Adam Purple cycled by me as I walked down Second Avenue near 3rd Street early on a sunny spring morning.

It was nothing unusual—in the past twenty-five years he has pedaled by me dozens of times while making his rounds below 14th Street. A few weeks earlier, I had seen a photograph of Mr. Purple’s long-since demolished Garden of Eden in the Grey Art Gallery exhibit devoted to downtown New York in its 1974 to 1984 heyday—my youthful stomping ground. Seeing my memories getting the royal museum treatment was jarring. It made me realize that whatever happened 25 years ago had happened, by any measure, a very long time ago. So encountering Mr. Purple still conducting his business as usual was reassuring—it allowing me, at least for a moment, to sustain the illusion that maybe not so much time has really passed.

The aerial shot of The Garden was one of the few artifacts on display at the gallery that filled me with genuine nostalgia. Maybe it will take another 25 years and at least a touch of senility to alter my memories, but the East Village I recall wasn’t as much fun as people insisted it was then, and certainly wasn’t as much fun as people imagine it was now. By the time I arrived, the scene was as haughty and tight-assed (in its more-marginal-than-thou way) as anything else going on during the early 80s, suffused with a charmless obscurantism that was almost as profound a part of the downtown weltanschauung as hair gel. At The Garden of Eden, however, everyone was welcome, and I suppose that spirit of inclusion accounts for my enduringly wistful memories of it.

For those who don’t remember the saga, Mr. Purple was a hippy squatter living on Forsyth Street in the mid-1970s who, through toil and perseverance, created The Garden on several neglected plots of city-owned land. Rings of plants and flowers radiated like ripples from a yin and yang symbol, the widening circles of color meeting the right angles of the crumbling city. It was as startling a juxtaposition of nature and urban dissipation as you might have experienced if, while hiking in the Adirondacks, you happened upon Richard Hell and the Voidoids. The Garden was an against-all-odds enterprise that took imagination, grace, and commitment to pull off, all of which were supplied – along with horse shit biked in from Central Park – by the hirsute, lavender-clad Adam Purple.

In 1986, the City of New York decided it wanted to develop housing on the lots, and evicted Mr. Purple. The Garden, don’t it always seem to go, would have to be bulldozed. There were protests, there were petitions, there was litigation, and saving the Garden of Eden became a cause celebre.

Mr. Purple smiled and answered: “I’m not interested in fighting anybody. I’m interested in enlightening them.”

That stirred me. The year was 1986 – nineteen years past the Summer of Love and a decade before the yoga boom – and people just weren’t saying things like that in public without using air quotes. This was not, for example, the message of Ivan Boesky or other leading figures of the day. I tend to be a cynical person, but the notion of being able to enlighten people instead of fighting them germinated a kernel of optimism embedded in me from all the times I had been forced to watch “Free to Be You and Me” by substitute teachers. Mr. Purple’s words expressed a confident largeness of spirit that I found both idealistic and pragmatic, an approach no one could really argue against. And so I clung to it – for twenty years, I told that anecdote, shared Mr. Purple’s philosophy, and, in my way, tried to live up to it.»