Raising hope & veggies in Brewerytown

PUTTING HIS money where his dream is, Marathon Restaurants CEO Cary Borish is investing $100,000 to turn a long-vacant, blighted Brewerytown lot into Marathon Farm, which will supply his six Philadelphia eateries with fresh vegetables and feed the residents of a neighborhood that has seen its share of hard times.

Although the third-of-an-acre lot on the corner of 27th and Master streets is still bordered by the ancient redbrick walls of a city warehouse that collapsed 20 years ago, Borish watched happily Sunday as blight gave way to beautiful on its way to bountiful.

In one raw, blustery weekend, community volunteers and Marathon farmers cut down and sawed up six towering weed trees, cleared 50 bags of trash, built two dozen wood-plank raised beds for vegetables and were framing out the potting and tool sheds.

This weekend, they will finish the farm in time for Mayor Nutter to officially open it on Monday - and let the planting begin.

"There will be a mini-orchard here, a community space for grilling and picnics over there, and a farm stand that will sell very affordable fresh vegetables to our neighbors," Borish said excitedly. Plans call for tomatoes, carrots, greens, peppers, broccoli and more.

"Fifty percent of what we produce on the farm will be sold at our farm stand or given away to elderly people in the community," he said. "The other 50 percent will be purchased at market value for Marathon restaurants."

While his wife, Perri, kept an eye on their children - Elijah, 5, and Sonia, 3 - who ran around the farm as if they were in rural Pennsylvania instead of urban North Philadelphia, Borish helped with the carpentry and said, "For a while now, I've had a desire to figure out how we can use Marathon as a vehicle to create positive social change.

"Then I connected with Patrick Dunn, who worked for us years ago as a server, and he exposed me to what urban farming really is - creating a community where people have direct access to fresh, organic produce grown right in their neighborhood. That became very compelling to me."

After "hunting all over Philadelphia" until they found the city-owned vacant lot they wanted, Borish said that he and Dunn took their plan to Deputy Commissioner of Public Property John Herzins, "who got what we were doing" and gave them a free, three-year lease.

"When I first met with them, I immediately sensed the potential their farm had for that whole North Philadelphia community," Herzins said. "It meets so many of the administration's goals for immediate neighborhood access to healthy, locally produced food."

Dunn, who blogs stuff like "I am infatuated with dirt!" on the Marathon website, started the Emerald Street Urban Farm in East Kensington in 2009 with co-founder Elissa Ruse. They've turned five weed-choked vacant lots where the only crop was a trashed VW van into a veggie-rich, raised-bed community garden that has grown 1,500 pounds of food on its 6,000 square feet.

That farm, Dunn said, has sustainability questions because it has a "pay what you can" policy at its farm stand and also gives food away. It is surviving only because both he and Ruse have full-time jobs elsewhere.

Marathon Farm, which is three times the size of Emerald Street Farm, has hired a full-time farm director, Adam Hill, and will have a stable source of revenue from sales to Marathon Restaurants, Dunn said, adding, "This is so cool because if it works, there will be more sustainable farms like this."

Dunn and Borish have already eyeballed a nearby block of Myrtlewood Street, which is almost completely trashed vacant lots, for a future urban farm.

As he watched Brewerytown neighbors working side by side with Dunn and Hill on Sunday, Borish could barely curb his enthusiasm.

"I'm 40 years old," he said. "I've been in the business of feeding people for a long time. I'm getting a sense of what's really important in our lives-which is giving back, connecting with people, connecting with a community.

"I think there is something big going on in Philadelphia right now - in Fishtown, in Kensington, all over the city. I feel we're tapping into something here that just feels right. I am so happy to be part of it."

There eventually will be a Marathon Farm affordable-vegetable mobile unit, he said. Maybe there will be strawberries growing along 27th Street. Maybe there will be chickens.

"We warned him about the strawberries and the chickens at our community meetings," said James Carter, president of the Greater Brewerytown Community Development Corp., smiling and shaking his head with his colleague Charles Holiday. "When we were kids, we knew where all the peach trees and all the grapevines in the neighborhood were. You ever eat fresh peaches, right off the tree?"

The memory transported Carter back to his '50s childhood for a moment and filled his face with joy. "If they plant strawberries along 27th Street . . . " he said, letting his smile finish the thought that those strawberries would never last long enough to reach the farm stand. "We suggested he move them back away from the street."

Chickens, Carter said, do not make good neighbors. Older Brewerytown residents come from farm families, he said.

They know why you never see chickens in a public library.

"They are noisy," Carter said. "And they like to fly up and perch on roofs. They are messy. We don't want chickens. Don't want roosters, either."

But 50 Brewerytown residents, young and old, showed up at a community meeting on a rainy, miserable night last week to embrace the idea of farm-fresh vegetables - which are quiet and do not fly - growing in the heart of their neighborhood.

"This is a positive thing that will replace a lot of negative things," said Allen Smith, a retired city worker who has lived since 1951 in the house that he and his five siblings were raised in, right beside the blighted lot that will soon be a densely planted vegetable farm.

"I can't get to a supermarket anywhere around here," said James Howland III, another retired city worker who lives around the corner from Marathon Farm. "As soon as things start coming up this summer, I can walk down the street and get my fresh vegetables. That's a beautiful thing."