The Pine Trees on Bella’s Hill

People in Boyle Heights call it Bella’s Hill because Bella Corvera has lived on it for 30 years and has a kind of proprietary interest in what goes on around it or on top of it.

It’s a small knoll just off Zonal Avenue and across from Hazard Park, maybe an acre of land right next to a covered water reservoir that’s been there as long as anyone can remember.

What makes the hill interesting is not exactly its location but the presence of about a hundred Canary Island pine trees that tower 60 to 80 feet over the neighborhood, trees so tall and stately you can see them from the San Bernardino Freeway.

Bella Corvera, who lives in a duplex right across an alley from the little plot of trees, has raised five of her kids there. They used to ride their bikes on trails that wind through the tiny forest, and camp at night on a soft bed of pine needles.

There’s a mountain-like atmosphere to the grove, enhanced by a scent of pine that can take you drifting back to places in memory where you haven’t been in years, family camping trips that were always chaotic and fun.

The trees were brought to Bella’s Hill from their native Canary Islands in the late 1920s when they were hardly more than twigs. No one knows who brought them, just someone who loved trees.

They’re a part of Bella’s past, a small forest in the middle of a city that cries out for preservation. But soon, too soon, both Bella and a lot of her trees will be gone.

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They lie in the path of a billion-dollar expansion project of the County-USC Hospital, much of which was damaged by last January’s earthquake. The reservoir and Bella’s Hill are owned by the city’s Department of Water and Power. They’ll sell them to the county for the hospital expansion program.

There’s no question that Bella’s going to be forced to move. Hers is one of 160 homes that will be flattened to make way for a 3,000-car parking structure. Cars always come first in a city which, if it isn’t careful, will someday ride to hell atop a spontaneous combustion engine.

Bella cries when she talks about having to move. It will be the third time she’s been forced from her home by County Hospital or USC Medical School expansion, either for a parking structure or for student dormitories.

But this time is the worse because she’s been there longer and raised her family on the hilltop. And there are those trees, too, which will linger in memory as long as she lives, pointing timelessly toward heaven.

It was the trees that got me involved in this. Alex Man, who lives in Santa Monica Canyon, called one day to say I ought to look into a proposed environmental disaster in East L.A. on a place called Bella’s Hill.

He was aware of columns I’d written to help save Topanga’s Summit Valley from the builders and pointed out that open space in Boyle Heights was every damned bit as important as open space on the tony Westside.

What intrigued me was that here was a guy who lived on the Westside too and was furious about what was happening on the eastg side of town. Turns out he’s president of the Federation of Organizations for Conserving Urban Space, or FOCUS. They’ve already saved a couple of parks and don’t want to see Bella’s Hill and its trees die under a bulldozer’s blade.

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The covered reservoir is a goner for sure, but the fate of the trees is less clear. Plans now call for about 30 of them to be yanked out, and even though they’re going to be replaced, that’s not good enough for Man and for others who want to see the whole grove spared.

They claim that the work itself is going to be destructive to much more than 30 of the pines, and the trees that replace them will be sticks compared to what’s there now.

But even more important, they just don’t trust builders to stay with the original plans. They see them as lovers of steel and concrete who would gladly rip out anything in their path for the sake of a building, trees be damned.

“All we want to do,” Man says, “is save some open space in an area that has so little.”

I understand that and wish sometimes that all the vacant lots of my past were still there, but they’re not. The best we can hope for here is that the county will save most of those towering pines.

And what can we say of Bella Corvera, who is being forced to move from her beloved hill to make room for a temple to cars? Nothing, really, that will ever replace the whisper of a breeze rustling through high branches.

But at least I can offer the words of author James Barrie who said that God gave us memory so we would have roses in winter . . . and, perhaps, the sweet, lingering scent of pine when its memory is all we have left.