It’s crimson and clover until the goats come and chew it all over.
John Street Pasture, a temporary Dumbo art installation that covered a formerly fallow waterfront lot with crimson clover, opened this week and will remain through mid-summer, when the masticating mammals will be brought in to mow the lawn the old-fashioned way. The field is meant to provide visitors with a little peace beneath the bustle of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, its creator said.
“I’m hoping that people find a visual silence,” said Andrea Reynosa, the artist behind the agricultural artwork.
Reynosa has worked in a studio that looks down on the lot since the mid-1990s. She helped to found Smack Mellon gallery, which backed the pasture project and is hosting a related exhibition about agricultural art. The neighborhood is barely recognizable as the barren place Reynosa moved to two decades ago, she said.
“I didn’t have any neighbors back then. And that space was a rat-infested parking lot,” she said.
The site on John Street between Adams and Pearl streets will be developed by the real estate company Alloy after it removes the installation mid-summer. The company plans to construct a 12-story, 42-apartment residential tower on the site, with a 2016 completion date.
John Street Pasture uses soil donated by Brooklyn Bridge Park, which hopes to use the clover-enriched dirt for landscaping on a neighboring plot when the clover meadow comes down.
Urban farming experts from Brooklyn Grange, which runs rooftop growing operations in the Navy Yard and in Queens, helped plant the crop. The yard’s two feet of soil should allow the clovers to grow to two feet tall, with green petals accented by red blooms. The bright colors are a welcome addition to the park, stewards of the greensward say.
“This site will present the northern section of Brooklyn Bridge Park with a fabulous entry point right off of Jay Street and will really punctuate the park,” said park head Regina Myer.
“John Street Pasture” (John Street between Adams and Pearl streets in Dumbo, www.johnstreetpasture.com). Wednesday–Saturday, noon–6 pm.
