A New York Rooftop Blossoms with Lessons About Food Literacy

The Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project grows more than beans and greens. It is an open-air classroom about nutrition high in the sky between Port Authority and the Lincoln Tunnel.

NEW YORK—On the roof of Metro Baptist Church, 52 pink and blue plastic kiddie pools are filled with soil and a bounty of blossoms, legumes and leafy greens. It’s the first hot summer day in New York City, and the air is thick with haze from Canadian wildfires miles away. On this rooftop, there is life buzzing with bees and demanding watering, care and some neighborly love. 

The Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project is a garden in the sky, sandwiched between the Port Authority and the Lincoln Tunnel. It is the result of Metro Baptist Church’s effort to offer food-insecure residents some fresh and healthy produce. Metro Baptist’s congregation has provided emergency meal programs for the local community since 1984, and about 15 years ago the church decided it could do even more.

Collaborating with three other organizations—the Clinton Housing Development Company, Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries and Metropolitan Community Church—the church figured it could grow much like New York City itself. It pushed upward. 

Sixty volunteers hauled seven metric tons of soil up the steep staircase of the church onto the roof. A single seed was planted that day in 2011. The plastic kiddie pools were heaved up and over within weeks. The Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project was born.

Bound by a 4,000-square-foot roof and the strict weight restrictions of the old brick church’s foundations, organizers of Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project quickly realized there was more to grow than beans. Over the past couple years, Chrisaleen Ciro from Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries helped to define and design what has become a community garden, an open-air classroom and an escape from the brick, asphalt and exhaust of city life.

Ciro, 26, is the food justice coordinator at the ministries, which oversees the farm project. Early this morning, she is working with a lone volunteer to water the pools brimming with plants. 

“The purpose of the farm is to build community and food literacy,” Ciro said. Food literacy is the cultivation of a more mindful and aware relationship between people and food, she explained.

That means sharing an understanding of what goes into food production and the history of food systems, she said. It also means taking the time and effort to nurture community connections. Overall, she aims to help consumers and communities make more informed nutritional decisions. 

The farm fosters this by encouraging volunteer initiatives. Jessica Wilks, working with Ciro this morning, is a Hell’s Kitchen local. “After hearing rumors of a rooftop garden in the area, I found the farm’s Instagram and decided to get involved,” Wilks said. For two hours, the 47-year-old snakes a long garden hose around the maze of pools, ensuring every plant on the roof is watered to its roots.

After Wilks leaves, Ciro waits alone on the roof for Simone, one of the farm’s most consistent and experienced volunteers. A retired neonatal nurse, Simone knows something about nurturing and encouraging young life. For the last year, she has been volunteering at several New York City nonprofits and describes her work on this rooftop as fulfilling.

Ciro tells her that watering is complete for this morning. Simone, who came directly from weeding plants as a volunteer at the High Line, doesn’t mind. They stay and nibble on fresh snap peas—which Simone jokes is her “breakfast”—as they look over the city and plan a harvest. Tomorrow is the day that bags of vegetables will be ready to be shared with their neighbors. 

“Chrisaleen is the expert on the farm,” Simone said. “She is a great leader and a friend.” 

Ciro’s food literacy journey began in 2019 when she was an undergraduate student at Trinity Western University in British Columbia. During the summers she worked at A Rocha, a community center and sustainable farm in Surrey, Canada. Ciro eventually enrolled in a master’s program in communications and media studies at the New School in New York, hoping to become a food systems journalist. She wanted to gain more food systems experience before becoming a reporter and in 2023 she found the Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project in need of a coordinator. 

By noon, Simone bids Ciro goodbye. Ciro retreats to her office to answer emails, set up interviews for the farm’s summer internship program and prepare for the harvest. Tomorrow, many of these plants, in the sunshine between the surrounding skyscrapers, will be uprooted. 

A Morning Harvest 

By 10 a.m. the next day, 30 volunteers have shown up. They are from United Talent Agency (UTA), one of Hell’s Kitchen Farm Projects’ many corporate partners and are ready, in jeans and with gardening gloves, to pull their weight—and maybe a few weeds—as part of a company-wide day of service.

Ciro breaks the UTA gang into small teams. On the southeast corner of the roof, where the plants seem to grow best, six people harvest snap peas. They carefully dig into the dirt and pick ripe pods from the tangled green vines. 

At the center, other volunteers pull up turnips from the shallow soil beds. The kiddie pools are just deep enough to grow root vegetables, but the turnips seem to grow a bit less round. No matter, Ciro said, they still taste good.

Another few volunteers are sorting through a pool of leafy greens, and the smell of cilantro wafts across the roof, masking the car exhaust from streets below. Ciro dispatches the remaining volunteers to a garlic patch to harvest the green edible stalks. 

“We try to grow things that make food worth eating,” said Ciro, explaining that the farm project wants to serve its diverse beneficiaries. This includes growing Asian vegetables like bok choy and mustard greens, herbs like cilantro and oregano and varieties of peppers native to some African countries. As an homage to the Lenape Nation, the Indigenous peoples of Manhattan Island, the farm grew Lenape pole beans last year. 

The beans “have been grown in the region for thousands of years. We like to acknowledge that so much of the genetic diversity of the crops we grow are the products of Indigenous communities saving seeds,” Ciro said. And the beans are food for conversation as well: Ciro used the legumes to explain to volunteers the area’s Indigenous heritage and potential for alternative food systems.

Crops are cleaned, weighed and bagged by the volunteers to prepare for Saturday’s distribution. Each year around 400 pounds of food is harvested from the rooftop. This day, 28 pounds of vegetables and greens were harvested.

The produce is added to the church’s bi-weekly food distribution and helps round out the menu of hot meals provided to migrants in the worship hall.  

Throughout the morning, volunteers pepper Ciro with questions about the farm and how to stay involved. Ciro considers these conversations a cornerstone of the church’s outreach and the farm’s mission. But she has noticed a shift in recent months. “Since the (presidential) election I have noticed that volunteers have been asking more and more questions,” Ciro said. “There seems to be more conceptual thinking happening.” Volunteers have been asking about funding and the farm’s vulnerabilities.

“Because we have various funding sources, I think we are well protected,” Ciro said. “And there’s proof of concept that when these cuts happen, our elected officials are susceptible to pressure.” 

In a few minutes, Ciro turns to the final set of tasks for the day. The volunteers must replant the empty plastic pools with heat-tolerant crops. 

Seedlings have been nurtured under the glow of lights in the worship hall. Volunteers clamber with cucumber and peppers seedlings in hand from the first floor to the roof. Then they get their hands dirty again, scooping holes for the seedlings and carefully placing the tender stems in the soil. Another light cover of dirt, fertilizer and straw-–and the garden is renewed. 

As the morning crew feels the heat on the roof, more volunteers arrive with goods to store in the church’s basement.

“A Scalable Climate Solution”

The nonprofit New York Cares is there to unload truckloads of pantry staples for distribution. Aaron Moore, in charge of the church’s food pantry, directs volunteers to heave cardboard boxes of produce, canned goods, milk, proteins and bread to refrigerators in the basement. The bounty comes from New York City’s Community Food Connection program, New York State’s Nourish Program, and the USDA Emergency Food Assistance Program. 

Although each funding source is essential for the farm and pantry, Ciro has a special appreciation for the Nourish program, which provides money to buy fresh food from local New York farmers. 

“It’s an attempt to create a local food system and is like microdosing socialism,” she said. “It is also a scalable climate solution,” because food is not transported far and is often grown through sustainable methods. 

By 8:30 the next day, more than 50 people are lined up on 40th Street, between 9th and 10th avenues, awaiting the church’s lode of free food. Traffic congestion and some threatening dark clouds do not make for a good-morning atmosphere yet people are cheery. Community members from across the Hell’s Kitchen community, Chinatown, Brooklyn and the Bronx are chatting and catching up on their lives.

Many have been coming for years. During the pandemic the pantry served 400 families consistently. In 2024 that figure eased a bit with about 250 families seeking food every Saturday. But times are changing. “We have already seen our numbers go up since January,” Ciro said. She worries that supply chain issues and attempted federal food assistance cuts by the Trump administration will deepen food insecurity in the city.

On this day, the group offers food to 280 families.

Each family is given a time slot, in 15-minute increments, for pickup. They are handed a number when they arrive and asked to wait in the worship hall until called. Languages from across the world, children’s laughter and babies’ cries echo through the hall.

Once their numbers are called, families are given another paper slip with another number. This slip ranks them from 1 to 6. Based on a family’s income, size and other needs, the slip determines the quantity of food each family receives. 

Then they are led to the basement of the church, where tables are piled high with food from the roof and from donors. This day, there is spicy Italian sausage, fresh cilantro, milk, yogurt and a variety of proteins so that families can choose.

“There is dignity in choice,” says Kristen Pietropoli, a television producer who has worked the distribution lines at Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries since 2016. “We don’t want to give them sardines if they don’t want sardines.”

Pietropoli knows the clientele much like family. She welcomes kids she’s watched grow up, helps elderly adults climb stairs, and guides newcomers patiently through the process. 

“It really is all about community. It’s a fantastic way to kick off the weekend,” Pietropoli said. 

By 11 in the morning, the last clients have made their way into the worship hall. 

The Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project is one of the hundreds of community gardens in New York City. But even its good work is not enough to stave off hunger pains. According to the nonprofit City Harvest, 1.4 million New Yorkers are food insecure. Defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as “the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways,” food insecurity is caused by poverty and unequal distribution.

“The dream for Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project is to have multiple sites and to build more relationships with other community organizations,” Ciro said. Until then, she and dozens of volunteers will be plotting how to end hunger and food illiteracy—on this New York block at least—up on the roof.   

Cover photo:  Volunteer Jessica Wilks waters the plants of the Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project with the bridges of the Port Authority in the background. Credit: Ryan Krugman/Inside Climate News