Brooklyn Grange: Rooftop City Garden

Rooftop gardens are gaining in popularity in dense urban areas. Check out this cool video about urban rooftop farmers in New York City – the 40,000-square-foot rooftop garden in Queenseven has chickens and beehives (and is the largest rooftop farm in the world). Ben Flanner, one of the farmers profiled, said, “It started with the desire to farm, and also a reluctance to leave the city.”

Watch the ABC News video about New York rooftop farming

Check out the full post on 30 Days at a Time

New York’s Rooftop Gardens

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Eagle-eyed Manhattan pedestrians may spy them high above the street: lush, tree-lined gardens, whose defiant greenery interrupts an urban panorama of concrete and glass.

Tourists will never see them up close. Few New Yorkers will. Those who notice these airy playgrounds, some just a few floors above the sidewalk, may wonder how it would feel to step out of one’s living room into a private green space without giving up the perks of urban living.

A new book, Rooftop Gardens: The Terraces, Conservatories and Balconies of New York satisfies that curiosity with a photographic tour of 28 such exclusive oases.

Co-authors, and best friends, Denise LeFrak Calicchio and Roberta Model Amon called on friends and connections made over years in New York’s high-end real estate business. With architectural photographer Norman McGrath, they set out to showcase the most spectacular gardens.

Many of the photographs in the coffee-table book highlight elaborate landscaping or show the way urban terraces serve as a private art gallery. Sometimes a sculpture dominates the space. In others, the garden’s appeal lies more in its interplay with the cityscape just beyond a waist-high wall.

“It’s really a fantasy world above New York,” Amon said. “This is the epitome of luxury. A lot of people work all week and it’s their weekend retreat.”

Read the full article here