Strawberry Fields: Forever?

Every day from 7 in the morning until 5 in the evening, Francisco Contreras invites the city’s future to look at its past.

That’s when the 30-year-old Guadalajara, Mexico, native displays the fat strawberries, green beans, basil, mint, chives and Italian parsley just picked from Hiroshi Fujishige’s farm and spread over a wooden produce stand on Harbor Boulevard across from the Anaheim Convention Center.

Set on a dusty earthen berm, the small stand is a study in contrast in a city where once thriving family farms have given way to the office buildings, towering hotels, restaurants and convenience stores that fuel Anaheim’s treasured tourist trade.

These days, the oddly positioned produce stand just a few blocks south of Disneyland is something of a tourist attraction in itself--where Contreras says good days are measured by the size of the latest convention, just like it is at the 7-Eleven store up the street.

“I think it’s too hard for the farmers today,” Contreras says. “There aren’t too many like this one.”

Hiroshi Fujishige and his brother Masao took control of the 58-acre Anaheim farm by trading about 20 acres of family land in Norwalk back in the early 1950s.

Those were the days when orange groves and eucalyptus trees dominated the local landscape and the snow-capped Matterhorn replica was still on Disney’s drawing board.

But since the theme park’s opening, Fujishige and other farmers have seen Anaheim’s open spaces shrink away. He and Masao watched as the mammoth Anaheim Hilton & Towers shot out of the ground just west of the farm. The view west became increasingly crowded when the Marriott, the Inn at the Park and Jolly Roger won prime locations near the convention center.

Since the mid 1950s, developers have literally helped plow the dirt path to Fujishige’s front door. And in 1986, the family and its resistance to constant development threats became local legend when Masao committed suicide during a fight to keep the city from building roads through the property.

Recently, Fujishige said he was offered a proposal worth $2 million per acre. But the most interest has come from the Walt Disney Co., which has been unsuccessful in repeated attempts this year to purchase the farm for long-term expansion interests.

“It’s home,” the 68-year-old Fujishige said earlier this year. “But I could see where I may have to move, maybe in three, four, or five years. I’m happy doing what I’m doing, that’s all I know.”

The Fujishige stand is located at 1854 S. Harbor Blvd., Anaheim. It is open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.