in a recorded meeting with gardeners in April. Werle and Téllez joined the garden in 2023, although by then, Wilkinson was nowhere to be found.

Werle and Téllez said the gardeners decided to draft a series of community values after their first season working together as a way to facilitate collaboration among such a diverse group of people. This is a normal thing to do in communal land stewardship, Werle asserts, and the values were an enormous collaborative effort, the result of six months of surveys, virtual meetings, and in-person discussions among garden members.  As the final document — published in the summer of 2024 — notes in its introduction, it is a “living document,” meant to evolve and change as the garden does. Its tenets are a means of ensuring that all who use the garden feel welcome, Werle says.

“That’s why the agreements were made, because we want everyone to feel safe, so we can make decisions in the most productive and healthy ways possible,” she said. “Which is why it’s so ironic that it’s being touted as a tool of exclusion when it was meant to be a method of inclusion.”

The garden’s community values, written in Spanish and English, include a land acknowledgement and a statement of solidarity with oppressed people around the world, including in Palestine. The document ends with the “community agreements” that condemn and identify homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, fatphobia, xenophobia, Zionism, anti-semitism, nationalism, and racism as forms of hate. The values, the gardeners assert, are not a litmus test but a democratically agreed-upon expression of shared values, and are not meant to exclude. 

In an affidavit, Jewish garden steward Marcy Ayres explains the sense of community she’s fostered at the garden: “I have never felt any anti-semitism from the garden members, and have only felt support and celebration of my identity and faith,” Ayres writes. “Members of the garden even came to a Passover Seder that I held with my family last year.” 

Wilkinson, who had been monitoring the garden’s social media although she was no longer involved, complained to the City in September 2024. According to Martinez in the April meeting, Wilkinson was submitting her complaints through New York City Councilmember Robert Holden, who is known for his pro-Israel stance and with whom Wilkinson has a close relationship.

“Christina Wilkinson has direct access to councilmember Holden, so that’s how we are getting these complaints,” Martinez said. “It’s coming from the top. Basically, we are trapped in the middle.”

When asked via email about the discrimination that spurred her complaint, Wilkinson wrote: “I pointed out that their community values statement was discriminatory and both Parks and a judge agreed with me. There’s nothing further to discuss.” Wilkinson declined to be interviewed for this article.

The Post article 

Shortly after submitting her complaints, Wilkinson spoke to The New York Post, and the conservative outlet launched an aggressive attack against the garden, attempting to paint the gardeners as antisemites. Wilkinson had previously appeared in a July 2024 Post article for her support of an initiative to buy headstones for fallen New York City police officers.

The Post’s September 21, 2024 article, which opens with the line “They’re planting hate,” brought immediate threats and harassment to the gardeners. On September 24, 2024, a group of six white men entered the garden and approached two gardeners. The men, who did not identify themselves, began interrogating the gardeners, who happened to be immigrants from Middle Eastern countries. 

The men asked how they got their keys to the space and whether they were “pro-Hamas.” Meanwhile, dozens of violent and racist comments began appearing in the Post article’s comment section:

“You know what I like?” read one. “Gasoline and matches. Great for removing weeds.” 

“Kilemall,” read another, using an intentional misspelling of “Kill them all” to avoid censors. The commenter continued: “And their families that support them and their terrorism.” 

“Table cloth heads and sarin gas go together,” wrote another. 

Quoted sources in the article include Wilkinson, who has not set foot in the garden in years, and an Israeli woman named Sarah Schraeter-Mowers, whose name neither Werle nor Téllez recognizes. The Post quotes Mayor Eric Adams in its most recent article, whose campaign to confront the “unprecedented rise in anti-semitism and anti-Jewish hate” has been criticized as a tool to silence constitutionally protected speech.

In a written statement, Niki Cross, one of the attorneys representing the gardeners, suggested the garden may be another victim of the mayor’s crackdown.

“The City is favoring the unjustified and baseless feelings of exclusion of someone it openly admits is a transphobe, and who is openly Zionist (that is, supportive of an explicitly discriminatory and genocidal state) precisely in order to actually exclude and punish anyone who expresses solidarity with oppressed peoples and to remove the trans people of color from the community they have carefully cultivated alongside allies,” Cross wrote. “This is what Mayor Adams means by ‘stamping out hate’—in fact he and the City are illegally stamping out dissent.”

In a text message sent to gardeners on April 23, NYC Green Thumb Assistant Director of Community Engagement Alex Muñoz, described the City’s enforcement as “unfair,” and appeared to refer to Wilkinson as a “transphobe.”

“I’m sorry for everything,” Munoz wrote. “For the changing requirements, the unfair policies, for empowering a transphobe, and for not being there on the ground as soon as the Post article happened.”

The violations 

The violations that the City is enforcing as a result of Wilkinson’s complaints concern the community agreements and a small memorial for Cecilia Gentili, a prominent Argentinian-American trans-rights activist who lived near the garden. When Getnili passed away in February 2024, Téllez and other gardeners who had known her built a 3×3.5 feet tall memorial in the space’s far corner as a way to remember their neighbor.

In September 2024, the City notified the garden that the community agreements constituted an “ideological litmus test” that’s prohibited in NYC Parks’ public spaces.

A few months later, the City told gardeners the Gentili memorial violated NYC Parks’ policy about memorials. The gardeners responded with a clarification that it was in fact an art installation, not a memorial, and was thus subject to NYC Parks’ Arts and Antiquities guidelines. When garden members communicated that they wished for the installation to be permanent, the City suggested either moving the altar to a different space, or subjecting it to a formal approval process that would have it moved to a new space the following year, as large, permanent art installations are prohibited on City land. On May 5, 2025, the City sent the gardeners a termination notice, citing their continued failure to comply with NYC Parks’ public space rules.

Werle, Téllez, and the garden’s legal team, however, point out that small art installations are common throughout the city’s public gardens and are — by the City’s own admittance — rarely enforced. Furthermore, Green Thumb’s community garden handbook states only “large art installations” are subject to the written approval process, while gardeners say Green Thumb has not defined what constitutes “large.” 

“We try to turn a blind eye,” Martinez said. “Because we know that you guys having art installations is part of the vibrancy of gardens, but when the powers reach out to us and say, ‘hey, you have illegal activity in the garden,’ unfortunately we need to act.”

On June 4th, the NY Supreme Court granted the garden a temporary restraining order halting immediate eviction, but in a July 18 hearing, NY County Supreme Court Judge Hasa Kingo sided against the gardeners, affirming that the garden’s community values violate the First Amendment.

The gardeners withdrew from the NY case and quickly re-filed in federal court, for which a preliminary injunction hearing has been scheduled for October 3. In a written statement directed at Kingo, garden attorney Jonathan Wallace wrote that the judge “completely misapprehends the First Amendment” by construing the community members who lease the garden as the state itself. Gardeners are no more subject to free speech law than would be private citizens leasing government-owned office space, Wallace writes.

The ‘gift that keeps on giving’

In subsequent press releases, the gardeners claim to have attempted to contact and dialogue with the City since the first notice was sent last September, but struggled to get any meaningful compromise. 

Gardeners attempted to meet directly with NYC Parks Department by contacting Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Ridgewood City Council Member Jennifer Gutierrez, NY State Senator Julia Salazar, and NY State Assembly Member Claire Valdez. The Parks Department ignored requests, and Salazar, Valdez, and Gutierrez condemned Kingo’s statement in a July 24 letter:

“We are deeply troubled by accounts of racist and transphobic harassment against the members of Sunset Garden,” they wrote. “People in our community care and want to enjoy this space without fear or intimidation. We need to come together to ensure this garden remains a place of safety and inclusion, and we urge all parties to work toward that future.“

It is unclear exactly what would happen if the City successfully evicts the gardeners.

What will certainly be lost if the City locks the space in October — a critical time for garden care — are years worth of labor and hundreds of pounds of food. And as attorney Wallace notes in his condemnation of Kingo’s decision, successful eviction of the gardeners could lay the groundwork for similar outcomes in other community gardens. He described the legal precedent as potentially a “gift that keeps on giving,” likely to be cited for years to come “by litigants eager to suppress any criticism of Israel and to establish that trans people, people of color, and immigrants do not warrant the protection of our laws.”

The NYC Parks Department declined to comment through its press officer, Chris Clark, due to the ongoing litigation.