| It's not that damned cat again, is it? |
 Sheriff's deputies evicted people from an urban community garden to make room for a warehouse Tuesday, touching off a furious protest in which actress Daryl Hannah and others climbed into a walnut tree or chained themselves to concrete-filled barrels. At least 39 people were arrested. Authorities cut away branches and used a fire truck lift to bring down the "Splash" actress and another tree-sitter, who raised their fists as they were removed. It was not immediately clear whether Hannah was under arrest. "I'm very confident this is the morally right thing to do, to take a principled stand in solidarity with the farmers," Hannah said by cell phone before a fire truck raised officers into the tree.
About 350 people grow produce and flowers on the 14 acres of privately owned land, in an inner-city area surrounded by warehouses and railroad tracks. The garden has been there for more than a decade, but the landowner, Ralph Horowitz, now wants to replace it with a warehouse.
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." 
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