I never got a reply from the City Manager. Rude bitch! If I offered to get you a free chain link fence wouldn't you at least say thank you? If memory serves me right I might have also suggested low cost water storage tanks like the ones I use in my garden.
Shortly thereafter, a professor from NC A&T University came to speak at one the early Renaissance Community Co-op meetings to tell us of his plans to bring community gardens to Phillips Avenue.
It's June now and I'm harvesting sweet red tomatoes from my own garden but when I ride my own 150 mile per gallon prototype Wackemall moped up and down Phillips Avenue from one end to the other I can find nothing that looks like a community garden.
Last Thursday, June 13th, I sent what I thought was a simple public information request to the City asking for the location of the Phillips Avenue community garden. Honestly, at that point, as one who grows vegetables and herbs in surplus US Army rocket launchers in my front yard, has backyard chickens and has devoted half my backyard to a vegetable garden since before I was old enough to pull the starter cord on the garden tiller, I honestly wanted to see a community garden, perhaps even help.
But a week later and still no reply from the City of Greensboro-- why?
Then a few minutes ago after making a joke with someone over at NC A&T about my making the City Staff paranoid it hit me: What if the only available site for a community garden on all of Phillips Avenue was in fact the very site I had suggested?
I started doing some online searches and came up with 4 NC A&T community garden projects. Problem is: None of them are in Greensboro. As a matter of fact, the closest to Greensboro is an hour away in Durham. And the closest community garden in the state directory is Kernersville.
So did the illegal Greensboro Inn, Bessemer Shopping Center swap kill the Phillips Avenue Community Garden? I don't know but one would have thought the City would have replied by now if there really is a Phillips Avenue Community Garden? And if there isn't a Phillips Avenue Community Garden then we've just one more example of how Downtown and filling the pockets of Greensboro's elites take president in the minds of Greensboro's "leaders" over the needs of Greensboro's poor and working class. The very food from our children's mouths! Is there nothing they won't steal from us? Nothing?
Update: It just doesn't add up. I got a reply today (below) after posting above but if the City already had all of those properties then why did they send out e-mails last winter asking the community where available properties might be located?
Here's a little info on Mr Gayland A Oliver you might find interesting.
Update 2
According to this 2012 page on Minister Gayland Oliver he "co-opened Triad Centers for Youth, Inc in 2009 and continues to manage the daily operations of the home" but according to the NC Secretary of State, the Triad Centers for Youth, Inc operated by "Minister Gayland Oliver" was suspended by the State of North Carolina in 2007, five years before the "minister's" web page was last copyrighted.
I'm wondering what was known about Mr Oliver before the City of Greensboro gave him $41,000 Dollars and how it was that he happened to leave the "non profit" school he co-founded in Little Rock, Arkansas? And I'm wondering if the good minister is still running the Triad Centers For Youth, Inc out of his home? Must be tough with all those kids in the house.
