Jane Jacobs Medalists

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Barry Benepe

Barry Benepe

Barry Benepe is proud to be a born-and-bred New Yorker. The son of a linen importer, he grew up on Gramercy Park, walking daily under the Third Avenue El to attend Friends Seminary on Stuyvesant Square.

After graduating from Williams College with a B.A. in Fine Arts in 1950, he returned to New York, studying at Cooper Union for two years. He later attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree.

Although Barry has spent most of his career as a planner and architect, his passion — much like Jane Jacobs and his mentor, architect and planner Robert C. Weinberg — is advocacy and activism. Journalist Marian Burros once wrote that Barry was a “pit bull” in his commitment to making New York City a more habitable place. Barry didn’t take issue with the description.

In 1966, Barry organized demonstrations to have Central Park Drive closed to traffic on weekends. Galvanized by the success of their campaign, Barry and his cohorts founded Transportation Alternatives, a group that promotes city cycling and advocates greater use of public transportation and car-free parks. Many in the group see themselves carrying out the legacy of Jane Jacobs, who wrote scathingly about Americans’ dependence on cars, and stated, “Are we building cities for people or for cars?”

Barry has championed several causes throughout the years. In the 1970s, then a resident of the Upper West Side, he joined the campaign to oppose the Westway Project. As a member of Community Board Seven, and later, Community Board Five, he pressed for more attractive space for pedestrians. More recently, as a board member of the Union Square Community Coalition and the Fine Arts Federation of New York, he advocated improvements to Cooper Square, Union Square and Washington Square to “decrease the negative impacts of traffic and increase the delight and pleasure of people on foot.”

It is the Greenmarket program, however, that has been Barry’s greatest passion for the past thirty years. Following his work for developers who were buying up farmland in Orange County, NY, in the early 1970s, he was inspired to combine his experience in working on his family’s truck farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as a child with his expertise in planning. His goal was to marry the economic needs of struggling farmers upstate with the desire of city residents for fresh and affordable produce. Barry enlisted the help of a fellow planner, Bob Lewis, and the two obtained the sponsorship of the Council on the Environment of NYC to start Greenmarket.

In July 1976, with major underwriting from the JM Kaplan Fund, Barry and Bob Lewis opened the first farmers market on a city-owned lot at 59th Street and Second Avenue. It was the first of its kind in New York City since 1935. Eleven farmers brought their just-picked produce to the market; they sold everything by noon that first day. Two more markets opened that summer, one at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn and another, at the urging of the New York City Planning Commission, at Union Square.

There were some bumps along the way in the early years. Barry tells stories of drug dealers threatening farmers and letting them know that they weren’t welcome in Union Square. And there was a judge in Brooklyn who opposed a farmers market in front of the courthouse as an unseemly presence. Undaunted, Barry devoted much time and energy over the past three decades nurturing, building and promoting the program. Today, Greenmarket is the largest farmers’ market program in the United States, with markets in 42 neighborhoods across the five boroughs of New York City, serving nearly 100,000 people a week during the summer and fall.

Jane Jacobs often talked about how important “diversity, density, and dynamism” were to the health of a city. Barry Benepe’s Greenmarket program recreated the ancient agora, a lively community gathering place for people of diverse backgrounds to meet, to talk, to buy, to sell. The program brought new business activity to neighborhoods, without costly overhead or new construction. By creating temporary markets in empty lots or underused parks, his project transformed the way we think about and use space in the city.

In July of this year, Barry was featured as Person of the Week on ABC World News with Charles Gibson for his work with Greenmarket. The segment closed with a gem of a quote from Barry: “When we stop and walk through this farm stand, we are walking through a community of people, not a community of cars. And this is the way cities have to be experienced — on foot. And it redefines our city as a place to live and enjoy life!”

Barry and his wife, Judith, now live in the West Village, a few streets away from Jane Jacobs’ home on Hudson Street. Barry has five grown children: Adrian, Jennifer, Andrew, Callum and Simon. When he’s not shopping at one of the many farmers markets, you can find Barry wandering around the city with his 1911 Bromley map in hand, still excited by what he sees and finds in New York, the city that he made more livable for us all.

To watch an interview with Barry Benepe, click here.