It offers plenty of chores, isn't far from stores and the countryside for the Landslide Community Farm has a penthouse view.
That's because peeking above the corn silk and apple trees is a glowing UPMC sign and the rest of Downtown's skyscrapers. Along Beelen Street, against the corners of the decidedly urban Uptown, Hill District and West Oakland neighborhoods, Landslide is a working farm.
Three formerly abandoned "farmhouses" on Allequippa Street host 13 resident agriculturists, mostly men and women in their early 20s, who clear and tend nearly an acre of organic zucchini, raspberries, exotic grains and this year's bumper harvest of five varieties of cucumbers.
Since Landslide's founding nearly 1 1/2 years ago, the registered nonprofit farm has garnered about $40,000 in donations, attracted 213 volunteer tillers, started a children's garden at the Martin Luther King Reading and Cultural Center, bought five city lots overgrown with weeds, and opened a Downtown soup kitchen to feed the homeless.
On Saturday, the farm will throw a fundraising party at 7113 Reynolds St. in the city's Point Breeze neighborhood.
The mission: Raise enough cash to buy four more acres for a forest garden. Apples already grow there, and wild turkeys harbor in the woods, just steps away from gang graffiti tags.
The farm is busiest on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, when volunteers from the neighborhood and elsewhere in the city descend on the steep hills in the shadow of the former Allequippa Terrace housing project to chip heroin syringes out of the dirt, pick mulberries and haul discarded tires from the wooded ravines -- so far they've tugged out more than 300 radials.
"On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, you definitely feel like a farmer," said Claire Schoyer, 23, a CAPA High School grad who got her biology degree at the University of Colorado before learning the practicalities of ag labor on an experimental farm in Lafayette, Colo.
Like Schoyer, most of the volunteers are white, and the neighborhoods rimming the farm are predominantly black. The urban farmers say they're sensitive to fears that they might be the harbingers of gentrification, but assure neighbors they just want to work the gardens, not develop the land commercially.
So far, they've been accepted by neighborhood leaders, including Councilwoman Tonya Payne of Uptown and the Hill District Consensus Group.
"We haven't had any problems. We're hoping that by moving on with our projects and working closely with the community, everything will keep going like it is now," Schoyer said. "We're aware we didn't grow up in the Hill. We have to earn a place here."
One row at a time.
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