TTT

Interviewee:  Barry Benepe						  	  Session #2

Interviewer:  Judith Weinraub					    New York City

Date:  July 13, 2009

Q:  This is Judith Weinraub.  It’s July 13, 2009, and I’m with Barry Benepe at his home in Greenwich Village.  We’re about to start our second interview.
Nice to see you again.

Benepe:  Good afternoon.

Weinraub:  We managed to get up to the beginning of the Greenmarket when we spoke before, and there we are in a lot at Second Avenue, behind Bloomingdale’s.  So can you describe that first summer and go from there?

Benepe:  The important thing is we waited until late in the summer to start the market, because we wanted to make sure that when the market opened, that we had a full range of products that people wanted to buy.  So we opened, I think it was no earlier than July, when corn was in, tomatoes, and summer squash and things like that.  We opened with nine vendors.  Four of those were non-produce vendors; they were plants and one person came in mistakenly with toys from his attic and didn’t realize we were a farmers’ market, so we didn’t put them out.  I think he had other things.  It was then that we decided we had to establish rules for the market, and at that time we thought that we would have to go out to the farm and buy produce.  We didn’t think farmers would come in.  It turned out they would.  Then we required them to have 25 percent of the produce to be off their farm and the rest could be purchased from neighboring farms.  That was the beginning of the market.
	Fifty-ninth Street was selected as the site, or recommended as the site by a funder, the executive director then of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, Suzanne Davis, and she said, “Oh, there’s this lot near where I live,” which happened to be perfect for a market, and it turned out the city owned it, and because the Council on the Environment, which ran the program, had city agencies on its board, including the mayor, we were able to get cooperation from the city in getting the lot.  The lot was small and we had never worked at laying out a market before; this was our first.

Weinraub:  Did you have to pay for it at all?

Benepe:  No.  That was the great thing about being with Council on the Environment; we had no costs for any of our sites.  The cost was really for staff, to staff them, and fixed costs for materials.  We began in a very modest way, myself and Bob Lewis and our t-shirts, and my family members helped.  My daughter was there and some of my children, working at tables.  They worked as volunteers.  Initially, in terms of our finances, we had raised $15,000 the first year towards the $34,000 grant request, our budget, which was encouraging enough to start off and pay ourselves a [modest] salary.

Weinraub:  How many weeks did you—

Benepe:  That first year?

Weinraub:  Yes.

Benepe:  We opened up three markets that first year.  Fifty-Ninth Street was the first market.  Then I was contacted by Margot Wellington of Municipal Arts Society, who lived in Brooklyn and very much wanted a market in Brooklyn, and she recommended a site at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.  When I looked at it, I thought it was terrible.  The city owned that site too.  It was across from the [L.I.R.R.] railroad station.  Brooklyn Academy of Music is not far away from there.

Weinraub:  Atlantic Avenue.

Benepe:  Yes.  It’s on the Long Island Railroad line, I think, stop.  So there’s commuter traffic there, a lot of people driving by, but nobody walking by the site, so it seemed like an uphill battle to get people to come, but they did.  It was a hot, barren site covered with coarse stone; it was unpleasant to walk on.  Had a high chain-link fence around it, was triangular in shape, which is a very odd shape to work with.  It was basically a parking lot..

Weinraub:  Had she been to the Fifty-Ninth Street market?

Benepe:  Margot?

Weinraub:  Yes.  What interested her—

Benepe:  Probably had.  She was interested in the program even before we opened.  She had wanted to be the sponsor, Municipal Arts Society, but we really approached the Council on Environment of New York City first.  I’m glad we did, because they had the resources to pull it off, where MAS would not have had it.  When I said resources, they had people on their board who worked for the city and cooperated with us, and that was a big plus.
	The third site was Union Square, and that happened because the head of the Manhattan Planning Office for the city Planning Department, Mithoo Baxter, she heard about us.  One of the interesting things about when the market opened at Fifty-ninth Street, I worked hard on making press contacts, and somehow we were able to persuade one of the major channels, news networks, to come by, and they did.  When it appeared on television, everybody knew about it.  Then the city began getting calls from outside, from farmers and other people who were wanting markets, and the city didn’t know how to field these calls because they really didn’t know about us either, because we weren’t really a city program.

Q:  Were you surprised that there was this much response so quickly?

Benepe:  We were pleased.  I was surprised on getting the publicity and very fortunate in that, because not only did one channel come down, I think Channel 2, later on Channels 5 and 7 also came to markets, and they would tack this on to their news programs and it would be like a cheerful wrap-up at the end, to give something pleasant to say about the city.  So this was good.  It put us in the right position in the city diary, and of course more people learned about us that way.
So that when Mithoo Baxter saw us and the city was involved then in trying to revive Union Square, which was really in the doldrums, S. Klein’s, a major store, had closed, and they were doing their best to rescue the square.  They had already produced a report that year, showing the future of Union Square, and the site which we selected for the market, and they helped us select, was shown as tennis courts.  I said, “I think you should redo your plan and show this as a farmers’ market,” which they did.  They proceeded then to notify the other city agencies.
At that time the Parks Department didn’t control the site; it was controlled by the Highway Department.  At that time there was no Department of Transportation; it was Highway and Traffic.  So we had to deal with two different agencies.  They were using it as a parking lot, and its history as a parking lot went way back to the 19-teens.  It had always been used for parking.  In the 1934 Public Works Guide to New York, it listed Union Square North as a parking lot.  However, its true history was as a public place which was created in 1811, when the first map was made.  I have some wonderful records of it, where the surveyor [and map maker, John Randel, Jr.] was cutting his way through wildlife to try to survey the land.  It was that wild then.

Q:  It was trees and—

Benepe:  Yes, shrubbery.  He talks about that.  I have a report in which he discusses it.  It’s called The D. T. Valentine Manual of 1964, which is a beautiful manual. Adrian gave me this copy.  In it Randel discusses surveying Union Square, and he describes being at Sixteenth Street and Union Square West, which is just where we started the market.

Q:  How much time was there between Fifty-ninth Street, Brooklyn, and—

Benepe:  Very little.  Everything happened within a period of two months, within two months of each other.

Q:  So how did you and Bob manage?

Benepe:  Well, we were on the phone a lot.  We called farmers and we called the city agency people necessary to help us.  So there was a lot of arranging.  Then, of course, publicity’s important, so we would crank out news releases and flyers and distribute flyers.  For the first ten or fifteen years, the market, the job was always how do you let people know that we have a market.  So there was constant outreach to the community in various ways, attending conferences, meetings, going to community boards, just getting the word out.
The most important factors in making a successful market, over and above all those other attempts, is visibility and imageability, which are two different things.  Visibility is you see it when you walk by.  Imageability is when you say the name, people know where it is.

Q:  Is that a technical term?

Benepe:  No, it’s one I made up.  It comes from Kevin Lynch, who wrote Image of the City.  So that when I say “Times Square” to you, you can picture Times Square.  I don’t have to give you directions.  If I tell you “Bryant Park,” I’m probably going to have to give you directions….Broadway has a strong image.  Everybody can find Broadway, no matter where they live.

Q:  Except taxi drivers.  [laughter]

Benepe:  Probably.  So we tried to find places that were, say, a block from Bloomingdale’s.  That gives people a good idea of where it might be.  It was also at the foot of the tramway, so people who knew about the tramway or the Queensboro Bridge could get an image of where we were, which made certain locations very difficult.  We had one that was offered to us behind a church on East Sixty-eighth Street, and there was no way in the world to tell people where that was.  You could give the name of the church, but that didn’t mean much.  So it was a difficult market to get off the ground.  We put maps in our flyers and things like that.  But Union Square was a cinch.  Everybody knew where Union Square was.
	Flatbush, Atlantic, for people in Brooklyn wasn’t such a big hump, and it was certainly visible, but mainly to people driving.

Q:  Why do you think people wanted more markets, besides the farmers?

Benepe:  That’s a really good question.  I’m not sure if people did want more markets.  I think when they saw them, they found them likeable.  What was interesting about Fifty-ninth Street, that was a gated site, so we kept the gate closed while setting it up, and because the use of the site had changed from a parking lot to a human activity, it made people curious as they walked by, so that within a space of two or there weeks, they were lining outside the gate, waiting to get in, because they knew this was going on.  They could see it when they walked by.  That’s really important.  That has to do with imageability as well as visibility, the passing-by bit.  They both go together.
	When we started a market in Washington Heights later in later years, in the eighties, we were shown the site in a valley surrounded by high-rise public housing and filling stations, very depressing looking area, and the …Washington Heights/Inwood  Association, tried to get us to go down there because it was a slummy area.  They thought this would help clean it up.  I said, “No, this is really undesirable.  I don’t want to be here, and I don’t think other people want to come there.  So let’s walk around and look for what might be nice.”  We walked up to Broadway, and there up above 175th Street was, unlike the other streets, was wider.  It was 100 feet wide rather than 60.  It had a very easy way [for farmers] to get in there and parking, and the other thing that let to its imageability was the former—I think it was the Roxy Theater.  It was one of the old big movie palaces, which had been turned into a church at that time.  It was Reverend Ike’s church.  So that had a marvelous presence, so you felt you were some place.  I have postcards of the famous markets in Europe.  They were [often] on the cathedral squares.  If you said you were in front of a certain cathedral, people knew where you were.  So this had that kind of a presence.
So we were trying to be careful.  We had many requests for markets which we wanted to honor, because we were constantly looking for new outlets, and the people who wanted the markets wanted them where they were.  So the market at 137th Street was in front of Harlem Teens for Self-Help, which was run by Minerva Coleman, who is a real go-getter.  Minerva is one of these devoted, driven, intelligent, passionate people who love their community and wanted to do the best she could for it, and she thought a market would be just what they needed, because they needed food they could afford and needed in their diets.  It was her commitment which made it work.  She made sure to get people there, get her neighbors.  She said, “This is an unsafe neighborhood for anybody to live in.  Apartment hallways are broken into, and security is important.  This helps improve security.  This makes us feel like a neighborhood.”  So her leadership and support made it work.
This was true in many cases. [In Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Heights Association director Tony Manheim] … was very supportive and helped us get started [in downtown Brooklyn at two locations].  A second market in Brooklyn, which ended up being in front of the courthouse, was because of the Brooklyn Heights Association wanting us, and then we ended up also going in front of Borough Hall [on Saturdays].  Borough Hall has a very strong image.  This was Fulton Street, where the trolley used to be.  So a lot of attention [had been] devoted to [creating] this space, and it showed it, so was a natural for us.
Strange happening at the courthouse.  These two locations were near each other, but they were different days.  The administrative judge in the court wanted us out of there.  He said, “It’s not appropriate to have a market activity in front of a courthouse.”  Said, “People might slip on a banana peel.”  We didn’t sell bananas, you know.  [laughter]  But he just thought it was “demeaning to the court,” is the word he used.  So we had a meeting with him and brought another judge to the meeting, who was very highly respected.  I don’t recall his name, but he was unusual; he was blind, so he couldn’t see the market, but he really experienced it.  He argued to have it there, and over the administrative judge’s objections, the market did open in front of the courthouse.

Q:  That was approximately when?

Benepe:  I’d say approximately 1982.

Q:  Where was the John McPhee piece?

Benepe:  That was early on.  That was like ’77.

Q:  Could you tell me how that happened?

Benepe:  That happened because of Bob Lewis, again.  We were a great team because he had very good strengths, and he’d read John McPhee’s books and he loved his work, and he contacted him.  John McPhee really cottoned onto the idea and came down and he spent time at the market.  I think he visited farms as well.  He was terrific, and Bob was brilliant in bringing him there.

Q:  What kind of reaction was there from the public after that piece?

Benepe:  Not only from the public; it was reprinted in the Congressional Record.  It got into the Congressional Record [by a] congressman from California—McPhee’s piece was published also in New Yorker magazine under the name “Giving Good Weight.’.

Q:  Originally, yes.

Benepe:  Right.  So the congressman in California read this in the New Yorker, and he said, “We should be doing this in California.”  California got off to a rousing state program of farmers’ markets.  There was a woman there whose name I don’t remember—it may come back to me—who was really gung-ho in establishing markets.  She was such a vital person and so attractive and so devoted.

Q:  I can ask Gus Schumacher.  He may know.

Benepe:  Yes, he probably will remember her. [Or Bob Lewis may]. There was a lot of back and forth between us.  I was going to conferences on the West Coast, and people were coming here.  There was a very strong ground—what’s the word?

Q:  Groundswell.

Benepe:  Groundswell among communities around the country.  Baltimore had a woman from Brooklyn who ran the Baltimore farmers’ market.  Went down to see their market, and their market was by far the largest single farmers’ market in the country, had 125 vendors.

Q:  Where was that?

Benepe:  Judith may remember.

Q:  Near the Washington monument?

Benepe:  No, it wasn’t in a very imageable place.  It was hard to find, I remember.  There was one market I went to that was under elevated railroad tracks or an elevated highway.  Baltimore had a couple of markets.  It had a traditional wholesale market where the farmers’ trucks came in and sold off the trucks, but it’s not that market I’m speaking of.

Q:  That was covered, the wholesale market.

Benepe:  I thought those were trucks selling off the tracks, as I remember going there.  There was maybe some inside, some outside.  Could have been.  Maybe what happened there is that the wholesalers were inside and the farm trucks were selling on the street, which is not dissimilar to the Bronx Terminal Market, which we had farmers who came down from Orange County, who came to Greenmarket, also went to Bronx Terminal Market. [One of the farmers there, Hoeffner Farm,] also Bronx Terminal Market.  So the father [Jack], went to Bronx Terminal and sold wholesale from his truck.  The son [Phil] came to Greenmarket and sold retail from his truck there.

Q:  How interesting.

Benepe:  The Hoeffners are no longer with us, as far as I know.  I don’t know why.  They’re Orange County farmers.  But other farmers, [including Rich Hodgson and Don Keller have been coming since the first year.]  I just talked to Rich Hodgson last week.  If you ever want to talk to somebody else to get a sense of continuity, he’d be good to talk to.  We have three generations of family members now at the markets, because Rich Hodgson, whose father is Dick Hodgson, and Dick died a few years ago, and Rich Hodgson’s son, I think, is involved in the markets, so three generations involved.  And Rich Hodgson’s already an older man, an old gray-haired man.  He was a young boy when I first met him.

Q:  These markets are here?

Benepe:  Yes.  Rich Hodgson is here in Union Square.  I think he’ll be here Wednesday.  The Binaghis, and Van Houtens have been with the Greenmarket since before 1980. There are maybe six to seven farmers who’ve stayed in since the beginning.

Q:  Of those original—

Benepe:  Yes, of the original.  As I say, originally there were only nine at Fifty-Ninth Street, and four of those were dealing with flowers, not other plants and other things.  But the vegetable and fruit expanded rapidly, and also interest was there.
	The other changes that took place, I’m both exploding and compressing the experiences, is that the market was initially very seasonable.  As I said, we opened late in the summer because we discovered the following year that if we opened too soon, there wasn’t anything to offer, just greens, lettuces.  People still—I’ve seen in Greenmarket educated, smart, well-dressed, well-to-do people come looking for oranges and don’t understand why we don’t have them.  So that there’s a constant education process in what is the farmers’ market.  So they’re disappointed when they don’t see corn and tomatoes in June, but now generally the buying public understands seasons and they respond to seasonality. [Gradually we broadened our selection to include grains, baked products, maple syrup, honey, cheese, milk, fish, poultry, meat and other products].
	Then the other thing is that after we’d been open a while, we reached way beyond our limited Orange County farmers and northern New Jersey and reached out into southern New Jersey, and there you’re getting crops a whole month earlier, [and into the Finger lakes for grapes, wine and vinegar].

Q:  You mean as you needed more farmers for the additional markets?

Benepe:  And more and more farmers heard about us.  We would go to conferences attended by farmers, so we were not only spreading the word to our colleagues in the farmers’ market world, but also to farmers in the region.

Q:  What kind of conferences?

Benepe:  The conferences were generally direct marketing conferences.  Then occasionally there would be conferences just for growers, growers searching out new markets for their food.  So we’d make a plug for Greenmarket at those conferences.
One of our first southern New Jersey growers, [Frank Stiles], became the subject for one of our major posters we used.  It’s of a farmer holding this big basket of greens, and the painting for the poster was made by a colleague [Joel Specter] who I shared my office with.  He had a studio on the same floor and the same room, Joel Spector.  He made this illustration of a farmer holding this basket of greens, and that became our big poster for that year and maybe succeeding years.  He was a southern New Jersey farmer, so he was able to come in early and beat the other farmers in the Hudson Valley who felt the pressure of competition.  So they were finding ways of competing, specializing in certain crops.  One of our growers said, “I want to buy a farm in Florida and I’d like to bring up oranges from my farm and take down apples to Florida in season.”  And we debated that, should we do it or not do it, and we said, no, we really should keep to our region.  We had the same issue with Finger Lakes farmers.  Finger Lakes being 250 miles away was a long journey for small organic farmers, and they seem to have also small farms, sometimes five acres or less.
So the proposal was, well, let them come in as a co-op and sell off one truck, maybe four or five farmers, and the criteria for allowing them in would be, one, they’re organic, two, they’re small farmers, and three, they’re 250 miles away.  But our Farmer Consumer Advisor Committee wouldn’t go along with that.  They didn’t want that competition.

Q:  Were all the farms organic at that point?

Benepe:  Oh no.  First of all, organic was never a goal of our market.  That became self-impelled by the organic growers themselves.  They wanted to make themselves attractive.  I have never had a bias towards organic just simply because getting locally grown food is difficult enough.  I don’t want to get too fussy.  Secondly, what’s important is the flavor, the variety, the freshness, the maturity.  All of those things have nothing to do with whether it’s organic or not.  The differences between organic and non-organic are not that great, because the conventional farmers we’re talking about are not industrial farms.  They’re not using high amounts of chemicals because they’re too expensive to use.

Q:  You talk about committees related to the Greenmarket.  So explain what the general staffing was and what kind of board eventually developed.

Benepe:  Well, the concept of the Farmer Consumer Advisory Committee evolved from a man and wife farmer from Cream Ridge, New Jersey, the Etgens, Arlene and Bob Etgen.  They were complaining about farmers doing things that they thought weren’t kosher.  So they said we should tighten our rules and have a Farmer Consumer Advisory Committee going over potential violations and referring the violations to staff and seeing they’re carried out.
The irony was that one of the first people brought up on violations were the Etgens for buying things that weren’t theirs, because we went to visit their farm, they didn’t find much there.  They were penalized and they finally dropped out of the market.

Q:  What did they do?  They bought from other farmers and brought it down?

Benepe:  I’m not sure where they got it from.  A lot of the buying that goes on can be other farms.  It can be people going to a local auction block.  In the case of New York State, some people were going to… a large auction block in Menands, New York, outside of Albany, where the farmers were both selling and buying.  They would go up there with stuff from their farm and sell it and then they would buy things from other farmers and bring it down to the market.  Extremely difficult to police that, because if the farmer’s already growing tomatoes and he’s buying tomatoes because he doesn’t have enough, that’s pretty hard [to pin down the origin]. He may sell not only at Greenmarkets, but also elsewhere in his own community at the farm stand or in other farmers’ markets, there’s no way of knowing whether he is selling more than he produces except within our own market.  We could see that.
So the bookkeeping is really difficult.  They submit crop plans. Every farmer has to submit an application at the beginning of the year.  It’s a very lengthy application.  The crop plan will show how many acres or even row-feet of each item he plans to bring in.  So at least we make sure there’s a match between what he’s growing and what we see in the table, and that’s followed up by a farm inspection, which still happens today.

Q:  By whom?

Benepe:  By a staff person on Greenmarket’s staff, Counsel on the Environment staff.  It’s a woman named June Russell who does it today, and she has some assistants.  She goes to the farms.  Policing is a big part of it.  So there’ll be the crop plan, the visit to the farm, and then the checking to see.
We do inventories at the market.  The [market] manager writes down everything’s being sold and the prices they’re being sold for.  So we can, one, track how well the market’s performing.  We try to—this is the hardest thing to gather, but we gather how much is being sold in addition to the price.  Farmers don’t like to say how much they’re making because they think the IRS somehow will find out, which is ridiculous.  The IRS can’t get anything from us.  They probably are more afraid of what their competition may know.  I’m not sure.  But we can always look at the empty crates piling up.  You can make some pretty good estimates.  I’ll ask them, “How did you do today?”  Some I know will keep their figures small, and some will be open about it.
One farmer from the Finger Lakes who would drive down the full distance—and this was going back, again, to the early eighties—would say, “I need to gross 1,600 to make it worth coming down.”  This was a market where I thought if people were making 300 they were doing well.  So 1,600 is a big figure.

Q:  Let me go back for a second to Fifty-Ninth Street.  How long did that last?

Benepe:  Not very long.  I think possibly three years at the most.  What happened was that the city owned the site, wanted to turn it over to a private developer, which they did pretty quickly.  We made a drawing, a really wonderful watercolor drawing, saying this could be a permanent park market, a great open space, right across from the bridge entrance, and tried to sell them on that idea, but the Community Board wasn’t very supportive for the market there, which is really strange.  The chair, I think, of the board then was Joanne Battalia, who was also, strangely enough, a member of the board of the Parks Council, was interested in parks.

Q:  She was or you were?

Benepe:  No, she was.  But she opposed the market.  She thought it was too commercial or something, didn’t look nice on the street.  She went to the Hamptons in the summer, so it didn’t matter to her, but when she was back from the Hamptons, she wanted to see the market disappear. 
Then there was a woman named Doyle.  What was Mrs. Doyle’s first name?  She was the Fifty-Ninth Street Association and she would go and take pictures of empty crates, which is, for me, of course, a symbol of success, but for her it was a symbol of failure, because they looked ugly, and take them to the Community Board and say, “Look at this, how bad it looks on our street, these empty crates inside the lot.”  So there was a certain kind of institutional resistance to the market from that part of the community that felt they represented the community.

Q:  When did Union Square become the primary deal market?

Benepe:  Very early.  First, it was slow starting, Union Square, and as I said, it was the city Planning Department which pushed it.  Mithoo Baxter’s boss, the commissioner then, was [Victor Marrero]….As a planning commissioner, he was very supportive as well.  The planning commissioner was supportive.  They managed to help—I don’t know if it’s support, but help the Highway Department and the Traffic Department in giving up the [parking] meter income [on Saturdays] because they were getting income from meters, so they didn’t want to lose that.  They didn’t make us pay up for the lost income.
That was a struggle, because Union Square was really undesirable in those years.  It was a drug haven.  There were actual shootings.  There were some murders involved.  The farmers working the market hated looking at it, such an awful environment.  I went over there once with Mary Frank and we were walking into the southern end of Union Square—this was during those late seventies—and one of the, I guess, dealers came up to us and said, “You don’t want to come into this park.  It’s not safe.”  [laughs]  That’s what the park was like then and why the city was desperate to turn it around and thought that we would help play a role.  Very few people came to the market in those early years.  It was not nearly as successful as Fifty-Ninth Street.  But the farmers were determined and they kept coming back.
Of course, we would flyer like hell, just go out there and put out flyers on the streets and contact people.  The Community Board, we were actually at the focus of three Community Boards, two, four, and five.  Two was Greenwich Village, four was the Lower East Side, but five encompassed Union Square and that was a Midtown Board.  Actually, I had been on Community Board Five and their Traffic Committee, so I had contacts there.  Community Board Five is really quite strongly supportive.  They came down to the market to see how it was working, and were impressed that we live up to our commitment to how we ran the market and that there were farmers there; it wasn’t just peddlers.  So Community Board Five, for all those years, was supportive, unlike [some other] Community Boards [such as 6 and 7].
Community Board One was always supportive of the markets downtown.  The Brooklyn Community board, I think remained supportive.  The Upper West Side, Community Board Seven, was supportive of that market up there, but not of other markets.  We had a market on [Verdi Square] next to … a subway station.  It has been rebuilt.  It’s now a park [with no room for a market].  We were doing very well there and they sort of pushed us out in order to get the subway station rebuilt and made into a park.  It’s a very nice park.

Q:  The Seventy-Second Street Station.

Benepe:  It’s Seventy-Second Street, maybe it is, yes.  But it was a very successful market.  We hated to lose it.

Q:  There is still a small market there. 

Benepe:  At Seventy-Second or Seventy—

Q:  Well, just below it.

Benepe:  Sixty-Sixth, there’s one at Tucker Square.

Q:  Yes.

Benepe:  My niece’s son is now working there, which I’m very pleased with.  He brings in a unique experience.  He got hired as a manager for that market and other West Side markets.  His experience is unique because he works as a farmer in Costa Rica during the winter.  On top of that, he speaks Spanish like a native, so in a lot of these communities, speaking Spanish is a great asset.  His name is Christopher, Christopher Wayne.  He is delighted with working in the market.  It’s nice to have this sort of family bridge going across and getting involved.

Q:  So about five years after you started at Second Avenue, how many markets were there?

Benepe:  During the 80s we grew to over 20 sites, but we closed as many markets as we opened because they were in bad locations.  Some of those were in the Bronx, some on the Upper West Side, so that we learned from experience what markets lasted.
We had one on Alexander Avenue in the Bronx and it had only one farmer, but as long as that one farmer was willing to go, we were happy to keep it open.  His name was Frank Cole.  Frank was an interesting guy from two respects.  One is, his farm was an area of New Jersey you never think of as farm country.  It was in the northwest, not in the south.  I’d never been over there before.  It was a very beautiful area.  The second unique thing about him was he had a boyfriend here in New York who worked for him, a black man, so he was very comfortable working in minority communities.  So he would go into an area where nobody else would go.  He was one of the two farmers who, when we had—this is another market we opened and closed—indoors [on Sundays] at the World Trade Center, where the escalators came up from the PATH tubes into that great hallway, we had that as a Sunday market, Frank, and then we had one farmer from New Jersey and one from New York. … So we had [a] farmer there representing [each] state.  We’d put up exhibits for them and talk about the state agriculture.  So we did some education about farming at the World Trade Center and make a connection, “This is why we’re in the World Trade Center.”
So Frank stayed with that market for a few years.  Port Authority was cooperative.  It was a very difficult market because they had to come in through the cellar, unload things, get into elevators, bring up their tables and chairs.

Q:  The Port Authority one?

Benepe:  Yes.  But they supported us and it worked for a while.  Then after 9/11, we opened up—oh, and then of course, at a certain point we moved up on the street in front of the World Trade Center.  That was an extraordinarily successful market even though it was in a business community, not a residential community.  One, we were in walking distances of a residential community on the Hudson River and the business community was so large the people come down at lunchtime and get things and take things back to New Jersey from New York.  [laughs]  New Jersey-grown produce.

Q:  That’s pretty funny.  When and how did the concept of different days for different places emerge?

Benepe:  That was sort of hit and miss.  Obviously, the World Trade Center you’d want a weekday, because that’s when the business community is open.  Which days we were able or not, Wednesdays we were pretty full so we needed to find outlets [on] other days when we didn’t have farmers and also our own staffing because from the standpoint of our program staffing, I hired people to work basically by the hour, not by the year.  They worked for me, not for the Council on the Environment.  So I would bill the Council on the Environment as a consultant.  So we didn’t have overhead to speak of.  We didn’t have any medical insurance, we didn’t have any holidays, because they were working [as contractors] like salesmen.  They were working by the hour and by the days we needed them.  It’s like how people work in restaurants in a certain way.  But on the other hand, I wanted to keep them as fully employed as possible for two reasons.  One, they needed the work, and, two, they were getting training which would be valuable.  When you learn how work on one site, you can work on the next.  And they got to know the farmers.  The farmers would see the same manager as we work from site to site.  I wanted to be consistent with good staff, trained staff, and committed staff.
Then seasonality changed.  This was most apparent at Union Square.  Initially, as I said, we only opened during the summer and early fall.  That’s because you didn’t have crops growing the rest of the time.  But then gradually other crop products came in.  A very obvious one was bakers.  Well, bakers were not seasonal.  Then there were the crops like jams, honey, grains, and as more and more of those things came in and the range of food broadened, then we took the big step of bringing in meat, and there we were concerned all about the health laws.  But since we were under this New York Department of Agriculture, we operated under their laws, not the New York City Department of Health.  So they established those conditions which had to be met for farmers to bring in meat.  It had to come from approved slaughterhouses, USDA Approved.  So that was getting over a big hump, meat, then fish.

Q:  When was that meat and fish?

Benepe:  Well, everything really happened in the eighties because, after all, we started in ’76.  The late seventies was chiefly devoted to the opening of new markets, not so much of new products.  Union Square started as a Saturday market.  We felt there was enough demand there to then add Wednesday.  Then within about five years we added a Friday because Friday is close to the weekend.  Then when we decided to add a fourth day, we said we keep having the same people coming back who are selling on Saturdays coming back the Wednesday.  We see the same faces.  Union Square is too sought-after.  All the farmers sending applications always put Union Square at the top of their list.  We had no room for them.  So when we opened Monday, we said only new farmers for Monday; none of the old farmers already here can come.  That did two things, not only brought new faces, but it brought in a lot of organic farmers because the organic farmers came recently and that was ideal to give organic farmers a break into a strong market.

Q:  How long was Bob with you?

Benepe:  From the very beginning.

Q:  But how long did he stay with you?

Benepe:  That’s a good question.  When did he go to go work for the Department of Ag and Markets? [In the mid 80s].

Q:  When you talked about the meat and fish, I wondered if he was already working for the state at that point.

Benepe:  I don’t think so.  I would think he went to the state in about ’87 or ’88, but I’m not sure.  If you’re talking to him, he’ll tell you.  I could be way off.  That question of was he there when we had to go to the state or not, he would have probably played a more helpful and useful role after he was with the state than before, because I don’t think he had any particularly strong state connections before that.  That’s true.  One of the big things I’m sort of leaving out is the cast of characters one deals with on the agency level.

Q:  Why don’t we talk about that.

Benepe:  I’d put most strength on the people on the community boards, the chairs of community boards, the chairs of committees, the community organizations.  I mentioned already, in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Heights Association, the … Washington Heights Association.  There were the Union Square Community Coalition …and they were very big supporters.  Evelyn Strauss succeeded Carl Rosenberg as the head of USCC.  Initially it was called the USPCC, it was Union Square Park Community Coalition, and “Park” got dropped out of their name.  Jack Taylor has been with them since the beginning.  He’s one of the people who give you consistency in their help.  So they were one typical of the local groups which were always in our support.
	When we first opened, a newspaper called The Packer, and it was the second newspaper representing the wholesale food industry, ran headline stories opposing us and trying to convince the city not to give us permits because they thought that we were competing with their grocery stores, and within weeks of those first editions of the papers, they turned around and supported us because they realized we weren’t competing with them and that we were a real farmers’ market.  They said, “We couldn’t care less about farmers.”  [laughs]

Q:  Amazing.

Benepe:  “They’re no threat.”  They thought we were brining California produce, that’s what they were worried about, and competing directly with Texas onions or [Florida] oranges.  I said, “New York?  New Jersey.”
In fact, we tried to convince them to carry local produce.  Fairway has done that to quite an extent.  I’ve forgotten the one on the East Side said they were going to carry local.  They put it in their advertising.  It was either Shoprite or something like that.  They would say “local” in their advertising, and I would go to the store to see if they were really carrying local and they weren’t.  It was phony advertising.  And I would talk to them about it.  I’d say, “Where’s your local stuff?”  Because I wanted the competition.  I wanted to see them buying local food.  My thought was if the supermarkets would carry all the regional produce that could be grown here, there’s no need for us.  I’d be happy if I was put out of existence by good, honest competition, but they weren’t moving in that direction.
I did a survey and I got a grant for it [to determine the market for locally grown].  I never completed it to the publishable state. ….  But the core of the survey was to pick thirteen locally grown items that are also sold at Hunts Point and to see what percentage of these thirteen fruits and vegetables sold at Hunts Point came from local sources.  One of them, eggplant, almost completely, 100 percent, came from local, regional sources, strangely enough.  Eggplant being the only one.  But in general, the others had a very small percentage, as low as 2 or 3, 4 percent from the region.  Carrots were coming from Canada, from California.  California carrots were delicious and cheap.  I can understand why.  Even local apples were hard to find in the stores.  They were coming from the State of Washington.  That was a big supply.
So that what the study showed is that food was not being purchased locally.  People speak about the watershed.  We were talking about the foodshed and we developed a big three-dimensional map showing where the farms were in our region.  We had little pins we put on the map to show the cluster of farms.  That concept of foodshed has been adopted, I think, by the [Barack] Obama administration.  I think they used the term “foodshed” this past year.  I think maybe Michelle Obama talked about it a bit. [Also, our Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer, announced a new initiative, “Food in the Public Interest,” released in February 2009.]

Q:  Has anybody ever agreed on the distance?

Benepe:  Michelle Obama was quoted as using a very great distance, and Stringer, 200 miles….

Q:  He had a conference.

Benepe:  Stringer.  Scott Stringer.  He … gave a news conference [at Union Square announcing an upcoming conference late in the year.]  If you could extend the subject and were going to talk to him, that’s a great report.  He talked about how we were moving quite far, at least, I think he says 200 miles.  We normally see it as being 120 miles.  When we’d said 250 miles, we realized we were moving down into Delaware.  We actually had a Delaware farmer—I think I might have mentioned this to you during our last interview—who came up with a small school bus loaded with melons from Delaware and his barefoot daughter.  It was wonderful.  In a gingham dress, the whole works.  [laughs]

Q:  How much of your time was all this taking up?

Benepe:  Literally all of it and more.  I was doing some other consulting work, but I didn’t have time for very much.

Q:  This was over from the beginning until when?

Benepe:  Let me take that back.  Maybe in terms of my available time it might have been as little as 40 percent, the big part of it, but it gradually grew to be close to 100 percent by the time I retired.  I mean, I did want to keep my foot in the door in planning projects.  I did a lot of work during the eighties in communities like Woodstock.

Q:  You mean pro bono work.

Benepe:  Not pro bono, no.

Q:  Actual billable work?

Benepe:  Yes, professional work.  Historic preservation was an area which I was very active in.  I did a preservation guide for East Hampton Village in New York.  I [prepared] a country report for Ulster County and that’s still being [sold in bookstores].  That was in the seventies.  I did master planning for communities in Sullivan County and Ulster County.

Q:  When did Union Square get to that imagibility level?

Benepe:  In 1987 the Parks Department [prepared plans]… to rebuild Union Square Park itself, and his model for the park was going to be Bryant Park.  I don’t know if you remember the plan for Union Square.  It’s a Union Jack plan.  First of all, you should step back further.  The 1811 plan for Union Square [later added] Union Square Park, I think, was built itself around 1826, was an oval park, complete oval, like an egg, with a green in the middle [designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, I think]…..
Then at sometime in the 1930s, maybe ’34, they connected the subways there, the IRT and the BMT.  In order to do this, they wanted to create a mezzanine over the subway tracks which ran under the park at an angle, so they had to raise the entire park to cover the mezzanine by about four feet.  As a consequence, the park was no longer level with the ground, and they developed this formal plan with its paths intersecting like the Union Jack flag at the center with a huge flagpole and a space at the center.  As a consequence, the park became really an uninteresting spot.  I don’t know who designed it.

Q:  Uninteresting?

Benepe:  Yes.  I wouldn’t be surprised that its eventual demise in the 1970s as a drug haven was partly related to its poor design.  It was a park nobody really wanted to go to.  It was a park where it was always associated with—well, during the depression years—this was when it was rebuilt—it was a hangout for winos and public speakers.

Q:  [laughs]  Perhaps one and the same at various times.

Benepe:  Jack Taylor loves to recount the history of the north end being used for public speaking.  He incorrectly, despite that, the illustrations he sends out say the pavilion was a speakers’ rostrum, but the pavilion was seldom if ever the speakers’ rostrum.  If you see the photographs and drawings of that day, the speaker’s always out in the square in the north on his own rostrum where he can be seen and heard and the pavilion was being used by the police to keep an eye on people.

Q:  Let me just take you back to that subway mezzanine.

Benepe:  Construction, yeah.

Q:  So presumably that was called Union Square.  The stop was called Union Square.

Benepe:  Yes, it was.  It was called Union Square-Fourteenth Street.  That was synonymous, sort of like saying Herald Square-Thirty-Fourth Street, Times Square-Forty-Second Street.  Those words kind of run together.
	So that was known as Union Square.  It was Union Place at its very beginning in 1811 because it was the intersection of two roads, Bloomingdale Road and the Albany Post Road, and where they came together was their union.  It had nothing to do with labor unions, nothing to do with what are some of the other theories behind it, but it was the union of two streets.  It didn’t have anything to do with the victory of the Civil War going to the Union, either.  Some people thought it had to do with the Civil War.
The cortege, Lincoln’s cortege came down Broadway and wound around the north end.  The parade route was always down along the north end and down.  That’s why there has such contemporary meaning to the new [proposed] traffic plans for Union Square, which have not come to bear, which I hoped would, that Broadway would go across the north end and down the east side and not down the west side, which it still splits and goes around it and produces a bad traffic situation.
So the fact that Union Square was raised, put over the mezzanine, the double whammy both of destroying the park in order to build the mezzanine, maybe a triple whammy, then raising it off the ground so it became less accessible, less inviting, and then blocking off the north end with this ugly pavilion so you couldn’t get in anymore from the north because the Tennis Pavilion, which was on the ground level, a shingle-design structure, it was called a Ladies Pavilion, I think, and that was a wooden building and there was very generous pathways going around both ends of it and walking into the square.  All of that was destroyed with this bringing it up.
So you had the closure of the north end access.…Then you had this crazy pathway system of treating the park as a traffic artery for people to walk through the square and not go into a park.  It wasn’t really a park. …So that when Bronson Binger-- I think he was Manhattan Parks Commissioner.  If not, he was the chief designer of the new park -- came to the community [he] asked for our input with his design.  Generally we were supportive at USCC of the design of creating a [central] green lawn, but suggested he reflect the oval of Union Square in the path system and not replicate the rectangular pathway system of Bryant Park, which is what he did.  So he liked that suggestion and created curved paths that celebrated the holding of the park, the oval form, and that makes a big difference in how you experience the park, gets away from straight lines.
Then in recent years, the park’s [unclear] in one year, it’s made one improvement after another.  They brought in the landscape designer who did Bryant Park.  She’s famous.

Q:  I don’t know.

Benepe:  Anyway, she was brought in to do additional landscaping a few years ago.  What’s now called the Partnership, it used to be called the BID, they’ve been very supportive of design improvements.  Henry Stern got in back of funding it and improving it, and Bronson was working for him as Parks Commissioner.  So there’s a lot of attention from ’87 forward.

Q:  So the seventies were—

Benepe:  Depression years.

Q:  The eighties, say the beginning of the eighties, how big was the farmers’ market and on what days?

Benepe:  We were chiefly on the north end.  We didn’t even come down the side for years.  We weren’t even full on the north end except on Saturdays.  Wednesday, which is the second busiest day.  Friday was a very slow day.  By the time we opened on Mondays, which would have been the eighties, and by that time the park maybe even had been redesigned, but I’m not sure, it might have been mid-eighties, we were so well established, people knew we were there, but it took at least three years for Union Square to be established as a destination.

Q:  At least three years from when?

Benepe:  From ’77 to ’80.

Q:  When did the west end begin to be used?

Benepe:  I’d say early, mid-eighties.  We only came down two-thirds the way.  It was kind of narrow in there.  It was rather difficult.  We had to deal with two subway entrances.  Entrances to the park itself had to be kept open.  We had to deal with a lot of traffic conflicts, people coming down Union Square West, cars, taxis, and trucks, so it was really crowded.  The intersection of Seventeenth Street and Broadway was always difficult and is still difficult.  So we had to overcome those difficulties.  In a sense, the fact that there was always that traffic there made us more accessible.  Obviously people walking to and from the subway system saw us.  So we were seen by a lot of people.
Then, of course, the southern end became an attraction for the peddlers.  So up until this reconstruction—what I call the peddlers are the people with dry goods and who apparently are winning their case in court.  It all revolved around the rights to free expression, I guess.  So the courts have interpreted putting out a newspaper broadside to putting out t-shirts, it’s all in the same family.

Q:  I guess what I’m trying to get at is at what point did that—let’s put it this way—

Benepe:  It grew slowly.  There wasn’t any one point.

Q:  It grew slowly, but especially for people who don’t live here, when you say the Greenmarket, people think Union Square.  When did that happen?

Benepe:  When did they originally know it was Union Square or think of Union Square?

Q:  Well, when did it become the concept of Greenmarket—

Benepe:  Was identified with Union Square?

Q:  Yes.

Benepe:  Very early, because there was no other place that seized—there were two things going on at the same time.  One was location and the other was the service mark, the main Greenmarket, which became synonymous with farmers’ market.  So that we could go to a community and say, “We want to open a Greenmarket here,” and even our attorneys were confused.
“Well, what is Greenmarket?  Is it a program, is it a location, or is it a type of market?”  It was all three of those, really.  Greenmarket was the location, it was a type of market, and it was the service mark name of a program.  Technically it was only the latter, the last, the service mark of a program.

Q:  A service market?

Benepe:  A service mark.  It was a trademark, in other words, a federally registered service mark.  It could not be used by anybody else.

Q:  When did that happen?

Benepe:  That was early eighties.  There was a group down in the South that started and they publicized themselves as Greenmarket.  We had to write them a letter saying, “You can’t do this.”  I don’t know if we still do it or not, occasionally you will see somebody coming out saying they just opened a greenmarket with a small g.  I don’t know if the council still sends out letters or not and whether they’ve reestablished their service mark or not, as they have to do every seven years.  It was important because too often people would put in a phony farmers’ market and then, on top of that, call it a Greenmarket.  It’s bad enough to call it a farmers’ market.  So that’s why it was important to have the service mark, that you would be guaranteed that you were buying from farmers, truly grown in farms.  And that’s why it was important to protect the service mark.  We weren’t trying to keep a monopoly; we were trying to keep an ideal alive.

Q:  Over time did your job change?  What were you called, actually?

Benepe:  I was called the Director of Greenmarket.  No, it really didn’t change.  I was inventive.  I was moving in different directions, like I mentioned, the big [relief] map we did of the region, different events, talking to different people.  Conferences were an important way of reaching out.  I didn’t try in any way to get grants or to be active on the national level in any way.
We did advise other communities.  One of our funders was New Jersey-based.  They were not in Morristown, but near Morristown [in Madison]…. They wanted to establish farmers’ markets in New Jersey.  We helped start them but we didn’t want to  run markets in New Jersey.  Another funder which had a lot of money wanted us to establish farmers’ markets in Long Island, and we did, but we wanted other people to run them; we didn’t want to run them.  So we’d give birth to new markets run by other people.

Q:  About how many?

Benepe:  Well, then I didn’t keep track to see if they were still running, but all told, the number of markets we may have given birth to would be six, maybe more.  We helped start a market in White Plains, another one in Scarsdale.  What we’d do is meet with the local group there and advise them how to start a market, how to stock it, and so forth, and say, “Now you’re on your own.”  So we weren’t interested in extending Greenmarket as a program, but extending the idea of farmers’ markets in the region, run by other people.  We did this seriously when we had a grant for that purpose, as we did in Long Island and New Jersey.  The ones in White Plains and Scarsdale were probably the results of somebody asking us.  We just made a brief—I’m not even sure we charged for it.  So I didn’t attempt to get involved under a Kellogg Grant, for example, doing something nationally.  I didn’t personally have those kinds of ambitions at the time.  That’s where Gus [Schumacher] is working, on the national level.

Q:  How did the staff grow, the office staff?

Benepe:  That’s a good question.  Tony Manetta was important.  He became my assistant director and he probably came to me.  Joe Patraker came to him and they formed kind of a bond.  Other staff people, I had Mike Zimsky… is a great staff person.  I hated to lose him.  You meet people maybe in the market sometimes.  They weren’t personal introductions.  I think they tended to be more meeting in the field, a conference or friends of friends.  Somebody knows somebody, somebody good, they work for us.

Q:  As something like a market manager or what?

Benepe:  Both market manager and in the office.  I needed good people in the office too.  One of the programs that started while I was still there was called the New Farmer Program.  We had a special grant for that too.

Q:  Immigrant farmers?

Benepe:  Well, it moved into that, but it wasn’t meant to be, but because of the staff working on it, who were Hispanic-speaking, they tended to reach out more to Hispanic-speaking potential farmers, but that bias wasn’t built into the program.  It was also to reach out to any small farmer who wanted to get started and help them get their feet on the ground.
One of the women who’s worked hardest in that program is Laurel Halter. She’s still with the council and she’d be good background on that program.  There are others who have been working on it too.  I can’t recall really where.

Q:  I’m a little bit confused.  Do some of these people work for the Council on the Environment?

Benepe:  [They do now.] [Before] they worked for me.  What happened was at a certain point the council wanted to adopt the programming and bring the program under the council and put everybody on their payroll.  That was getting close to the time I wanted to retire anyway.  I never became a member of their staff, but I just transferred my staff over to the council, and the location of the office moved from my location at Sixteenth Street down to the Council on the Environment at 51 Chamber Street.  That all happened in 1998.

Q:  When you retired.

Benepe:  Yes.  That had some major benefits.  Well, first of all, now most of our people are working full-time because….. two-thirds of the markets were running year-round.  One-third closed at the close of the season.  We’re doing this now in Saugerties.  Judith and I came up there.  We found that our market could run through the winter once we moved indoors, and was more successful in the winter than it was in the summer in terms of the number of people it attracted, which was interesting.  We had one farmer stay throughout the whole winter who has root crops, potatoes and carrots and radishes and turnips and things like that.  Then one farmer had been trying to get there for a long time for our summer market, Bernadette Bulich, who does dried flowers, she came into our winter market for the first time.  She lives within twenty miles’ distance from the market.  She didn’t do all as well as I would have liked her to have done.  She was not one of the more popular farmers.
But our apple grower stayed with us all winter because they have a lot of apples out of storage.  The meat person, of course, and the cheesers, and some maple syrup, some organic food products.  Somebody, Cathy Kreda … does a lot of jarred and bottled products, some really interesting stuff.  She does dried garlic chips.  They’re wonderful.  You could eat them just like nuts, but they’re powerful.

Q:  What about the rules for the participating farmers?  How did they get established?

Benepe:  They became more and more stringent.  So participating farmers can bring in only what they grow, unless they were given permission to bring in specific items from specific farms within twenty-five miles, which we don’t already have in the market.  For example, a typical item would be eggs.  You have a small market with five farmers, nobody has eggs.  Honey might be another, things like that.

Q:  Tell me, though, people now have to pay for insurance, don’t they?

Benepe:  Yes, farmers do.

Q:  The farmers must secure their own.  What kind of insurance?

Benepe:  Not only their health, Department of Agriculture health regulations, but the insurance is a sticky requirement, so a lot of insurance coverage liability.  It’s a pain in the neck and it really discourages small farmers--there are so many [state regulations]-- people that would participate in markets, except the regulations that are imposed. It happens with us in Saugerties.

Q:  What other kinds of regulations?

Benepe:  One of the ones we’re running afoul of now, a very popular thing to have in markets is prepared foods.  People cook things in their kitchens, some great dishes, and bring them in.  They can’t do it.  They have to be inspected kitchens.  They have to have licensed handling, rubber gloves, the washing at the market, the toilets, the whole works.

Q:  Kind of standard city health regulations.

Benepe:  Well, yes, and up there it’s county health regulations.  So it cramps the freshness and vitality of the market.  I’ve just been reading about this now with another program in the papers recently. It’s the yogurt people in the papers recently.  The state regulations on the practice of yogurt, it’s putting a lot of small people out of business.  They have to come out now with big insurance.  It’s enriching insurance companies every time they come up with regulations.

Q:  When you retired, how did you see your future?

Benepe:  [laughs] It was a great release.  I could do what I wanted to do anytime I wanted to do it.  The downside of running Greenmarket is I had to be there to run it.  So I saw my future as being relieved of responsibilities other than those I chose to be responsible for.  So it was a great freedom.  It’s like going out to play.  Recess.

Q:  You had bought the Saugerties property how long before that?

Benepe:  1983.

Q:  A long time.

Benepe:  Yes.

Q:  So did you see yourself primarily living there or what?

Benepe:  I’ve never been able to make that determination.  If push came to shove and I had to live in one of the two places, it’d probably be here because my roots are in New York and I was born here.  New York’s my true parent, the bricks, the pavement.  I mean, the changes in New York are very rapid.  They can be disorienting, but they also can be very stimulating, the High Line being one of them.
I discovered a new cross-block arcade today I didn’t know existed between Seventh and Sixth Avenue.  It was so attractive, I walked too far south, I had to turn back uptown.  I went from Fifty-Fourth to Fifty-First Street.

Q:  So primarily, or not primarily, what have you been doing?

Benepe:  In Saugerties, I’m Chair of the Historic Preservation Commission.  We have a lot on our plate out there.  We just organized a major stone house tour.  A team of four or five of us worked on it with one woman chiefly in charge, who would be up until all hours of the morning.  It was an extremely successful tour.  It brought a lot of public attention and love of Saugerties’ stone houses.  There were only eight houses in the tour, but we made clear there were sixty-eight in the community. 
The next thing on our plate is one of our members is putting together a proposal for doing a major book on Saugerties’ town and village.  I’m a member of the Comprehensive Planning Committee and trying to do a major rewriting of the zoning law.  We’ve been working on it for years.

Q:  The planning committee for?

Benepe:  For Saugerties.

Q:  And trying to rewrite the zooming law.

Benepe:  Yes.

Q:  To what end?

Benepe:  Protect open space is one of the major things, protect the environment, and get better-designed projects.  It’s a difficult battle because you’re basically dealing with the old school and sort of “We’ve always done things this way.  Don’t interfere with us.  I have the right to do what I want with my own land,” which they’ve stretched to, “I have the right to do what I want with other people’s land too.”  So it’s a leveling procedure trying to protect.  It’s my personal love as well.  Really, I’m working in that community, I want to protect it.

Q:  Do you farm at all on the property?

Benepe:  Yes, I have a garden.  It’s not terribly successful.  I’m not scientific at all.

Q:  I assume it’s, but you tell me, smaller than the Maryland farm that you—

Benepe:  It’s about the size, twice the size of this apartment.

Q:  What do you grow?

Benepe:  Right now I’m growing onions and Swiss chard, tomatoes and potatoes and string beans, which are not doing very well, and—

Q:  For your own use?

Benepe:  That’s right.  I don’t sell anything.  [I give surplus to the local food pantry.] We still buy a lot of produce in the market, which is why I don’t work so hard with growing it, since we can get it at the market.

Q:  Listen, before I let you go, I would appreciate it if you’d, as briefly as you’d like, comment on you and Adrian and Washington Square Park and what that was all about and how you feel about it now.

Benepe:  Well, two different parks, Washington Square and Union Square.  Washington Square, I’ve always been supportive of what the Parks Department is doing.  I’ve been fighting people in the community a bit on that, because they’re the ones who are fighting change in Washington Square.  I think the proof of the pudding is Washington Square every month is getting better.  It’s absolutely beautiful.

Q:  It is.

Benepe:  Moving the fountain was important.  The strange thing is that I’ve discovered, and I have to talk with George Velonakle about this, but while the fountain is on axis with the arch, the arch is not strictly on axis with the avenue.  So that’s a kind of strange thing.  But now people don’t ever notice it.  Also I wanted to see more trees planted around the center circle, which hasn’t happened yet, I think will happen.  I’ve been very supportive of the Parks Department on that altogether.
	Union Square is where I agree with USCC.  I had to resign from the USCC board because of the fight over the pavilion and turning it into a restaurant.  USCC chose as their attorney Al Butzel, and Al Butzel said, “Oh, this is going to be good.  Benepe versus Benepe.”  So I said… that’s when I resigned [from USCC].  I didn’t want to create that kind of a picture and I was getting that from the writers on the newspaper.

Q:  You mean that’s when you resigned from the USCC?

Benepe:  From USCC, yes.

Q:  Was there ever any kind of antagonism about what was planned between you and your son?

Benepe:  No, just disappointment in the sense that, I mean, he, first of all, the earlier DOT Commission was not supportive of doing something.  Adrian came to me and he said, “What do you think if we made Seventeenth Street one-way [east] at the north end?”
	I said, “I think it’s going to create traffic problems through the intersections.”  Then when I looked at it, I saw it created traffic opportunities.  I said, “It’s a pretty good idea.”  But then the then director of the [Union Square] Bid Partnership was pushing this too, and they both, the directors left and they backed away from the commitment.  So we didn’t get the expanded square and we didn’t get the improved traffic arrangements.  The [$12 million] money they’re spending on that is atrocious on what’s being done for nothing. 
They’re building new bathrooms because they’re giving up the existing bathroom for the restaurant use.  The restaurant, even then, whether it will really happen or not I don’t know, because, see, even the Community Board has come out opposed to the restaurant.  There are some fixtures in the works for a long time, but I’ve never known the bottom of it.  Why are we insisting?  Because they have a pavilion exactly like it in Chinatown at Columbus Park.  It’s not a restaurant.  It’s a nice community building.  It’s identical situation.  It’s at the north end of the park and frames the entrance to the park and everything.  So I don’t know [why it can’t happen at Union Square].
Millions are being spent to make the restaurant possible that have nothing to do with the pavilion itself.  The restaurant will never pay for that, those millions invested.  Even thought they say 5 million is an anonymous donation, which I just don’t understand.  Who, anonymously, is giving 5 million dollars to that restaurant?  Somebody who’s writing about it should ask.  It can’t be anonymous for 5 million dollars.

Q:  Is this something that you and your son talk about?

Benepe:  No, he doesn’t really want to talk about Parks issues much.  Through him, with his help, I talked to Janette Sadik-Kahn about Union Square.  I have to go back to talk to her some more about Union Square West.  One thing I’m trying to achieve is reversing the traffic direction in Union Square West.  That would relieve the problem at Seventeenth Street, totally.
Then the next thing would be to improve the design.  Janette has the right ideas in some places, but they’re not carried out the right way.  I pointed this out in a letter to the Times that [may be] printed this week.  With Madison Square, the concept there was mine, was advanced to DOT and they accepted it.  To reroute Broadway from intersecting Fifth Avenue at Twenty-Third Street to entering the park at Twenty-Fourth Street and going through a corner and making the park a true rectangle or square.  They adopted that, but instead of taking that corner, which is a corner of the park, and making it a corner of the park with planted lawns, with a road going through the park, they made an expansion of the street and just made it a pedestrian area in the street.  So the traffic concept was carried through, but the design concept wasn’t.

Q:  Well, you may have retired from the Greenmarket, but your commitment to the city is obviously still alive and well.

Benepe:  I’m very supportive of Washington Square and what George Velonakis [has also done for City Hall Park and Abingdon Square--that’s his drawing up there on the wall, by the way.  I fought some people in my own community on that one, too.  Because I thought his design is a wonder.  His design of City Hall Park is great.  But my own colleague on the Fine Arts Federation thinks he’s too period an architect now and he doesn’t adopt modern design elements.  But I say to my colleagues, “Well, show me good modern design elements to adopt.”  Nobody’s come up with anything on fences or street furniture or lamps which comes close to the old stuff.

Q:  All that said, it probably doesn’t at all surprise you to have Barry be in the Parks Commission.

Benepe:  Adrian.

Q:  Adrian, I’m sorry.  You’re Barry.

Benepe:  No, I get confused, too.  I sometimes call him my father.  No, but it’s been consistent because he started with the Parks Department as a volunteer, I guess.  As an Urban Task Ranger.

[End of interview]









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