Riverpark restaurant owners Tom Colicchio, Sisha Ortuzar, and developer Scarlet Shore Clifton from Alexandria Real Estate (owner of the site)  approached ORE with the challenge of creating a farm at 29th St. and 1st Ave. in Manhattan to provide their kitchen with fresh produce not readily available in the city.

The issue of the site was not just the logistics of creating a farm in the center of Manhattan, figuring out what happens when this construction site was reactivated.  Rather than drop soil and begin planting a project that would need to be thrown away once the economy restarted, we convinced the client to create a mobile farm.

After a search for an off-the-shelf, ergonomic, container with adequate soil depth we decided to convert milkcrates into planters.

The next step was convincing our restaurant client that they could grow all the produce to their hearts desire in the boxes that pile up outside of their service entrance. 

We planted a mock-up on our office roof in Dumbo and grew what would be most challenging – watermelon, 6 foot high tomato and okra plants.  The client was convinced and a 3,000 milkcrate farm was born.

The true test of mobility came when Hurricane Irene made landfall in New York one week before the official project opening.  ORE’s office with a team of 10 volunteers moved the entire farm of 3,000 full-grown plants into the corporate lobby of tower 1 by hand.  It took just under 4 hours.  The instant farm in a corporate lobby was so striking, we honestly wished the farm could have stayed there.

The most valuable lesson learned through this project was the power of design scalability using standardized modules.  After the project was completed We decided to create open source guides and how-to videos which we posted on YouTube.  We were then contacted and agreed to mentor Groups ranging from Ilewa combating food spoilage deserts in Lagos Nigeria, the 3 x 3 project feeding homeless veterans in Virginia, offsetting the urban heat island effect Tokyo’s rooftops, training young urban farmers in North Philadelphia and urban blight with local food production in Toronto with the Bowery Project