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.

Despite the hue and cry, The Garden of Eden was razed, and unceremoniously at that. To say that its spirit endures in each of the myriad community gardens dotting New York City is only giving Mr. Purple his due. Likewise, Mr. Purple endures, but on the sunny morning he rode by me, he stopped his bicycle to root around in every trashcan he passed and felt with a bony finger inside the coin return slot of each pay phone. Though I was aware that this had long been his way through the world, I felt my spirit sink. I thought, ‘This isn’t how the world should be for a beautiful person.’ And for the first time in 25 years of opportunities, I felt a powerful need to connect with Adam Purple.

I introduced myself and said: “Mr. Purple, I just wanted to let you know that twenty years ago, you touched my life in a small, but profound way. It happened when they were trying to evict you from your garden…”

“Our garden,” Mr. Purple interrupted. “It wasn’t my garden, it was our garden.”

I shook my head, smiling. The man still had it.

“I was watching T.V.,” I explained, “and a reporter asked you if you were going to fight the city. You said – and this is what sticks with me – you weren’t interested in fighting people, you were interested in enlightening them.” I smiled again.

“Naaaaaaaaah,” Mr. Purple said, waving one hand. “You can’t enlighten people. Forget about it.”

Well then, that’s more like it. When an anomalous strand of experience like the enlightenment business is finally woven into the familiar grim tapestry, I am usually grateful. It makes me feel like life has symmetry, and if it has symmetry then maybe it has a purpose, and if it has a purpose, maybe its purpose is to teach me something. Upon later reflection, I tried to name one person in the last two decades whom I had enlightened. I could think of no one. I wondered if, in 1986, I should have just listened to Ivan Boesky and been done with it, and whether Mr. Purple had given me a new, more useful mantra to carry me through the next twenty years.

As we parted, Mr. Purple called to me: “Type the name ‘Adam Purple’ into your computer search engine sometime. You’ll see some beautiful pictures.” When I got home, I googled and clicked.

It was indeed a beautiful garden, more beautiful than I could have remembered.