For nearly seven years, Williamsburg’s North Brooklyn Farms has provided Brooklynites with a welcoming space to eat, drink, and idle on a grassy stretch of the East River. A functioning urban farm, it’s also served as a venue for comedy shows and weddings, the site of a mobile sauna pop-up, and a spot for people to commune with nature, and each other, in a space that is fully public but feels deliciously private. It feels especially sad, then, to announce that the farm will close down in December to make space for a new stretch of Domino Park, owned and operated by the farm’s landlords, Two Trees Management Company. 

The farm launched in 2013, headed by farmers Ryan Watson, who recently left to start a cidery upstate, and Henry Sweets. They signed a two-year lease on a space in the former parking lot of the Domino Sugar Refinery building, an incongruously massive brick structure looming over the rest of downtown Williamsburg. Built with the help of over 30 selfless volunteers, the farm became one of New York’s only agricultural parks. They began renting their current space on a year-to-year basis in 2015, with the knowledge that Two Trees would eventually take it back from them. 

Sweets is careful to keep an eye on the big picture. “A lot of people want to paint this really simple narrative of ‘big, bad developer pushes out community garden,’” Sweets said. “But it’s kind of a played narrative, and if you really want to understand the mechanisms that are at work, you have to understand the subtlety.”