When people step into a hospital, they’re often looking for an answer to a problem. What’s wrong with my stomach? Can the pain in my hand go away? How do I feel better?
While nurses and doctors are there to solve those problems, they’re also working to prevent future ones. Simplified, a hospital’s job is twofold: react and prevent.
On the roof of the Boston Medical Center, they’re preventing by growing.
The hospital’s 2,658-square-foot rooftop farm grows fresh produce for its food-insecure patients. These patients are referred to the Boston Medical Center’s Preventative Food Pantry. There, they gain access to over 25 crops and can take home fresh food for their entire household every two weeks.
“The Preventive Food Pantry helps fill the gap for those who would otherwise be unable to access affordable, nutritious food, and this expansion further demonstrates BMC’s commitment to addressing the underlying social factors that affect a patient’s health,” Thea James, MD, vice president of mission and associate chief medical officer at BMC, said in a news release.
Kale, carrots, onions, cauliflower, eggplants and radishes are all grown in the rooftop plant beds, creating over 6,000 pounds of food each year. A little under half goes directly home with patients, and the remainder is used for the hospital’s cafeteria, teaching kitchen and in-house farmers market, which is held in the lobby every week during the summer months.
The food pantry opened in 2001, and the garden opened in 2016 to provide the pantry with more fresh produce.
“BMC for a long time has had a mission that food is medicine,” farm manager Lindsay Allen told WHDH.
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The foods we eat can be a direct indicator of how healthy we are. Studies show that eating more processed and fried foods can increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes and death. But the reverse is true, too: People who consume more fresh fruits and vegetables are likely to live longer and healthier lives.
With that in mind, BMC got to growing. Patients are given a prescription to the pantry, where a registered dietician helps them customize a plan and pick out food based on their health needs. The patient can also pick up food for their entire household. In 2017, the pantry worked with over 83,000 individuals.
“When they provide a patient with a prescription, it becomes part of your medical care. It’s more like going to the pharmacy. They do not hesitate to come,” Latchman Hiralall, manager of the Food Pantry, told Boston Magazine.
But the benefits extend past healthy eating for patients and in the cafeteria. It cuts down on the hospital’s carbon footprint, collects stormwater, creates green space and reduces the energy required by absorbing heat that would otherwise warm a building.
If farm visitors listen closely, they’ll hear a faint buzz. The farm is home to two honeybee hives, which pollinate the crops and produce honey.
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The Boston Medical Center isn’t the only hospital that’s thought of this green idea. Across the country, green roofs are gaining popularity as a way to help eradicate food deserts.
At the John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, patients visit the hospital’s terrace garden and pick vegetables and herbs to incorporate into their meals. Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City transformed its black slate roof into an urban garden five years ago. The space grows herbs and small crops, like strawberries and tomatillos, for the kitchen team to use and for the staff to take home.
As of 2017, 54% of the country’s hospitals are in urban centers. Those hospitals’ patients and staff are more likely to have a hard time finding green space and affordable, healthy food. Rooftop gardens can solve both of those problems, offering a place where people can experience the therapeutic benefits of nature and gain access to fresh food.
So the next time you’re walking past a hospital, look up and you might find something green.
More: Why Green Classrooms Could Be the Schools of the Future
Tag: urban garden
Forget South Beach. This Urban Park Is Going to Be Miami’s Top Spot to Get Fresh Air
South Florida will soon have its very own version of New York City’s famed High Line. The southern counterpart’s co-creators are calling their idea “The Underline,” a stretch of urban parkland underneath an elevated train’s railway in Miami.
Led by Meg Daly, a businesswoman who first reimagined the transit corridor’s possibilities after a debilitating accident, The Underline will transform a barren swath of land into safer paths for pedestrians and bicyclists — from the Miami River in the north to the city’s South Station. James Corner Field Operations, the same New York City-based firm behind the High Line, is sketching early blueprints and expects to present plans this September.
The genesis for this huge public works project occurred when Daly was out for a bike ride with her adult daughter. The pair collided, and Daly hit the asphalt elbows first and broke both bones. (The pain was “terrible,” she says, “but I’ve been through childbirth, so whatever.”) For all practical purposes, Daly was incapacitated — unable to drive for three months while both arms healed. So she started traveling on the city’s Metrorail, an elevated train.
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“I took it from one stop to another, and on the final stretch, I’d walk under under the train tracks to grab some shade because June and July in Miami are really hot. It was at that moment I realized there’s so much land here, and there’s really not a whole lot being done with it. This should be like the High Line in New York,” she recalls. “That’s really where the idea came from. It was a crazy idea, and I started telling my friends and family. My background’s in marketing, so I’m used to hearing a lot more ‘no’ than ‘yes,’ but they all agreed it should be a park.”
From end to end, the park will stretch 10 linear miles. Under the tracks, the corridor exceeds 110 feet in width in some spots. (Compare that to 30 feet on the High Line.) One side parallels U.S. Route 1; the other faces building facades.
Today, there’s a crude, narrow path that some frequent, but mostly the space looks how you’d expect a rail yard to appear — utility poles, maintenance ladders, fences (and holes to sneak in) and encroachments from adjacent property owners. “There’s really bad signaling, and it doesn’t have lighting at night. Not a lot of people use it,” says Isabel Castilla, senior associate at James Corner Field Operations.
Although it’s underdeveloped, the passage still radiates potential. Its shade provides a refuge from the Florida humidity, and the patterns of light through the rails roughly three stories above create a dazzling chiaroscuro display — an effect that’s accentuated by pedaling on a bike at a constant rhythm.
This fall, James Corner’s team will present initial renderings for pilot projects downtown and near the University of Miami — two locations where people are “clamoring” for open space, Daly says. At one end of the line, construction of high rises in the central business district is encroaching on limited greenery; at the other, college students can feel disconnected from the town across the train tracks and are actively looking for new recreation opportunities. Neighbors abutting the line are planning out their own use for the space, too. South Miami Hospital, for example, is planning to pull back the pavement on a parking lot and introduce a meditation garden for patients.
Like Gotham’s version, the artery will connect disparate neighborhoods. Designers from James Corner Field Operations will unite the entire passage with native flora and tailor each block to residents’ needs. Columns supporting the tracks above, for example, might become a canvas for local artists in West Grove, a bohemian neighborhood, Castilla says.
But for all its specificity, the most important idea is that the line will be available to everyone, regardless of socioeconomics. “Anyone who lives along a transit line will now be able to come here and walk this, then go back home and never need a car,” Daly says.
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Compared to New York’s undertaking, Miami’s project must also fit more practical needs. “We’re the fourth most dangerous place in the country for pedestrians, and [one of] the most dangerous in the state for bicyclists. We don’t have protected infrastructure,” Daly says. The Underline will function as an “off-road safe haven” running parallel to the region’s busiest highway: U.S. Route 1, she adds. The project’s architects believe the new transit infrastructure won’t only protect pedestrians; they hope the newly landscaped paths, in sight of disgruntled motorists in gridlock, will be a “catalyst” for encouraging alternative modes of transit.
“Everyone hits their head and says, ‘Why didn’t I think of this?’” Daly says. “When I was forced to not drive and walk where I wanted to go, I had this new lens… It’s big, it’s shady. There’s an opportunity here. It’s all because I had never walked underneath it before.”
Many grassroots revitalization efforts have started with an ingenious idea like Daly’s, only to languish in the bureaucracy of City Hall. To the visionary, permits, zoning ordinances and public meetings can be a slow and painful death. A “champion” in Miami-Dade County’s Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces department, Maria Nardi, chief of planning, “a bureaucrat who thinks like an entrepreneur,” propelled the idea forward as the “glue that held future trails together,” Daly says.
No small force to be discounted herself, Daly often talks about bringing private sector speed to government. She sets ambitious goals for The Underline’s construction, but knows she’ll meet them. Overtures made to three municipalities and four nonprofits produced an “unusual collaboration”; altogether, they contributed $500,000 to get planning underway. Again, valuing speed, Friends of the Underline’s planning committee chose James Corner as the lead design team. “The way we’re railroading this thing” — pun intended — “we didn’t have the time to have anybody go through a learning curve. [James Corner] brought that expertise.”
There’s still some practical elements for the firm to work out — designing safe passageways at intersections, getting approval from the Federal Transit Authority, finding the money to make everything possible — but Daly seems positive that the entire line will be completed in six years.
“You know what motivates me? That it can be done; it just isn’t being done. The way the public sector moves needs to be challenged. Development is moving much faster than infrastructure to match it,” Daly says. “The people who live here deserve this. And I want to be sure to use this before I’m in a wheelchair.”
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