Best Community Garden

On the corner of 21st and Brooklyn, vegetables, herbs and flowers grow where a baseball stadium once stood. That stadium was home not only to sporting events (the Negro Leagues World Series, Lou Gehrig's first game) but to concerts, including a 1964 Beatles show. When the stadium was torn down in 1976, another stadium was supposed to be built in its place, but that never happened. So in 1985, when people had seen enough of the vacant lot, the organizers of Kansas City Community Gardens convinced the city to lease it to them. That first season, only about fifteen gardeners worked the land, but this year saw more than a hundred. Although the spring brought torrential rains, slowing gardeners down at first, the plots eventually filled with sunflowers sprouting between beds of lettuce and tomato vines. A shared wheelbarrow waits for the harvest beside manicured gazebos and picnic tables, while the downtown skyline rises to the west. The garden provides a place for urbanites to gather and form a community, much as the stadium once did. This is the Old Ballpark Garden's final season. It will soon give way to housing projects, and the garden will relocate to Swope Park next year under a new name.