THE DEVIL IN NEW YORK'S GARDEN OF EDEN

Lincoln Anderson, a newspaperman man of great integrity, knew he was going to take some heat -- but he did the right thing.

At the time he was the longtime editor of The Villager, a small award-winning New York weekly that covered lower Manhattan and he'd just written an online exclusive.

"We beat the New York Times," he recalled.

The article, which hit The Villager's website on Sept. 15, 2015, broke the news that a very strange man had died, a man who called himself Adam Purple.

Purple -- 84 when he suffered a heart attack while bicycling over Manhattan's Williamsburg Bridge -- was internationally famous for something that was quite remarkable.

He’d planted a huge "Garden of Eden" on vacant lots in a decaying section of the Lower East Side that was definitely not Park Ave., to say the least.

Adam Purple peers down at his amazing “Garden of Eden”  

Anderson's obit heaped praise on the man, dubbing him the "godfather of community gardens."

A day later, though, he learned the guy didn't deserve it. Purple had a truly dark side, a monstrous side.

Anderson would soon have to decide whether to publish a two-part story that many told him not to run. Why kick a man after he's dead, they said. Why ruin this guy's incredible reputation?

In a city of characters, Purple was up there at the top. Rail-thin with a long white beard, he looked like an anorexic Santa Claus. He wore purple garb and said he named himself after a psychedelic magic mushroom with the royal hue.

He travelled by bicycle and bonded with dedicated activists fighting for the rights of pedal pushers in a city of motorized vehicles where a lot of drivers (take my word for it) are annoyed by them.

Purple lived a homeless existence, surviving mostly on the streets and the kindness of friends ever since he got to NYC in the 1960s.

He was a champion of recycling. He shunned powered transportation and railed against the bureaucracy. He fought City Hall with the help of legal advocates to resist eviction from an abandoned city-owned building.

For decades, he was the sole occupant of this shithole on Forsyth St., named after a hero of America's War of 1812.

The crumbling structure had no electricity or indoor plumbing. During Purple's time there, the surrounding neighborhood there on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was an urban blight.

Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s was a mess

Purple had a simple philosophy, telling the New York Times:

''One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist or a doomsayer to recognize that there may be something happening to the atmospheric systems on the planet Earth. That's why I renounce the flush toilet, renounce the internal combustion engine. As a political statement. I can live without.''

Author Mary Cantwell, who wrote, "Manhattan, When I was Young" met Adam Purple in 1985 and was impressed, calling him "the purest example of a hippie ever seen in this city."

And what made Adam Purple world-renowned was astounding. Over the course of eight years beginning in the mid-70s, he created that fabulous garden and fed his neighbors.

It took him years to clear debris from the vacant lots but he had a companion. Yeah, he called her Eve. When that one left, he met another one he called Eve. A kid was born to each.

The garden was incredible. It covered 15,000 square feet, with planting beds laid out in Zen-like concentric circles, a thing of immense beauty amid the rubble.

Purple had fertilized his planting space with his own waste and horse manure he collected from Central Park's carriage animals, carting the horse shit along a four-mile trek to his vacant-lot wonder.

Purple gathers fertilizer for his garden

In that inner-city garden, Adam Purple grew and nurtured crops of corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, black walnuts, asparagus, raspberries -- and 45 trees.

National Geographic did a feature on the garden. The New York Daily News, noting how young cycling enthusiasts were drawn to the man who shunned any form of powered transportation, dubbed him the "Original Hipster."

He appeared on "Regis and Kathy Lee" and is one of fifty subjects featured in "Harvey Wang's New York," a book of photographs and brief biographies of notable or colorful New Yorkers.

One copy of "Zentences," a book Purple wrote is safeguarded as an historical artifact in the New York Public Library's rare book collection. It measures one-inch by one-inch and is comprised of Zen Buddhism anecdotes that he wrote.

He truly deserved to be called the "godfather of community gardening." But that beautiful creation was doomed.

Mayor Ed Koch's administration needed the land for much-needed housing. Gentrification was coming.

Purple and his followers protested but lost. On January 8, 1986, with Adam looking down wistfully from a window of his rattrap lodgings, the city bulldozed his agrarian masterpiece.

“We are dealing with reptiles here," he said. "We have to understand that.”

The bearded man's followers were devastated. And that's when I first learned about him.

Following the destruction of the garden, purple footprints began appearing along the sidewalks and street crossings of Manhattan. I spotted them near Grand Central Station on the way to my job at the New York Daily News building on 42d St.

Like a lot of  New Yorkers, I wondered what the fuck was that all about.

And then, one day in mid-1986, I was waiting for my friend Rosie outside her walkup on E. 12th St. When she came out, a fellow sitting on the stoop of the building next door said hello to her. Rosie gave a greeting to the guy and said, "This is my friend Don. He writes for the Daily News."

"You work for the News?" he said.

"Yes."

"Do you want to know who's doing the purple feet?" he replied.

"That's you?" I asked?

He nodded. His name is George Bliss, one of Adam Purple's friends and supporters, a cycling activist who would go on to design various bicycles including the pedicab, his take on the rickshaw. A company he started would rent them out to pedal pumpers who carried passengers through the Big Apple traffic.

Bliss wore a hood when we photographed him holding the drum-like device filled with purple paint that he attached to a shopping cart and rolled along the sidewalks of New York in the wee small hours of the morning.

The purple footprints (40 miles of them, Bliss said) were all leading toward the site where Adam Purple's garden once grew, a protest to honor the homeless hero.

“I decided to paint footprints to remind the world about the garden,” he explained.  “They were a metaphor to follow him. The gardens that remain are a testament to his work.”

He's right. Today, inspired by that bearded character, more than 600 community gardens dot the five boroughs after bureaucratic regulations were changed.

When Anderson's online tale of Purple's death appeared, sympathetic comments appeared from as far away as Italy.

But then came that phone call, the day after Anderson's obit exclusive went online. It was from a woman out West in the U.S., a woman who knew Adam Purple all too well.

"I answered the phone," said Anderson. "It wasn't a big office. I usually handled the news tips. The woman told me she had read my piece and said, 'There's more to the story (of Adam Purple). I'm his daughter.'"

Her name is Jenean and she told Anderson that New York City's famous urban gardener, whose real name is David Lloyd Wilkie, raised four daughters, herself and Lenore (his biological offspring) and two stepdaughters, Diane and Dorothy.

L. to R. Lenore, 7, Diane, 8, Jenean, 9, Dorothy, 10, with David Lloyd Wilkie and wife Romola

All four, Jenean revealed, had been sexually molested by Wilkie in the most horrendous ways from their childhood into their teens.

“We were trained to perform. We were toys, not people to be loved,” Jenean told Anderson. "At any time it could happen, at the dining room table, friends coming over, anytime, anywhere. A friend would come over, and who knew where that would lead. He called it ‘diddle’ whenever he would touch us. . ."

Asked what specifically Wilkie did to them or had them do, she told the newsman, “Oh, everything — that’s what we were about — our purpose. He trained us, with pornography magazines, films, comics. I read ‘The Kinsey Report’ when I was age 10.”

Jenean put Anderson in touch with her sisters. For weeks, Anderson "talked to all four of them," listening to their shocking tales of the "monster" who put them through a living hell.

Wilkie's life before he landed in NYC came to light.

He was born in Missouri and was an educated man.

He went to college in Kansas. He served in the Army before obtaining a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and wound up as a reporter at The York Gazette and Daily in York, Pa., where he wrote about the police.

Wilkie was an Army vet

With his second wife, Romola, and the four young ones, he moved to Australia. The abuse had started in the States but increased dramatically in the land Down Under.

Dorothy, the oldest of the girls told Anderson that, after reaching a certain age, she was regularly subjected to molestation by her stepfather.

“For a few years there, it was every night,” she recalled. “It was a kind of rape. He used his tongue. He would do it every time he could, from the time I was six to the time I was 12. . .I wasn’t able to move. I was praying that it would be over. To me, it felt like hours. He would just go on and on, all night. It felt like an eternity.”

Jenean told The Villager about wooden dildos that Wilkie carved for the girls.

Dorothy remembered the sex toys. “Every time we were alone, he made us use those wooden things, all together," she told Anderson. "He was a monster. He knew what he was doing. He was destroying four young minds. He was a horrible, horrible man.”

Diane confirmed this.

“Yes, I remember all of that,” she said. “He was nasty. And he would read us stories and raunchy comic books. Everything that Jenean has told you is true.”

Diane also provided a phone number to Anderson for Lenore, Wilkie’s youngest biological daughter, who shared vivid memories of growing up in the sexually deviant household. They sent her life on a downward spiral into decades of homelessness and prostitution.

"I was very patient with the women," said Anderson. "I tried to be very sensitive to them."

The daughters, now in their 50s and 60s, now living back in the U.S. and having been helped by therapy, sent Anderson packets of information about their father.

They confirmed he was eventually arrested in Australia for sexually assaulting Dorothy, based on information provided by his wife Romola, and sentenced to two years in prison.

Anderson verified with Australian authorities that Wilkie was deported back to the U.S. when his sentence was up.

After reportedly spending time in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, Wilkie wound up in NYC and Adam Purple was born.

Anderson's reporting for The Villager appeared in two articles, the first headlined "The Dark Side of Purple" and the second titled "All Purple's Daughters."

How, I asked myself, did the mainstream press of NYC not follow up on Anderson's revelations at the time. Even the New York Post, with their Australian owner Rupert Murdoch, ignored the stories.

The only reference to Anderson's stories I found was a brief mention of The Villager's articles on Adam Purple's Wikipedia page.

"The bike activists hated me after the stories ran," said Anderson, who'd been told by some fellow journalists that he was stepping on the grave of a New York icon.

But he wasn't about to kill the stories. He did the right thing. "I don't want to be burying any stories," he said. These tales need to be told, he added.

And there were people who praised his integrity with one Lower East Sider telling him, “Your story is convincing. I mean Adam Purple. It’s like he’s our Bill Cosby.”

Anderson’s tales of Adam Purple won an award from the New York Press Association.

I asked the newsman, if Jenean had first read the New York Times obit on Adam Purple, would she have called the Times instead of The Villager.

"That's a good question," he said. "Maybe." Certainly, if the Times had put their vast resources into the story, it would have gotten a much-larger audience instead of The Villager's small readership.

Coincidentally, other publications always praised The Villager for its dedication to its readers.

In 2005, New York magazine listed "123 Reasons Why We Love New York Right Now." Number 51 was the New York Times "because our hometown paper is still the greatest in the world," the magazine said before adding, #52, on the facing page: "...next to The Villager."

Anderson said his staff was really proud of that. But times change. The Villager got sold and the staff was let go. The new owners kept Anderson on until 2019 when he was fired in a dispute over an assignment.

Lincoln Anderson holds one of the awards won by The Villager

He is now publisher and editor of The Village Sun — https//thevillagesun.com — a daily online and monthly print newspaper covering Greenwich Village, the East Village, the Lower East Side, Union Square, Soho, Hudson Square, Chelsea, Gramercy, Stuyvesant Town, Chinatown and beyond.

It's a good site. And as always Anderson, 59, remains a man of integrity.