THE actress Daryl Hannah had to be forcibly removed from a walnut tree as police in riot gear evicted dozens of protesters trying to save a community garden in the blighted South Central section of Los Angeles.
The actress, best known for playing a mermaid in the film Splash, waved a fist over her head as police cut through branches with a chainsaw and used a fire engine cherry picker to remove her and fellow “tree-sitter” John Quigley, an environmentalist.
“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 mobile phone before the officers reached her.
The arrest of 44 people at the site was the climax of a long battle to save the inner-city plot that has attracted support from actors including Danny Glover, Alicia Silverstone, Martin Sheen and Willie Nelson, the country singer.
Hannah had been sharing her tree-sitting duties in the past three weeks with Joan Baez, the Sixties protest singer, and Julia “Butterfly” Hill, an anti-logging activist, neither of whom was present when police arrived. Activists say that the 5.7ha (14-acre) lot is the largest urban farm in America and provides food for the families of 350 mostly Latino subsistence farmers in the heart of Tinseltown. A court ordered that the squatters should be evicted so the land could be developed by its owner. About 250 police used bolt cutters and chainsaws to evict dozens of protesters, who had chained themselves to trees and concrete-filled drums.
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Officers bulldozed their way through vegetable gardens and cut down an avocado tree to get a fire engine close enough to remove the last four activists, including Hannah, from the walnut tree.
“Everything that was here, they destroyed,” said Maria de Jesus Cruz, 42, who grew onions, lemons and nectarines on the site for nine years.
The dispute dates to the 1980s, when the city forcibly acquired the plot at 41st and Alameda streets to build a rubbish incinerator to generate energy. The plan was abandoned after community protests following the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the land was leased to a food bank, which allowed people to start farming.
The original owner sued to get the land back. After a court battle the city agreed three years ago to sell it to him for $5million (£2.7million) — close to the price he received for it 17 years earlier. The owner, Ralph Horowitz, offered to sell 4ha (10 acres) for $16.3 million to a trust set up on behalf of the farmers. When the group failed to raise the money, despite a $10 million pledge by the Annenberg Foundation, he obtained an eviction order.
Mr Horowitz says the land is costing him almost $30,000 a month in mortgage payments and other costs and wants to build a warehouse on the site.He says that the farmers sued him and their supporters picketed his home and office. He has been incensed by a Spanish- language website that accused him of being part of a “Jewish mafia” that controls Los Angeles. “We’ve made, in the last three years, enough of a donation to those farmers,” he said.
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Despite the celebrity protests he won support from the Los Angeles Times, which observed in an editorial: “One wonders how the luminaries joining the protests would react if urban farmers camped out full-time on their assorted Malibu or Hollywood Hills estates.” Many of the farmers are being relocated.