Rousting the Roost : Redondo Beach Neighbors Run Afowl of Each Other Over Chickens

The Whites, Tom and Josie, had been searching for years when they finally found the spot to build their dream house. A corner lot, it was, with a whispering sea breeze and an old cottage; where their Mediterranean estate would someday rise.

Then they moved in, and the sea breeze whispered, and what it whispered was . . .

Cock-a-doodle-doo.

And that was how the Whites learned that their dream house would be next door to the Chicken Lady of Redondo Beach.

“We didn’t want a feud to develop, but that is basically what has happened,” said Tom White, a 41-year-old orthodontist. For the Whites and their neighbor--37-year-old bird lover Roseanne Smith--the last three years have been consumed with a battle over her desire to keep her back yard full of pet roosters and hens and their wish “not to live next door to a chicken farm.”

“The chicken situation,” as the Whites refer to it, has been aired from the City Council chambers to Los Angeles County Municipal Court. And despite ordinances, court orders and even a criminal conviction, as many as 35 chickens--many more than the half-dozen the city said she could keep--continue to roost outside the cottage where Smith grew up.

Now, after being hauled into court yet again by her neighbors, Smith faces the ultimate punishment: A court commissioner has given her until Dec. 8 to get rid of every chicken on her property.

“Oh, why don’t they let us alone?” lamented Smith’s father, Edmund Smith, 62, who lives with Roseanne Smith and his two other daughters in the family homestead on Irena Street.

“All these birds do is peck the ground a little and sleep. They don’t ask much out of life.”

But there is more at issue between the Smiths and the Whites than the merits of a family coop. More than anything, both sides say, the dispute underscores the changes that growth has wrought in Redondo Beach.

There was a time, Edmund Smith recalls, when their neighborhood was rural, and there was plenty of room for ducks, goats and even the occasional horse. But since 1954, when the Smiths bought their cottage with its honeysuckles, juniper trees and whitewashed fence, the city’s population has more than doubled and housing prices have soared. The cottages with the 44-by-160-foot lots that cost Smith $6,000 now sell for more than $325,000.

Tom White said, “These throwbacks to the past are in conflict with the changes that are going on in Redondo Beach.”

The Smiths, however, believe that the Whites want to make them so unhappy that they’ll sell out and move, leaving the possibility of an even bigger lot for the dream house-to-be.

“Why else would they cause all this trouble, if not because they want this property?” Edmund Smith asked.

Since Roseanne was a child, her father said, she loved poultry the way other children love kittens and pups.

“She’d ride her bike with her rooster, Tommy, perched on the handlebars,” he said. “And he’d hang on pretty good.”

No one objected to Roseanne’s flock, even after the initially unincorporated neighborhood was annexed by the city in 1982. Although the city required special permits for chicken owners and prohibited the keeping of chickens within 35 feet of other houses, it wasn’t until 1986, when the property next door went up for sale, that the county Department of Health Services began to get complaints. The chief complainants, records indicate, were the Whites, who acknowledged that they bought the property almost sight-unseen in July, 1986.

“On the day we went by to look at it, I heard a rooster crow, but we didn’t realize how many chickens there were until after we moved in,” Josie White, 35, said.

“One night, I looked out and saw her open the door and 60 chickens paraded into her house.”

Actually, the Smiths said, it was 35 hens and 19 roosters, which share the back yard and sometimes the house with 10 cats and eight doves. As the Whites cleared away the thick foliage that had overgrown the fence, the cackling and crowing got louder, Josie White said. Roosters materialized on the edge of their new back yard. Her two children developed an allergy to feathers.

Within a year, both sides say, the relationship had so deteriorated that the Whites offered to either buy the Smith home or take it in trade for another property where flocks would be welcome.

The offer, said Tom White, was intended as a “gentlemanly proposition.” But to the Smiths, it implied an ulterior motive.

Soon two petitions were before the City Council--one signed by the Whites and four other families to get the chickens off the block, and another signed by Smith and 25 neighbors who believe that the birds should stay.

In September, 1987, the City Council ordered Smith to get rid of all but six of her birds. Four months later, when the flock was still there, Smith was convicted on misdemeanor charges of violating her wild animal permit. Her sentence was two years’ probation plus 19 hours of community service, cleaning cages in a Hawthorne animal shelter.

By September, 1988, the flock was down to the allowable six birds. But controversy bred fame--and chickens. And, as her reputation as the Chicken Lady spread, locals deluged her with strays--everything from orphaned Easter chicks to a starving rooster that was “so old he could barely crow” to a little hen whose side had been punctured with a nail. Within six months, the flock was back.

“People just came, saying ‘I can’t care for this chicken anymore,’ ” Smith said. “And I couldn’t bring myself to say no.”

Furious, the Whites hired an attorney and reported her as a probation violator. On Nov. 9, Municipal Court Commissioner Douglas G. Carnahan asked how they would punish Smith if they were the judges.

Give her two weeks in jail and a $500 fine, Josie White replied. Instead, the commissioner ordered her to get rid of the flock.

It’s an order Roseanne Smith will not obey without a fight. The last time she had to get rid of her chickens, she wound up having to euthanize 29 of her pets, she said.

“I lost sleep, I didn’t eat, I lost 35 pounds,” she recalled.

This time, she said, she will plead for leniency and write Carnahan a letter asking to keep her six birds.

“I wouldn’t have taken the (extra) animals if they hadn’t been in pain and suffering,” she said, “or if I could think of anyone better to care for them than me.”