About

"Thank you for notifying the community about vacant land! I pass the lot on Myrtle between Marcy and Nostrand very often, and I always enjoy looking at the herbs and wildflowers growing there. I thought it would be a wonderful spot for a small urban farm, but I figured it might have been owned by whoever owns the condos surrounding it. You taught me different." Email recieved on July 1, 2011, about 10 days after labeling the lot in question.

596 Acres Promo from Conspire Films on Vimeo.

596 Acres is a public education project aimed at making communities aware of the land resources around them. With the goal of a food sovereign New York City in mind, 596 Acres is helping neighbors form connections to the vacant lots in their lives -- from the smallest (throwing a seedbomb) to the largest (hosting a public meeting with the head of a City Agency that owns a vacant lot that was promised to the community as a park, see myrtlepark.org). Thanks to the Center for the Study of Brooklyn, we have learned that many of these lots are actually publicly owned and are developing a platform for negotiating interim and long term community uses for this warehoused public space.

596 acres is how much vacant public land existed in Brooklyn alone as of April 2010. If even a small portion of that was committed to neighborhood food production, we would have an abundance of fresh seasonal vegetables to eat! And think of all the grassy parks we could have! And composting sites! And whatever else Brooklynites and their neighbors know they need.

As of mid-March 2012, we just did a massive clean up of our map. Our initial data was from the April 2010 version of MapPLUTO, a NYC Deptartment of City Planning product, filtered to only land that was both vacant and government-owned. In the past month we have manually cross-referenced each lot using OASISnyc to see if you can get to the lot from the street or from some other public area. Since our goal is to help people organize, we didn't think it was helpful to show lots that you can't get to on this map. They no longer appear as a default, but you can choose to view them if you like.

These lots are interesting. For the most part, they represent anomalies in surveying, zoning and public-works projects—the technical term is "gutterspace." In the 1970s, an artist named Gordon Matta-Clark bought fifteen of these lots in Queens and Staten Island for $25-75 each and called them his Fake Estates. You can see a map of them here. We would love to hear your ideas for these inaccessible lots. Send them to fake_estates@596acres.org.

Contextual information provided by the Center for the Study of Brooklyn.