Cooper's Place, a community garden in the Roxbury section of Boston, is named after Ed Cooper, a gardener, community activist, and former director of both the NAACP and the Urban League in Boston. Cooper galvanized a group of his neighbors to create a vision for the garden and to secure the resources required to make the land their own. Founded in 1975 as the Highland Park 400 Survival Garden, this was one of Roxbury's first community gardens. Its beginnings were modest, but by l985 it had become a landmark in the community and was one of the most beautiful gardens in Boston.
Forty people garden at Cooper's Place. Each gardener has his or her own plot, and all tend a common sitting area, which they share with other neighbors. Fifteen years ago the garden was vacant land, composed of four separate houselots. All traces of the four houses that once stood there are gone, save the stone retaining wall along the sidewalk, interrupted by steps that once led to front doors.
Today, walking up Linwood Avenue toward Cooper's Place, you can see the white arches and colored roses of the garden from a block away; closer, the scent of roses fills the air. You enter by going up old stone steps through a white, rose-covered arbor. An unlocked gate leads into a formal sitting garden, with a small panel of grass surrounded by a gravel path bordered by flowerbeds. This sitting garden is an anteroom to the allotment gardens beyond, reached through another arbored gate. In this larger domain are the individual plots, a common herb garden and sitting area in back for the gardeners, and alongside, an orchard and nursery.
The transformation from vacant lots to Cooper's Place entailed the cooperative efforts of many individuals, organizations, and public agencies. For the first ten years, the garden was sustained by gardeners under the leadership of Ed Cooper and other neighbors. The garden was redesigned and reconstructed in 1984; the improvements were funded by the Boston Neighborhood Development and Employment Agency's Grassroots Program. This program awarded funds to neighborhood groups to make improvements to their local landscape. The Boston Natural Area Fund, a non-profit organization, purchased the land in order to protect the gardeners' investment. The gardeners selected a design for the new garden from among eight prepared by graduate students in landscape architecture at Harvard University. Local youth enrolled in a landscape training program sponsored by Boston Urban Gardeners and Roxbury Community College built the new garden.
Ultimately, the garden is a product of the energy, vision, and diplomatic skills of two key individuals--Ed Cooper and Charlotte Kahn. It was Cooper who initiated and sustained the garden. It was Kahn who was instrumental in the establishment of NDEA's Grassroots Program, who persuaded Anne Whiston Spirn at Harvard to devote a portion of her studio course to the design of Cooper's Place, who persuaded Boston Natural Areas Fund to purchase the land, and who organized the training program for unemployed youth in landscape construction and management.
The program and goals for Cooper's Place were well-defined: individual garden plots, a sitting area, and an orchard. Underlying this apparent simplicity, however, were the gardeners complex feelings and sometimes conflicting ideas about the place and how they wanted to use it. The design students listened carefully and then tried to design what they thought they had heard the gardeners request. They also groped to find an image for the place that would embody the values and aspirations of the gardeners. One student asked them what their favorite place in Boston was. The response was a surprising consensus: the Fenway Rose Garden. "Yes, the Fenway Rose Garden! That's why we want to include a rose garden!" The Fenway Rose Garden, built in Boston's Fens in the 1930s, with its white arbors and gates, gravel paths, and multi-colored roses, became the model for the new garden at Cooper's Place.
Cooper's Place is now a local landmark, and good design has been an important factor in that success. There have been weddings there and other celebrations. Completed in 1984, it has served as a kernel of neighborhood change. At that time, the apartment building next door and the two houses across the street were all vacant. Five years later, these were renovated, repainted, and repopulated.
Cooper's Place has been an inspiration to other groups for how they might accomplish similar goals in their own neighborhoods. Similar projects were built in other neighborhhoods in Boston. Beth Arndtsen, the student who designed Cooper's Place, went to work for BUG as their first staff landscape architect. In this capacity, she has helped many groups to organize and design local landscape improvements that express their own background and values. The project also created a reservoir of experience and expertise among the gardeners, students, and trainees in terms of how to build things, how to maintain them, and how to get things done. Cooper's Place is a model for how to care for a place. How to cultivate not only the soil, but also relations with other people.