Many U.S. urban centers were in the deep trouble during the early 1970s. New York City's housing stock and infrastructure were crumbling, crime skyrocketed, and the treasury was bare. There were more than 20,000 abandoned. City owned lots, many used as garbage dumps, drug-shooting galleries and place to abandon cards. In 1973 an artist named Liz Christy founder of the Green Guerillas, got some friends together and reclaimed as garden space an abandoned lot of Manhattan's Lower East Side. This simple act of grass roots activism began the community garden movement. By 2005 it had spread to more than 600 gardens in five boroughs. When Central Park was opened in 1859, it was thought of as green space to "civilize" the newly-arrived masses of immigrants. The community gardens of today represent a totally different sentiment. Here citizens, often from poor and neglected neighborhoods, reclaim public lands to tame a city landscape which they see as totally out of control. What were once open wounds in urban neighborhoods have become places of transcendent beauty and cultural meaning. Yet, since 1998, a pitched battle between then Mayor Rudy Giuliani and community garden activists developed as the city attempted to auction off many of the gardens to real estate developers.