The Backyard in NYC: An Urban Oasis

Flatbush Avenue pulses in the Brooklyn distance, but back here the vines are heavy with the bounty of late summer, a salsa-lover’s harvest of organic plum tomatoes, jalapeños and habaneros, along with bulbous eggplants, purple-veined Swiss chard, cucumbers, celery (for bloody marys), spearmint, basil, and strawberries, lavender, sunflowers, irises, pansies and a compost pile of red wiggler worms turning coffee grounds and garden waste into rich black topsoil.

In the middle of the Bronx, a Banzai Falls waterslide slowly inflates as the neighborhood youthquake converges on the swing set and takes turns roaring up and down the driveway on a Razor electric motorbike.

And on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a famous actress rocks in her green and blue striped hammock under a bird-feeder, glorying in her outdoor space while her husband lovingly stokes the grill.

Three different worlds, three different summer days and evenings, but all unfolding in that most counterintuitive of New York spaces, the backyard. Screened from all but the envious eyes of aerial neighbors, New Yorkers with backyards awaken to birdsong and the occasional rabbit and entertain by the light of tiki torches. They swim in their own pools (even if they have to inflate them first), mow minuscule plots of Kentucky bluegrass, stage rock concerts, worship in revival tents, sun-dry the laundry on clotheslines, and barbecue jerk chicken in rusted oil-barrel smokers, or sirloin steak on Ultra Premium TruSear Viking grills.

“This makes New York possible for me,” said the hammock-rocking actress, Rue McClanahan, the Oklahoma-born “Golden Girls” co-star now in the new Texas gothic cable series “Sordid Lives.” After migrating from sunny California, Ms. McClanahan scored the seemingly impossible — a large backyard with hibiscus trees at an East Side doorman building.

Those who have them prize them, whether they are grand or humble, soft and wild with plant life or hard and flat with concrete. Now, as the evening hours convey those first hints of autumn, the season of New York backyards is coming to a close, and with it a busier summer than most for these hidden urban rectangles, plenty of New Yorkers having forgone distant vacations because of high gas and travel costs, and simply opened the back door instead.

“I wish they’d pass a law,” said Rebecca Cole, a designer of high-end backyard, terrace and rooftop gardens, “that if you have outdoor space you have to put something on it because the rest of us want it.”

She remembered the time a client sent a picture clipped from a magazine, as inspiration.

“That’s Versailles,” Ms. Cole responded. “It’s really famous. I’m not sure we could accomplish that.”

Ms. McClanahan and her husband, the producer and cafe chanteur Morrow Wilson (not to be confused with any of his predecessors chronicled in Ms. McClanahan’s 2007 memoir “My First Five Husbands”), found their prize in 2003 despite warnings from their real estate broker that there was no such thing as a building with a doorman in front and a private yard in back. They not only found one on the ground floor of an apartment tower near Sutton Place, but also paid “under a million” and then expanded by buying extra land from the co-op for $125,000.

Uptown, Cathy Franklin delights in her East 92nd Street town house, a Carnegie Hill modernist masterpiece once owned by a niece of Theodore Roosevelt, with a backyard lighted by Bevolo lanterns, outdoor furniture by Smith & Hawken, and a gleaming Viking Professional grill with rotisserie. Paved in slate, the yard is bordered with crabapple trees, boxwoods and rosebushes. Behind the rear trellis are not the walls of other buildings but other backyards.

“One of the reasons we love it, it’s garden to garden,” said Ms. Franklin, a director at the real estate brokerage Brown Harris Stevens, married to Jeffrey Baker, an executive managing director of the global property services firm Savills LLC.

Then meet Bill Strawsacker, a sanitation worker, at his large above-ground pool in College Point, Queens, where jets roar overhead into La Guardia Airport across Flushing Bay. Mr. Strawsacker, who drives refuse containers to the railyards for out-of-state disposal, built the pool at his mother-in-law’s house 15 years ago; three years ago, he relocated the family from Astoria, Queens, to move in with her. Now, he said, his four sons all but dwell in the water with occasional visits into the house.

“The kids are crazy,” he said. “They’ll jump in any time.”

And then there is Dan Vinkovetsky in his 100-by-30-foot Eden behind a Civil War-era brownstone on Prospect Place in Brooklyn, steps from Flatbush Avenue.

Senior cultivation editor of the cannabis advocacy magazine High Times, Mr. Vinkovetsky moved into the ground-floor one-bedroom apartment three years ago for $1,800 a month (now $2,400) with his wife, Sarah Miss, a sales and development director for a jewelry company. They quickly began their backyard plantings — but not the obvious.

“I have long since retired from any illegal cultivation activity,” said Mr. Vinkovetsky, 36, who writes under the name Danny Danko. He is rather high-profile to risk a pot bust at home, so, he says, “I have put my passion for plants into growing legitimate legal ones.”

A few weeks ago he and Ms. Miss invited friends to a barbecue to celebrate her 35th birthday. It rained. So what. They got wet. But the party went on.

No edibles grow in the backyard of Mark Pinn and his wife, Katrina Parris, on West 120th Street in Harlem — it’s just a 16-by-18-foot plot of lovingly tended Kentucky bluegrass fringed with Mexican river rocks. At night, after putting their sons to bed, they set up a folding table to sip cocktails and grill by tiki candles and music on the radio while counting their blessings, as Mr. Pinn says: “A house, two kids, two cars and a lawn.”

Mr. Pinn, an information technologies manager, and Ms. Parris, a florist with her own shop nearby, made it their gift to themselves after leaving the Upper West Side and returning to their roots in Harlem, renting for four years while scouting brownstones for sale in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

They consulted neighbors who were also fixing up their yards. “We get together over drinks and talk about seeds,” Mr. Pinn said. “It’s kind of an odd conversation for the city.

Now weekends often find him pushing a manual mower back and forth across the baby lawn but he doesn’t mind. “It’s a little therapeutic,” he said. “I get out there and do my thing. It kind of softens up the hard life of New York City.”

But who knows, he said. “Three years from now I may rip it up and put in concrete.”

Rock concerts are not every backyard owner’s cup of tea, or beer, but Robbie Norris, a freelance film producer and a guitarist in the Turbotronics, has a special franchise at the basement and ground floor space he rents with three roommates in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Once a month, or as the mood seizes him, Mr. Norris assembles a stage and opens his yard of rosebushes and weeds for bands to join the Turbotronics (in cheerleaders’ costumes) in entertaining crowds of up to 100 drawn by the $5 admission, which includes access to a keg of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

“When we run out of beer, it’s free,” said Mr. Norris, who sometimes treats guests to a margarita or hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on coals in a Weber grill.

For some reason, perhaps the high walls of nearby industrial buildings that box in the sound, there have not been many noise complaints. Or maybe there is no one around at night to object.

They were watching for the cardinal when the rabbit appeared. It was a Magritte late summer’s eve on the West Side of Manhattan with the twilit sky too eerily bright for the enveloping dusk. In a luxuriant backyard on 82nd Street, where the land climbs an eight-foot escarpment to the heights of 81st Street, an uplit angel cast its shadow on the leaves of a Japanese maple. A Pondmaster fountain burbled merrily in a lifeless pond, a marauding cat having made short work long ago of the goldfish therein, leaving its cheeky calling card on the rock ledges: fishy skeletons.

David Waite, a commodities trader from London, had set a table with cheese and crackers and was pouring Prosecco into champagne flutes for his wife, Fran, and their daughter, Mary Sarro, and her fiancé, Robert Vernicek. One minute they were talking about the cardinal, the next thing, there was the rabbit — an Alice in Wonderland moment. Oh, but the garden: nearly as big as the double-width town house apartment it adjoined, 1,100 square feet, it was lush with lilac, wisteria, holly hedges, rose bushes, and red and white impatiens that Mr. Waite had tried, unsuccessfully, to cultivate into an emblem of Brittania, the cross of St. George.