By Della Hasselle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Cyclist advocacy group Times Up! plans to protest the loss of community gardens Thursday night by mimicking Paul Revere's ride, the Daily News reported.
Two dozen garden defenders will pedal around Manhattan on their “horsecycles” wearing Revere-style hats to warn Mayor Michael Bloomberg that developers were threatening his own injunction to preserve the city's green spaces.
“We are bringing Bloomberg a gift from the gardens, flowers and cucumbers,” advocate Benjamin Shepard told the News. “He is supposed to make this city green. I hope he will live up to his rhetoric.”
The group is protesting the Sep. 17 expiration of the Garden Settlement, an agreement that protects the city's 600 community gardens from development.
On their route, they will take a night ride from the Generation X Garden on East 4th Street to Bloomberg’s townhouse on East 71st Street.
Representatives of the agencies that watch over the gardens, the Department of Housing Preservation Department and the Parks Department, say they plan to keep them open to the public.
“The new community garden rules, now going through full public process, are intended to protect the gardens when the current temporary agreement ends,” a Parks Department spokesman said in a statement, the News reported.
The protesters plan to make their voices heard until the gardens are permanent. They will attend a public hearing at the Chelsea Recreation Center on August 10 in order to ask officials for an answer about the fate of the city’s gardens, the News reported.
