ian marvy

Everybody in Red Hook knew Ian Marvy. That’s a common thing people say in Red Hook - in any small town, and Red Hook was still a small town then - but in Ian’s case it was true. It was pretty easy for everybody in the “Back” to know who you were, that was only 3,000 people or so. But I think everybody in the “Front” knew Ian, too, the Front being the Red Hook Houses, Red Hook’s public housing project, which we always - proudly? - noted was the largest in Brooklyn. Knowing everyone in the Front was no small accomplishment for a short, bald white guy from Minnesota.

Ian founded Added Value, Red Hook’s urban farm, along with his friend Michael. At some point, before I met them, Michael moved on to other projects, and Ian stayed behind to keep managing and growing the farm and its programs. Most people from the Back, most of you who knew him, maybe, knew the farm as the farm market and the CSA, “Community Supported Agriculture,” where you could pick up a box of veggies for the week. Ian didn’t really care about that. That’s not totally true, but mostly the market and the CSA were a necessary cog in his real mission, which was teaching kids from the Houses about food - where it comes from, how to grow it, how to sell it, how to eat healthier, how food and the water that sustains it and us are the linchpins of everything else - all the things that get rolled together under the banner of “food justice.”

Ian was a pioneer in urban farming. Not the first, surely, but one of the first in New York City. He was doing the work before it was fashionable, before there were rooftop farms and farms in Queens and little farms popping up everywhere. He wasn’t a dreamer about it; he never had the silly idea that his couple of acres could make a meaningful dent in the food supply for our neighborhood of eleven or twelve thousand people. What he did see was that an urban farm could be a way to expand the horizons of young people, make the science they were learning in school tangible, teach them how work could be a path to self-sufficiency, and not incidentally put several thousand dollars in their pockets, which was significant for kids growing up in a place where the average household income was less than fifteen thousand dollars.

(Ian once talked to me about an early problem they discovered when they started paying kids to do farm work. The kids would come home with paychecks, and their parents would lay claim to some of the money. Increasing the family income by a quarter was increasing family conflicts. I don’t remember all the details of how they addressed that - just that, at an early stage of running a theater company in the same neighborhood, I learned from him that part of the work was being attuned to the impact your programs were having on the rest of people’s lives.)

Ian was a visionary. He had a vision for how farming connected people to real life. He had a vision for social justice, and it didn’t involve platitudes, it involved, literally and figuratively, getting into the dirt. He was a visionary when it came to tactics, which almost sounds contradictory, but Ian taught me that it wasn’t. One of the places we spent a lot of time together was in meetings of our little Occupy Red Hook group, a bunch of people we started getting together after realizing that, a mile from Zucotti Park, nearly all of our neighbors were learning about what was happening there from the evening news. I would be frustrated after meetings when we didn’t accomplish anything - no progress with the police who were randomly, or not so randomly, frisking kids in the neighborhood; no progress with the grocery next to the projects that was selling expired produce.

Ian would tell me, “process is product,” and I struggled to know what he meant. Then Hurricane Sandy hit Red Hook, and we had a bunch of people in our little neighborhood who had practiced how to work together in a leaderless way. Or, as Ian said, in a “leader-full” way - we had practiced how to make decisions together, to come to consensus, not just take votes or go along with whoever had decided they were in charge. Red Hook found ways to get through those days in no small part because we had prepared, and we were as prepared as we were in no small part because Ian had brought his patient, steadfast self to the table, always keeping his eye on where we were trying to go.

Ian could be a visionary in the worst of ways, too; he ignored of the dull and bureaucratic aspects of managing an organization that are nevertheless necessary. I had the sense that he wasn’t the easiest person to work for, not because he wasn’t caring but because it was hard to get him to focus on things that weren’t the mission. Added Value went a number of years without taking care of certain requirements, and it ultimately led to Ian leaving the organization, and then Red Hook. He was bitter about the way that ended, for a while at least. He didn’t talk about it much, with me anyway, but at times it would show.

I hope - all I can do at this point is hope - he reconciled himself with what happened. Ian accomplished so much; he had so much to be proud of. The farm continues under another name after him, and as far as I’m concerned he gets credit for all of that. As someone who has mostly spent his working life doing dull and bureaucratic tasks, I’m keenly aware that none of it happens without a visionary pointing the way.

Ian was short, a little fat, with sparkling eyes and a chipped-tooth smile. Elf-like in appearance, especially when he wore a stocking cap, often slightly askew. An elf-like giant, walking down Van Brunt Street, smiling and giving a short, sharp wave to anyone he knew, which was everybody.