Hattie Carthan (1901 1984) Hattie Carthan is probably the best
thing ever transplanted to Brooklyn " Just an old lady born with the century she said. But if her verve, her accomplishing interconnections with her Bedford-Stuyvesant community are what being 83 is all about, then
we should all be so lucky as to date to the turn or the century Hattie was always a doer, probably born stretching -- at 16, teaching school in Zuni. Virginia (population 121) --at 59, she was one of the
first Black interviewers for a market research company hired for Brooklyn. In the 1960's, block busting ripped into her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and only seven people showed up the first time Mrs. Carthan tried
to turn her neighbors on to the idea of a block association. But she parlayed that tenuous interest into a back-to-school party for children in 1964 and the following summer put proceeds from a pig and chicken roast
toward buying new trees everyone was sure they didn't need. (“Wouldn't leaves be just one more thing to sweep up,” they argued.) But Hattie prevailed and the four saplings Vernon Avenue planted were literally
seed beginnings of a gradual re-greening of Bedford-Stuyvesant the next few years -- 1500 new trees starting out street life via 100 flew block associations spinning off from the inspiration of Mrs. Carthan.
She turned her eves to old trees, too: the 40-foot Magnolia Grandiflora she had long felt proprietary about -- watching it blossom in summers; sprout its red-seeded cones in the fall; glorying in its having survived on
Brooklyn's Lafayette Avenue since William Lemken had brought it as a seedling from North Carolina in 1885. When Model Cities project bulldozers were heading its way, she got them to halt and with her intervention, the
City, in 1970, gave the tree landmark designation This tree is the only one of its type north of Philadelphia. Mrs. Carthan carried the symbolism of that victory for nature to the very young "That magnolia
stands high and mighty and beautiful for us, but I wanted to train children to love all trees.'' So she and neighbors went after funding to bring Mrs. Carthan's consuming dream to turn the three brownstones behind the landmark magnolia tree into an Earth Center with nature studies for all ages has become a reality. Hattie was in no way shy and she
cajoled political and corporate powers to help bring the Center to life. Why didn't she take the easy out--pack it in, move from Vernon Avenue years ago when she began to see her neighborhood decline, watched the
classic tragedy of each group running from the next? "We've already lost too many trees, houses and people...your community-you owe something to it. I didn't care to run." -- Melissa Sutphen
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