By Kathy-Ann Joseph
kathannjoseph@gmail.com
On a weekday morning in Barretto Point Park, everything seemed just so: the lush lawns neatly trimmed, the hedges manicured, the trees pruned and the playground equipment shiny. To a visitor, the site looked perfect. But not to Barbara Zwillick. What she saw was an endless array of tasks that needing to be done to polish this beautiful product.
What she saw was an endless array of tasks that needing to be done to polish this beautiful product.
“It’s a constant battle,” says Zwillick. “Keeping this looking like this is not easy. Every day there’s something to be done.”
Zwillick is the gardener in charge of both Barretto Point Park and Hunts Point Riverside Park. The 56-year-old Parks Department employee has been tending them since they opened, in 2006 and 2007, respectively. On almost any weekday, a visitor will find her plucking a weed, manicuring the lawn or trimming a shrub.
By 9 a.m. on a recent morning, her green uniform was already covered in the sawdust tossed out by chain saw.
But Zwillick calls the special care needed for parks that often showcase special events and host Bronx officials “therapeutic.”
Many of the skills she uses on the job, she said, she learned working around her house in Bayside, Queens.
“At home, I used a Weedwhacker around the house. I used a blower. I used a chainsaw. I already knew a lot.” Still, caring for Barretto and Riverside is not simply a matter of being handy around the house.
Although she does have not have an academic background in horticulture, Zwillick took a six-month master class at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden that taught technical aspects of gardening. And part of her preparation was the six months she spent working in the Parks Department’s nursery’s mobile unit, which tends to the Bronx’s Greenstreets and planted traffic triangles.
Before she signed on with the Parks Department, Zwillick worked indoors. For 30 years she was a colorist in the textile industry. But when that industry got shipped to China, Zwillick was out of a job.
“It’s such a totally different life. My life in textiles was scheduling deliveries. I knew what I had to do every day of every month. Here I never deal with dates. Every day is another day, a different day.”
On rainy spring day, Zwillick made sure all the other workers in the park had raincoats. One did not, so, her motherly instinct kicking in, she fashioned a makeshift raincoat from a garbage bag.
She had planned to prune the untidy rose bushes, but she decided against it. “You see the little buddies? They’re so cute,” she said, pointing to the closed rosebuds. “Nature is such a beautiful process. If I trim this now, it’ll be a plant with no flowers.” Of all the seasons Zwillick enjoys spring most, because she gets to see all the plants and shrubs come back to life. “Summer well: that’s a fight against weeds,” she huffed.
“There’s always a weed to pull. They’re so invasive. They take over everything.”
To combat those weeds and perform her other tasks, Zwillick arms herself with tools designed to minimize stress on her tendons and muscles, purchased out of pocket. But though the tools go home with her, they are never used there. This gardener hires a gardener to maintain her own yard.
“I don’t have time to garden at home. When I come home, I got to be a supermom. I’m exhausted. I rarely see 10 o’clock. I started watching CSI last night, I never saw the end of it,” she explained. Despite the end-of-day fatigue, she’s back at it the next day, finding something to shape up, clean up or neaten up “There’s nothing about these parks I don’t like!” she said. She also knows what a difference her acreage makes to a parks-starved community, where there’s only .6 acres of open space per thousand people.
“I mean it’s fun,” she says. “We get truck drivers who pull over and play a round of handball in their lunch hour. We get factory workers who come have lunch, and schools who take they gym period here. And they all have a lovely place to sit.”
Such commitment has gained her the admiration of co-workers and park users.
“Barbara is such a hard worker. She’s out here working alongside us. When she asks me to do something, I have no problem.” said her 28-year old co-worker Nathan Leaman, “She takes real pride in her work.”
“She really takes care of this park,” said Ernesto Manuel, a regular at Barretto Point. “I see her gathering and speaking to the workers during the day and walking around in the evenings, letting people know that the park will be closing.”
After spending so much time tending the parks, if there’s one thing that gets Zwillick upset, it’s graffiti. “I take it so personally,” she says.
“It’s such a show of disrespect.”
Although graffiti writers offend her, Zwillick generally has great respect for the people she encounters in Hunts Point.
“I gotta tell ya, coming from middle class Bayside, people said, ‘Oh my God! You work in the Bronx! Aren’t you afraid?’ But here everybody got their story, but they’re all nice people.”