PS 216 Edible Schoolyard

New York City — In 1995, Alice Waters, a food activist and owner of the Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, spotted a vacant lot behind Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. She thought, ‘Why not put a garden there?’ And thus, with support from the Chez Panisse Foundation, the Edible Schoolyard (ESY) project was born.

Ten years later, ESY has ballooned, launching sister programs in New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Greensboro, North Carolina. And in 2010, the concept came to New York City, to the Arturo Toscanini School, or PS 216, in Brooklyn.

PS 216’s Edible Schoolyard features a kitchen classroom, designed by New York-based WORKac, that offers students a food preparation and dining area and is connected to a mobile greenhouse, which can be extended from the classroom building to cover the organic plantings during the cold months, allowing for a year-round grow cycle.

It’s the first ESY designed and built for a humid continental climate, serving to instruct both the students at the school and the greater educational community of the learning possibilities ennobled at the intersection of agriculture and education.