A Nature Park That Doesn\'t Put Down Roots

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times “Trailer Park” is a traveling art installation presented as a public park housed in a trailer.

Thompson Davis climbed off the sidewalk into an old silver trailer with no door. “This is a park?” he asked, eyeing the beds of rubber tree plants, goldenrods and white snakeroot within.

“It's a trailer park,” Kim Holleman answered.

“But I've been to a trailer park before,” Mr. Davis, 25, said after some consideration. “This is different.”

Indeed it is. Ms. Holleman's environmental artwork “Trailer Park” is a nature preserve built inside a 1984 Coachmen Travel Trailer that has traveled New York City since 2006. On Wednesday last week, it made a stop on an industrial block in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Kim Holleman, left, who created “Trailer Park,” welcomes guests inside.

Some visitors had questions. “Wow, are these really growing?” Brianna Stachowski, 25, asked as she brushed a shrub growing up and out of a skylight. Others, like a 5-year-old named Rosa, offered exclamations: “Tiene pescados!” she said, pointing at a miniature fish pond.

The mobile garden bills itself as the only place in the city wher e you need to go inside to go outside. Once you're outside, which is really inside, it's a breath of fresh air.

The 14-by-8-foot “park” is a condensed version, or perhaps an excerpt, of what you might find at a conventional park. A narrow aisle of hand-laid brick is flanked by raised beds overflowing with grasses and flowers. There are benches for those who want to read, socialize or simply enjoy a snack. Glassless skylights fill the space with air and light, and even snow in the winter. Birds and bees have been known to flutter in to do bird and bee things.

Ms. Holleman, 39, a multidisciplinary artist from Tampa, Fla., said she came up with “Trailer Park” “to make the statement in a heavy way, that if we didn't change our ways, there would be no more nature left to go to, and we'd be put in the unfortunate position of putting nature inside to protect it - from us.”

Since the trailer's debut at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in downtown Manhattan, she has transported it to nearly every institution that has requested its presence.

The trailer, pulled behind a U-Haul truck, also makes spontaneous appearances, like last week's pop-up on Bogart Street in East Williamsburg, a few blocks from the lot where Ms. Holleman keeps it. (She announces the trailer's perambulations on Twitter and Facebook and to her mailing list.)

While “Trailer Park” may have started as a call to heal the environment, Ms. Holleman said she had seen that something as simple as a trailer filled with plants could also heal the people who visited it.

Last month, she said, at the do-it-yourself technology show Maker Faire in Queens, a father kept bringing his son back every hour or so. “He told me that his son loved robots but has Asperger's and gets easily overstimulated,” Ms. Holleman said. “So when his son would become overloaded by the thousands of people and the sounds and the machines and robots everywhere, h e would take his son back to my ‘Trailer Park' so he could recover.”

The trailer's guest book includes hundreds of haikus, odes and love letters. A visitor named Jesus wrote: “Dear Park, I like you this way. I like you for who you are on the inside. It's like I see less and less of you on the street.” Another guest wrote, “If every block in NYC had one of these, crime would go down.”

Kim Holleman gave a “TEDx Talk” about “Trailer Park” in April.

The trailer has occasionally attracted unwanted attention. “The park has no door, so anyone can come in at night, and I once started to get the sense that a man was doing bad things in here,” Ms. Holleman said as she fixed a stray piece of moss. “I would come back in the morning and be like, oh, he's bee n here again, because there would be random burn marks on the wall or pieces of litter stuffed in corners.”

The intruder turned out to be a patient at a local veteran's hospice, and Ms. Holleman decided not to involve the police. “It's not about getting the guy in trouble, you know? He just needed help.”

Other than that, though, and “Good Art” graffiti-sprayed across the back, the trailer has gone largely unmolested. “People see it as theirs; it's like a people's park,” Ms. Holleman said.

On Bogart Street last week, the people certainly seemed appreciative.

“We normally just sit on the street, but then we saw this,” said Adrian Buckmaster, 57, as he savored the last few bites of a strawberry  FrozFruit  on a bench beneath a skylight. “This is better.”

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times A skylight without glass provides sunlight and fresh air.

A version of this article appeared in print on 10/20/2012, on page A20 of the NewYork edition with the headline: To Flourish, Nature Park Doesn't Put Down Roots.