Cabbage
Windows Brooklyn
0.00156 Gallery
Brooklyn, New York

Heirloom cabbage seedlings & mixed media
6'' x variable, 2008

Photography by Leah Gauthier

Though challenging to envision given todays hyper-ubanized landscape, Brooklyn, not so terribly long ago, was once farmland. According to Of Cabbages and Kings County, a historical account of rural Brooklyn, folks who worked the land in the 19th century were mainly descendants of the original Dutch settlers. Using slave labor and city waste as fertilizer, they became one of the leading producers of vegetables (mainly potatoes and cabbage) in the nation.

The process of de-agriculturalization through suburbanization and finally urbanization after such prosperity involved real estate development, less committed and knoweldgable heirs, high cost of labor, and an encroaching modern, and sophistcated population with little respect and tolerance for the sights and smells and noise of the farm.

Cabbage was an installation of heirloom cabbage seedlings hung in memory of the farms that once stood around the site of 0.00156 Gallery.