Opinion: What the Big Apple’s Fruit Basket Can Teach Us About Growing Community

“It’s remarkable that a city as diverse as New York doesn’t do more to honor that diversity by planting a wider variety of public fruit trees that reflect the people who live there.”

Fig season in Astoria is hard to miss. Stroll down any sidewalk, and you’ll likely encounter a neighbor harvesting figs in their front yard. If you’re lucky, they’ll press a soft, perfectly ripe one into your hand and send you home with a few more to share. While you can find fresh figs in local markets, they’re usually expensive, as they aren’t grown commercially in the region. Despite, or perhaps because of their value, the local fig trade predominantly operates as a gift economy, where, to quote Robin Wall-Kimmerer, “the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.”

It’s a kind of community spirit more common to rural villages than a dense urban neighborhood, but is one that has flourished in post-pandemic Astoria through grassroots initiatives like the community-run food pantry and free store. These trees act as nodes in a larger network of mutual care that is transforming the neighborhood.

As an urban planner and horticulturist wanting to get a better sense of the scale and distribution of these community assets, I spent the season biking up and down Astoria’s grid, conducting a census of its fig trees and talking with their stewards along the way. What I found was remarkable—more than 400 properties growing figs, and that’s primarily just in the front yards.

There are surely hundreds more hidden away in private gardens and backyards. With some properties hosting as many as six trees, the total number of fig trees in Astoria likely reaches well into the thousands—an extraordinary sum considering that Astoria isn’t a particularly green neighborhood, lagging behind the city in metrics like tree canopy coverage and green space per capita. Yet hidden among the brick and concrete is a surprising secret: Astoria may just be the Big Apple’s unofficial fruit basket, thanks largely to its main crop: the fig.

In talking with fig-keepers whenever they happened to be out tending the trees, I learned the provenance of many trees. “My father brought this cutting from Greece,” one woman told me while watering her garden. It’s a story I heard repeated with slight variations. Astoria is a neighborhood of immigrants, and it’s from their Mediterranean homelands—places like Greece, Morocco, Italy, Egypt, and Palestine—that these fig trees have traveled, carefully wrapped in the luggage of emigrants hoping to preserve a connection to home.

Because figs can root easily from cuttings, they’re some of the few fruit trees that can survive the journey. Many of the trees here are heritage varieties, likely found nowhere else in America. Each fig cultivar I was gifted this season had some unique quality—flavor, shape, texture, color. The diversity of figs in Astoria mirrors that of their surrounding human community—Queens being one of the most culturally diverse places on Earth. And because they so readily propagate, new generations of these cultivars are spreading in Astoria, many to neighbors from Asia and Latin America with no particular past tradition of fig-growing themselves. Collectively, many Astoria neighbors are learning to love this fruit and the community bonds it brings. The fig trees are both living links to the past and forging new connections in the present

The fig is, in many ways, the ideal fruit tree for our urban environment. First, it’s productive—a mature tree can yield up to 40 pounds of fruit in a good year. It’s self-fertile, drought-tolerant, disease-resistant, and impervious to most pests. Unlike many fruit trees, figs don’t readily drop their fruit on the ground, where they could attract rats. 

They require little horticultural expertise to grow. Traditionally, the most labor-intensive part of growing figs in New York was the annual wrapping of saplings to protect them from our cold winters. Even that wasn’t always enough, as when the New York Times reported on widespread fig casualties across the region after the harsh winter of 2014. But as the climate crisis intensifies, there is a silver lining in that figs, once at the edge of survival here, are now thriving. The local growers I spoke with said there hasn’t been a major fig die-off in recent years, and many have stopped wrapping their trees, making fig-growing even more accessible.

In my informal survey of Astoria, the most surprising discoveries were the many fig trees found not in private yards but planted in apartment building courtyards, business parking lots, churchyards, sidewalk cafes, and on the campus of Astoria’s largest cooperative housing complex. These places are part of the urban commons—areas that are technically privately-owned but serve as shared spaces for the community.

The fig trees in these commons operate in the same spirit as the gift economy. Just as a neighbor might hand you figs from their tree, these trees offer their fruit to passersby, free for anyone to enjoy. While private fruit trees contribute to Astoria’s informal gift economy, this system still relies on the generosity of their owners. A more democratic and equitable system of urban agriculture would provide open access to fresh produce, regardless of relationships or ownership.

For all their abundance, there’s one place in Astoria where figs—and fruit trees in general—are conspicuously absent: city-owned land. The neighborhood’s partiality for figs has not led to their integration in local street tree beds, parks, schoolyards, playgrounds, or across NYCHA’s four large nearby campuses.

This is a missed opportunity. By supporting local food systems and public fruit tree planting, the city can scale up the benefits of Astoria’s informal system. It’s not without precedent: fruit trees are a defining feature of the public sphere in cities like Seville, Spain, where 14,000 orange trees line the streets. In the U.S., there are some 85 community food forests in cities from Boston to Atlanta to Seattle, and more in development.

New York was a late adopter, but in 2017, the city launched its first legal foraging site with the Bronx River Foodway pilot program in Concrete Plant Park. After seven years of growth, many of the trees and bushes are now beginning to bear fruit. On a recent visit, I watched as a father taught his daughter to pick raspberries without getting pricked by thorns. A curious stranger approached and after some conversation, joined them in the harvest. Despite the program’s apparent success in connecting people with community and the land, the Parks Department has yet to replicate it, and foraging on public land remains illegal throughout the rest of the city.

There are 76 species on the city’s official list of approved street tree species. Of those, the only one that produces sweet, edible fruit is the serviceberry. It’s remarkable that a city as diverse as New York doesn’t do more to honor that diversity by planting a wider variety of public fruit trees that reflect the people who live there. Just as the fig has become a living embodiment of Astoria’s cultural landscape, jujubes, guavas, or persimmons might serve a similar role in other communities.

There are signs of progress. This past spring, New York City’s first pawpaw street trees were quietly planted in Astoria despite the fact that they aren’t technically sanctioned by the city’s official guidelines. Perhaps this is another pilot program? Can we hope to see our public places filled with more trees providing gifts of fresh food, free for anyone to pick? Astoria’s fig trees provide a blueprint for what’s possible when we rethink how we use our urban land to create a more equitable, livable, and resilient city for all.

Jordan Engel is a recent graduate of Hunter College’s Master of Urban Planning program and a former community orchard designer.