T Magazine Design & Living Summer 2010 By MELISSA FELDMAN 
New York is not Kansas, and yet farms are sprouting up all over town. “April likes to garden,” says Ken Friedman, who co-owns the Spotted Pig, the Breslin and the soon-to-be reopened John Dory restaurant with his executive chef, April Bloomfield. Friedman has been busy working the approvals circuit so that he can begin planting the roof of the Ace Hotel, where the Breslin resides. The roof garden, he explains, could offer “the shortest distance between the farm and the plate.” Locavores, eat your hearts out.
Friedman’s go-to gal is Lisa Goode. She and her husband, Chris, are the Johnny Appleseeds of the roof-garden set. Having gotten their hands dirty planting their own 6,000-square-foot roof, the Goodes, along with Amy Trachtman, started Goode Green, a green roof business, in 2008. Goode Green’s epicurean clientele also includes the Crosby Street Hotel, where the roof features a Tudor-style chicken coop housing Araucana hens (they lay bluish-green eggs), rows of heirloom tomatoes, lettuce, herbs and an adjacent blueberry patch.
Also talking with the Goodes is Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery and the restaurant Co., who hopes to have a roof production up and running next year. For now he has filled recycled breadbaskets with soil and is growing tomatoes and herbs destined for breads and pizzas.
In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, in conjunction with Broadway Stages (and Goode Green), harvested slightly more than a tenth of an acre last year and sold the produce to neighbors, local suppliers and restaurants like Marlow & Sons. Annie Novak, the farm’s co-founder, hopes that this season will be even more productive, having planted seed catalogs with chefs from neighboring restaurants like Anella and Eat. “Brooklyn is a hotbed of picklers,” says Novak, who earmarked several cucumber varieties, including Lemon, Mexican Sour and Kirby, for one of her favorite pickle purveyors, Sour Puss.
And in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the crew at Roberta’s have joined forces with Brooklyn Grange, a commercial farm, to fill the pizzeria’s larder with ingredients like chilies, herbs, beets and tomatoes harvested from a 40,000-square-foot rooftop they have leased in the neighborhood.
City Hall is fertilizing the urban farmstead trend as well. Manhattan’s borough president, Scott M. Stringer, and Christine C. Quinn, speaker of the City Council, are working on initiatives like FoodWorks to create programs that would designate rooftop space for greenhouses. Meanwhile, Gotham Greens, which is scheduled to be the city’s first hydroponic rooftop farm, is in development in Greenpoint. According to Benjamin Linsley, a greenhouse design consultant involved in the project, “The rooftop business is not a passing trend but the beginning of a new approach to food production.” Here’s hoping the tomato blight steers clear of New York’s skyline this summer.