Our
View: Urban field of dreams deserves
preservation
For over a decade, residents in South Los Angeles have had a small 14-acre pocket
of undeveloped land, the South Central Community Garden, in the middle of the
concrete jungle.
It has been a small reminder of rural life beyond an urbanized existence. It
has provided some sense of beauty to the community with flowers and trees instead
of sidewalks and fire hydrants; but more importantly, the garden has been a source
of food for the community.
Imagine that. A free home-grown, fresh plant from South Central — and it
goes to needy families. Who would want to stop that?
Apparently Ralph Horowitz does. Instead of preserving the urban oasis, Horowitz
plans to bulldoze it and replace it with a warehouse.
Wonderful. That’s all the city of Los Angeles needs: another freaking warehouse.
Unfortunately, Horowitz has every right to do this despite tremendous community
opposition. He owns the land and has gone through his own legal troubles to keep
it. In the past, he was forced to sell the land to the city, but after suing,
he got it back in 2003.
Now he plans to use it, despite the bountiful plants there that feed the neighboring
community. Horowitz, a lawyer and real estate company owner living in Brentwood,
comes off as an aggressive capitalist in several quotations about the issue in
the Los Angeles Times article, “Seeds of Dissension Linger,” published
Monday.
“
We have to throw them off,” the LA Times reported Horowitz as saying. “They’re
not going to walk off voluntarily. They have to be thrown off by a sheriff.”
The “they” Horowitz so un-lovingly refers to are the low-income,
working-class predominately Mexican and Central American immigrants in the area
who have tended the land for years. Currently, they are staging protests to the
land’s upcoming development. To their disadvantage, these farmers have
little in their favor and legally have no right to keep using the land.
But they do have a right to eat. They do have a right to enjoy greener pastures
in an otherwise gray L.A.
Unfortunately, Horowitz does not agree. By not using his land, he loses money.
This man is extremely easy to demonize. Clearly, he is doing well enough for
himself by living in Brentwood, but can he not bite the financial bullet just
this once? Can he not let the community have its garden?
He said he will not, and that is a real shame. Horowitz should do the humanitarian
thing. He should not destroy this urban field of dreams. If he builds there,
they surely will not come.
He should allow the land to remain a community garden, possibly sell it back
to the city for preservation and continue about his business. Do not destroy
what little farmland Los Angeles, and Southern California for the matter, has
left.
Consider this — many cities in the greater Los Angeles area are named after
either green land or trees that, for the most part, are no longer there. Here
are a few examples: Los Alamitos (little cottonwoods), Cerritos (little hills),
Montebello (beautiful mountain), Garden Grove, Inglewood, Lakewood, Brentwood,
Hollywood (after California holly, or toyon), Maywood, Cypress (after the cypress
tree), Orange (guess what that is named after), Gardena and Lawndale.
Southern California’s rich agricultural past is almost completely gone,
making many of these names seem irrelevant now. Old timers recall the difficultly
of travel due to bad roads. It could take all day to get from Cypress to Santa
Ana.
They might be disappointed to know even with modern roads it still takes all
day. Some things never change.
In any case, we must not forget Southern California’s past. The proposed
demolition of the South Central Community Garden, tragically, is yet another
step toward such forgetfulness.
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