Scenes from a hot city: Part one

Mickels' Garden on Columbia Place. Named for a charming young man who was an EMT for Long Island College Hospital and died in their care. Here members of the community plant sunflowers, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, towering sunflowers, and sometimes, although not today, enjoy twilight dinners at the picnic table. It, of course, thrives in the heat wave. Today it is still and hot, green and quiet save for the roar of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.