Brush With Celebrity Doesn’t Help Farm

Former mermaid Daryl Hannah said recently she didn’t know there was a farm in South-Central Los Angeles until she got a phone call from a woman named Butterfly. This was back when Joan Baez was living up a tree on the same farm and singing folk songs, and I’d like to thank all of them for their contribution to the first paragraph of this column.

Hannah was being plucked from what may have been that same tree Tuesday as I arrived on the scene. Helicopters hovered overhead and there were enough police on hand to invade Mexico.

It was the final drama in a long-running soap opera based on the fact that a guy named Ralph Horowitz wants a warehouse or something to rise on his 14-acre property, where cactus and fruit trees now bloom.

Hannah’s arrest, along with those of a few dozen other protesters, was a Hollywood moment if ever there was one. The farm story has been beaten to death for years, but Hannah only heard about it a few weeks ago. And then suddenly she was Mother Teresa among the poor, laying her head down in a cabbage patch each night.

When I got to the show, protesters were behind the barricades at 41st Street and Long Beach Avenue, singing and dancing and yelling at cops in riot gear as the last squatters were evicted.

“What are you here to protect?” one foaming protester shouted at the cops, calling them slaves of the system. “Fascism?”

It was like being at a Mumia Abu Jamal rally. I liked the spirit of the young Che wannabes and gray-haired greens, but Mumia killed the cop in question, and Ralph Horowitz owns the farm in question. Which means he can do with it as he pleases, as the courts have ruled more than once.

Sure, it’s a little more complicated than that. The city bought the land from Horowitz in the 1980s to build a trash incinerator, then dropped the plans after citizen protests. In 1992, the city leased the land to a food bank, which opened it up to urban farmers. But then, after a court battle, the city agreed to sell the land back to Horowitz in 2003 for $5 million.

That’s when the current squabble started. Horowitz told the farmers to leave, but they wouldn’t budge, so he called them squatters and they called him names right back.

The money spent on legal fees alone could probably feed the farm’s 350 gardeners for years to come. But this isn’t really about gardening at this point. The property is a symbol of many different things and everyone’s got an agenda, with the plight of the farmers almost lost in the fray.

They became pawns, says South-Central activist Mark Williams, for a small group of political opportunists and Westside environmentalists. The latter groups made up the bulk of the arrestees Tuesday, said Williams, who’s with South-Central Concerned Citizens. Many of the real farmers, he said, long ago moved to other spots the city found them, including one seven-acre plot at 111th and Avalon, where they could grow food without endless political theater.

“They speak a lot of progressive, Marxist rhetoric, but they’re behaving like landed gentry,” said Williams, who had water thrown in his face Tuesday by one of the so-called representatives of the farmers. “They didn’t like hearing me speak the truth.”

Williams, whose mother, Juanita Tate, was one of the original activists who fought the city’s attempt to build an incinerator on the property, said he thought the activists were fools to vilify and alienate Horowitz, and thinks they sabotaged whatever deal might have been worked out to keep at least a portion of the land open to public use for gardening or soccer fields.

Meanwhile, demonstrators blasted Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for failing to save the farm, and supporters promised yet more legal challenges in the never-ending saga. At City Hall, the defeated mayor was pointing a finger at Horowitz, saying he had turned down a $16-million offer that included a $10-million pledge from the Annenberg Foundation.

The city lost “an oasis in a sea of industry and concrete,” Villaraigosa said.

Sure, it’s sad when a disputed patch of salad greens in central city gets crushed under the boots of City Hall bunglers and a developer who’s about to turn fertilizer into gold. But who knows, maybe Joan Baez will get a new folk song out of the drama. And it did give a few Hollywood heroes a bit more time in the lights.

“I’m very confident this is the morally right thing to do, to take a principled stand in solidarity with the farmers,” Hannah told the Associated Press moments before her arrest.

Call me a cynic, but I’ve got to wonder why she, Baez, Laura Dern, Martin Sheen, Danny Glover and other Hollywood supporters couldn’t help raise the dough to back up their principles.

And if they believe poor folk ought to do their farming on private property, I’m wondering when they’ll ask some of their Hollywood pals to open the security gates to their sprawling compounds. I’m just guessing, but there must be thousands of acres of fertile soil out there, ripe for planting.