La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez, the community garden on the southwest corner of East Ninth Street and Avenue C, turns 50 this year, and on Saturday, October 24, it is throwing a party for the whole neighborhood. The day runs from early afternoon into the night, with opening ceremonies at 2 p.m., four hours of live bands, a jazz happy hour and, after dark, a film retrospective of the garden's half century made by Alvah Holmes.

Music is on a $15 suggested donation, and the garden says plainly that no one will be turned away. NYC Parks lists the celebration in its own events calendar as free.

The schedule for Saturday

The garden has posted the running order on its own site. Opening ceremonies take place from 2 to 3 p.m. From 3 to 7 p.m., Pinc Louds and guests take the stage, with sets from Mars Ray and the Raptures, Dracula and His Band the Draculas, and Funkrust Band. From 7 to 8 p.m. the garden turns into what it is calling the Jazz Club on the Plaza, a happy hour with food and drinks and music from the Eric Hoffman Jazz Ensemble. At 8:30 p.m., the program closes with the 50th anniversary movie retrospective by Alvah Holmes, whose video about the garden's history is linked from La Plaza's own history page.

The event is outdoors in the garden, so dress for an October evening.

How a rubble lot became La Plaza

The garden's own history traces it to 1976, when neighborhood residents and greening activists took over a string of vacant city lots on the block that were piled with rubble and trash. The Lower East Side at the time was losing buildings to arson and abandonment, and members of the Latino group CHARAS hauled out truckloads of debris to make the space usable.

CHARAS worked with Buckminster Fuller to put up a geodesic dome in the open plaza, which became a stage for cultural events. Liz Christy, the founder of the Green Guerillas, seeded the lawn with seed bombs and planted the weeping willows and linden trees that still shade the garden. The artist Gordon Matta-Clark helped build the amphitheater out of railroad ties and materials salvaged from abandoned buildings nearby. Block residents later turned the western end into vegetable beds, flower plots and fruit trees.

In the 1980s, developers pushed to build on the land. After years of court fights, the garden was preserved in 2002 as part of a legal settlement. A year later it was renamed for Armando Perez, a CHARAS founder and former Lower East Side district leader who was killed in 1999.

What the garden looks like at 50

La Plaza is still volunteer-run, and it still functions as both a garden and an events space. The garden recently finished a solar pavilion, and says events and workshops there now run entirely on solar power. Over the years it has hosted composting, medicinal plant, water recovery and bicycle repair workshops, and its calendar this fall has included a free outdoor yoga hour and a two-week residency by Cul de Sac, a collective that sets up pop-up wood-fired saunas and cold plunges in parks and gardens.

The garden works with a set of East Village and Loisaida groups that have used the space for decades, including LUNGS (Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens), the Loisaida Center, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, Earth Celebrations and the environmental group Time's Up.

Joining or volunteering

La Plaza is a membership garden. Its site says it is currently reviewing plot space, and new members are expected to take part in garden activities and meet the garden's requirements before they receive a key or a plot. The garden asks that nobody pay for a plot before one has actually been assigned. Saturday is a practical day to meet members in person and ask how it works.

Getting there

The garden is at the southwest corner of East Ninth Street and Avenue C in Alphabet City. The closest subway is the L train at First Avenue, about a 15-minute walk east and south. The F train at Second Avenue is a slightly longer walk from the southwest.

The 50th anniversary celebration is Saturday, October 24, starting at 2 p.m. and running past 8:30 p.m. at La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez, East Ninth Street and Avenue C. Music is on a $15 suggested donation, and no one is turned away. The full schedule is on the garden's website.

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