SOUTH-CENTRAL : Out of Trash-Strewn Lot, a Garden Grows

For years, residents in the 1100 block of East 27th Street were fed up with illegal dumping on the neighborhood’s only vacant lot.

It seemed as though each week more truckloads of tires, broken furniture and other debris were being dumped on the roughly 3,000-square-foot lot. One time, residents even found a bag of dead cats among the three-foot piles of trash.

But on Saturday neighbors bid a long-overdue goodby to the blighted lot when a group of urban farmers hunkered down and planted the first seeds of a new community garden that, itself, took months of nurturing to finally blossom.

Among the eager gardeners was 53-year-old Ana Maria Espindola, who took a spade to a 10-by-6-foot plot and planted corn, chiles and tomatoes. “I want to teach my children to plant and cultivate,” said the mother of five. She plans to pass along the farming techniques she brought from her rural Mexican village 22 years ago.

The seed for the new garden was planted early last year when Espindola’s sister-in-law, Luz Mesa, took her frustration with the trash-strewn lot that abutted her house to a meeting of the 27th/28th Street Block Club, which is coordinated by the Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles community organization.

Concerned Citizens organizers and block club members saw a community garden as a way to permanently clear off the lot, which had stayed clutter-free only briefly after previous cleanup efforts.

But the process to create the garden wasn’t easy.

Organizers first had to track down the property owner through city records and win his support. Then they spent months persuading the Department of Water and Power to allow garden participants to pay monthly installments, instead of a lump sum, for an $800 water meter at the site.

And finally, Melodie Dove, a coordinator with the nonprofit Concerned Citizens, had to find a hardware business to donate the supplies for the garden’s individual seed beds and irrigation system.

In March, she struck pay dirt. Home Base Home Improvement Warehouse in Inglewood agreed to donate piping, lumber, plants and fertilizer.

Richard Harrison, the store’s general manager, said the decision was easy. “We run a business in the community and the community has been good to us. It’s good to give something back.”

Dove said the garden has not only erased blight in the neighborhood but also brought African American and Latino residents closer together.

Before the project, the block club was composed only of African Americans. Now close to half the group’s 15 members are Latino.

A community garden “is a way to bring the community together,” Dove said.