Requiem for the South Central Farmers

At midnight tonight, the "South Central Farm" at Alameda Street and 41st Street will cease to exist. An eviction notice posted on Friday by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department informed the 360 families who have tended gardens at the 14-acre site that today is the last day they could legally occupy the property.

While contentious "site fights" are common in our nation's cities, with precious urban land at a premium, the story of the largest urban garden in the country is one that could only occur in the convoluted landscape of South Los Angeles. After all, the "South Central Farm" began life as the site of a abandoned trash-to-energy incinerator and met death as the site of a warehouse for the world's largest retailer. Inbetween, it served as a lifeline to hundreds of families struggling to survive and a verdant respite in a hardscrabble industrial landscape.

For over a century, Alameda Street has served as the backbone of an industrial Los Angeles that few people are acquainted with. In its heyday, it was home to the likes of Firestone and General Motors, a bit of Akron and Detroit seemingly out of place in the sun-drenched metropolis. However, Alameda Street was (and is) as integral to greater Los Angeles as Hollywood and Wilshire Boulevards; here, the "American Dream" was realized in smokestacks and steel, not celluloid and currency. To this day, the landscape of Alameda Street, replete with warehouses and junk yards, represents a city with a "working class" aura that cannot be denied.

It should come as no surprise that, in the 1980's, the City of Los Angeles found this particular 14-acre site on Alameda Street to be the perfect place to build LANCER, a trash-to-energy incinerator. The project would divert waste from landfills while providing much needed power after the Arab oil embargos and the Three Mile Island disaster had cast doubt on the future of energy solely based on petroleum and nuclear fission. In 1986, the City exercised its right of eminent domain to acquire the property from Ralph Horowitz for a "fair market value" of $4.8 million.

While LANCER was set among the heavy industry along Alameda Street and was bordered on the east by the "industrial suburb" of Vernon, the residents of the neighborhoods to the west of the site weren't happy about the project. A unique collation formed among those residents of South Los Angeles and "Westside liberals," who resided in posh neighborhoods far from the property but opposed LANCER on environmental grounds. Then-Mayor Tom Bradley, who had long relied on support from both groups, decided to kill the incinerator endeavor. However, local residents remained embittered, considering LANCER to be an attempt to "dump" an undesirable use on a politically weak community, yet another "slap in the face" from a City government that didn't seem to care about them.

In 1992, riots broke out across Los Angeles. While the Rodney King verdict was ostensibly the cause, a larger sense of injustice and maltreatment, including perceptions of the aborted LANCER project, led to the death and devastation. In the wake of the riots, the City attempted to "rebuild" in a fashion that spoke to the aspirations of a 21st-century "world metropolis" rather than the shortcomings of a 20th-century "segregated city."

In a time of testing, the vacant 14-acre site on Alameda Street found new life as a place where the impoverished, disenfranchised families of the "demonized" South Central district could redeem themsevles and their community by growing their own food. In December 1992, the "South Central Farm" began operations as a community garden under the aegis of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. In a bizarre testament to the fertility of Southern California, its 360 farming plots (each measuring 30 feet by 30 feet) literally "bore fruit" in the midst of an industrial district. However, the agreement that established the garden was "temporary."

In 1994, the City sold its land to its Harbor Department to assist with construction of the "Alameda Corridor." The Corridor was a herculean endeavor to bury the railroad lines that paralleled Alameda Street into a subterranean trench, faciliating the movement of goods between the Port of Los Angeles and the railroad yards near Downtown. The Harbor Department required only a small sliver of the land, leaving the great majority of the urban garden intact.

The sale of the "South Central Farm" to the Harbor Department attracted the attention of former landowner Ralph Horowitz. Mr. Horowitz had been forced to sell his land to the City for a "public purpose," the LANCER project, and he knew he had the "first right" to buy the land back if the City abandoned the project. While real estate values had taken a nosedive since he sold the property in 1986, they were on their way back up by 1994 and Mr. Horowitz knew he could build some warehouses on the site and reap the profits. Maintaining the property as a community garden yielded no profit for anyone despite the fact that it provided tangible benefits to hundreds of families in South Los Angeles.

Years of legal wrangling ensued. The "farmers" tending the modest plots, most of them immigrants from Latin America, were unaware of the complex issues casting a pall over their garden. By the time the City finally settled with Mr. Horowitz in August 2003, selling the property back to him for about $200,000 more than it had paid for it 13 years earlier, it was too late to "save" the site from conversion to a more profitable use. The "temporary" agreement that had lasted for nearly 12 years couldn't last much longer.

While Mr. Horowitz may be "demonized" as an uncaring property owner from Brentwood, he acted within his legal rights. After all, the "farmers" and their supporters could raise the $5 million to buy the property and continue to use it as they saw fit. Furthermore, the land was "taken" from him in the first place. However, it's quite sad that the money couldn't be found and that no adequate "replacement" site can be found in this congested sector of the metropolis. Due to the strange machinations of land use law, economics, and politics, hundreds of people enjoyed this amenity for over a decade only to see it taken away. We should view this story as a tragedy.

Ironically, it was recently reported that the warehouses on the property will be occupied by none other than Wal-Mart, a corporation that is currently the "poster child" for everything that is wrong with American capitalism. Framed in such extreme terms, no one can dispute that it is better for poor families to grow food to feed themselves than for wealthy corporations to store goods to grow profit to feed Wall Street. However, we cannot blame Wal-Mart for the plight of the "South Central Farmers." In the end, we can't blame anyone.

As an urban planner, I believe that every "site" tells a story. Few stories are as compelling as the one told at Alameda Street and 41st Street. It is a story of poverty and prosperity, of capitalism and communism, of politics and property....it is a story of America itself. What values are guiding our cities into the 21st-century?

An aerial photograph of the "South Central Farm" snatched from Google Earth (click for a larger image):


Links of Interest:

South Central Farmers

Save Our Garden