Stars join fight for L.A. garden
LOS ANGELES – Hundreds of urban farmers battling to hold on to a small patch of land in the middle of the city’s gritty warehouse district got a shot of celebrity star power Thursday when actor Danny Glover exhorted them to ignore an eviction order and stay put.
With actress Daryl Hannah standing beside him and veteran tree-sitters John Quigley and Julia Butterfly Hill perched overhead in an old walnut tree, Glover said the farmers’ 14 acres of beans, tomatoes, squash, watermelon and other fruits and vegetables were not only providing sustenance to some 350 families but also setting a worldwide example.
“Not only is this sustainable development, but we’re talking about organic farming. This is food that comes from the community,” he said.
Surrounded by a tall chain-link fence and locked gates, the garden is filled wall-to-wall with various plants, including exotic spices and herbal medicines that people in the poor, largely Hispanic neighborhood interspersed among the warehouses say are often unavailable at local grocery stores.
“A lot of people bring the seeds from Mexico, and even if you can find some of the foods at the market sometime, the freshness and the quality is not the same,” said Maribel Tlatoa, who has farmed a plot with her family there for eight years.
The property was owned by developer Ralph Horowitz when the city seized it through eminent domain in the 1980s with plans to build a trash-to-energy incinerator. When that project fell through, officials handed it over to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, which began allowing people from the neighborhood five miles south of downtown to set up small garden plots.
Horowitz sued to get it back and the city settled in 2003 by returning it for $5 million, slightly more than the $4.8 million he had been paid.
He has offered to sell it for $16.3 million to a nonprofit group that would continue the farm, but when the group came up $10 million short by last month’s deadline, he got an eviction order.
Horowitz, who has said he wants to build a warehouse on the site, was not available for comment Thursday, said a woman who answered the phone at his home.
In a brief but passionate speech, Glover urged the farmers to stay put.
“They are doing what is just and what is right,” he told about three dozen people, including reporters, environmentalists and a handful of farmers who had laid out a spread of fresh-grown food for the reporters.
His appearance came as rumors circulated that Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were poised to arrive.
Hannah, Quigley, Hill and a few dozen others who have moved onto the property full-time say if authorities try to remove them they will respond with nonviolent resistance. Quigley spent 71 days in an oak tree that was to be bulldozed for a housing development in 2003 before authorities forcibly removed him. The tree was later replanted elsewhere.
Authorities have set no deadline for clearing the property, said sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore, adding he understood
fundraising is continuing and there is still a possibility a deal can be struck.