December 06

Eli Zabar's the Baker and His Rooftop of Greens

Michael Ableman

This essay is excerpted from Michael Ableman’s book Fields of Plenty: A Farmer’s Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It. Chronicle Books, 2005.

“Here is where we make granola and butter cookies and the Galaxy cookies for the planetarium.” Eli Zabar is gesturing briskly as he shows Aaron and me around part of his kingdom on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Eli Zabar is a successful (even famous) baker and retailer with several locations in Manhattan that feature many of his own products. His seven hundred employees produce everything from cookies and breads to their own ice cream, pizzas, and jams and – most remarkably – Eli’s own homegrown winter tomatoes and salad greens.

The three-story brick complex that houses Eli’s wholesale baker is like a food-production multiplex. The kitchens, workshops, offices, and massive storefront retail shop culminate in what I’m really here to see: half an acre of rooftop food gardens that thrust up into the New York City sunshine.

All of Eli’s facilities throughout the Upper East Side look as if they grew out of the neighborhood in bits and pieces. This particular location started out as one little part of the building, and then it took over another part, and then the whole building, and then another building, until it became a little city within the city. Now

Iit’s like a large rabbit warren full of every kind of food product and food-related activity, and jam-packed with people, including a noisy group of kids who have taken over the birthday party room.

Eli guides us through the maze of floors and buildings. “Here we’re cutting up the croissants for tomorrow; here are the pastries.” As he passes by, he peels off a cinnamon bun and hands it to us, then sticks his finger into a mound of bagel dough like a farmer checking the soil for moisture.

Eventually, we reach the final stairway that takes us up through a dark passage and out a rooftop door. When we surface, my eyes need a moment to adjust to the sunlight and to the extraordinary sight that surrounds us. Huge, commercial-size production greenhouses cap the rooftops, each glass or plastic structure filled with raised beds planted in greens and herbs and tomatoes. Fig trees in planters are lined up sporadically along the edge of one rooftop. Brick apartment buildings tower overhead, and, across the canyon that is 91st street, I can see people working in another set of Zabar greenhouses. An industrial compost grinder stands at the ready, waiting for the loads of bakery and deli waste to be converted back to fertility and spread on the beds.

Inside the greenhouses, trellises and irrigation systems crisscross raised beds of rich soil. Lighting and ventilation systems filter the New York atmosphere into garden oases that smell distinctively like baking bread. As I look out through the glass and plastic walls, the city is blurred and unreal, and reality becomes the bright, tender green of new tomato transplants.

“This crop – these are all heirloom varieties – was seeded maybe in the middle of July,” Eli is explaining, “and will go right into the spring.” I immediately picture the greenhouse dusted with January snow, the tomatoes riding out the winter without the cashmere overcoats, pashmina scarves, and leather boots that normally protect the residents in this neighborhood. “And they’ll climb up over these wires,” Eli continues, pointing out the support infrastructure for the vines. “By the time we take them down, the vines will have stretched maybe 60 feet and look like spaghetti all over the damn place.”

The next greenhouse over is full of salad greens, herbs, and radishes. Eli bends down to pluck a radish from the soil and offers it to me to sample, just as if he were grabbing a croissant off one of the cooling racks downstairs.

Aaron and I are in awe of the scale of this rooftop greenhouse operation. My mind races at the prospect of farms on the tops of every building in New York. I consider how much food could be produced, how many people could be employed, how it could improve the diets of local residents, what impact it would have on the urban environment.

I’m brought back to the present by the sound of a familiar refrain. “It’s been a terrible, terrible summer around here,” Eli is saying. “The sun just came out. We’ve had no sun for four days – nothing but rain.” So, I think to myself, the baker has learned to complain about the weather, just like a farmer.

I ask Eli about the engineering of these rooftops greenhouses, how he dealt with issues of weight and water and drainage. “When I built the original greenhouse, my goals was to get tomatoes in the winter,” he replies, and tells us how he decided to try to harness the heat of his pastry ovens. “I ran the exhaust pipes of these ovens that are going all the time throughout the buildings beneath us here up into the greenhouse.

“I had all kinds of theories,” he continues. “For instance, I thought theory one was that in order to have a really good-tasting tomato, you had to grow it in soil. And so I brought in organic soil that I bought from a guy we were buying vegetables from upstate. And then of course we had weight issues, so I had to bring in steel and reinforce this thing. I had beautiful leeks, but I didn’t grow a single tomato that first year out of this greenhouse. I put in lights and I brought in experts.

“I brought in twenty different people. Everybody had a different opinion,” Eli concludes with that blend of pride and frustration, and hindsight that every farmer masters.

“I don’t use lights anymore,” he continues. “I found that I couldn’t really measure any difference between growing with these 500-watt sodium lights and spending $18,000 on electricity. And during the period that we weren’t getting tomatoes – which was January and February – we didn’t get them with lights either.”

On the side beds, which aren’t tall enough for tomatoes, Eli planted mizuna and baby arugula. He found that the lettuces did well, but the passive heat was creating very irregular temperatures in the greenhouse. Now, that is a baker’s complaint. “We kind of stabilized between fifty and seventy degrees,” Eli continues, “but tomatoes didn’t like fifty to seventy; they liked sixty to seventy-five. But all the greens loved it. So after one or two unsuccessful years with tomatoes, I went to greens in this greenhouse.”

I ask Eli whether the greens that come out of a greenhouse continuously infused with bakery exhaust contain any flavor of croissant or muffin or bagel, a question I can imagine Earl Ransom approving of. Eli ignores me and goes on to talk about some of the disease problems they’ve had, including late blight and various funguses.

As we wander the maze of rooftop paths, I try to get Eli to talk about what he was thinking when he built this rooftop farm.

“I had opened a little restaurant that was on the other side of the street,” he replies. “My original idea was that we were going to do something very special and grow fresh food for it all year-round.”

I ask him whether he needed some kind of special permit. “It’s an ordeal,” he replies, “because there’s nothing in the zoning code in New York City that permits this. I don’t know what we got it under, but I do know that it was something other than greenhouse. There’s nothing called ‘greenhouse’ in Manhattan. This is the gold coast in New York. The apartments go for millions of dollars here. This was an anomaly.”

By now, we are standing alongside a row of mature Adriatic fig trees. Eli launches into a vivid description of their flavor, and I might as well be standing with a peasant farmer in Sardinia on the top of a rocky hillside overlooking an ancient gnarled orchard.

We make our way back down the maze of stairs and doors, which eventually leads to one of Eli’s retail stores. I head for the produce section and watch as smartly dressed men and women use a set of plastic tongs to fill bags with salad greens and herbs. The sign says “Eli’s Own Home Grown.” But “homegrown” is written on a lot of things these days, and I doubt that this urban crowd could imagine that the greens they’re collecting are so local that the roots are still growing three stories above their heads.”