City Wants to Uproot Woman’s Alley Garden

Five years ago, the unpaved Sylmar alley sprouted nothing but rotting timber and broken glass.

Then Victoria O’Casey moved next door, and there went the neighborhood.

The Irish-born landscape designer had trouble getting work, so she turned a 20-by-60-foot plot at the end of the dead-end alley into her canvas, her hobby, her mission. Working up to 40 hours a week on her hands and knees, she cleaned it up and planted a garden of bromeliads and cherry trees, roses and pampas grass, marigolds and camellias.

She says that one day after she began work, a city employee--she doesn’t know from which agency--happened by and she asked if she could continue her project. He said that was fine, she says, admitting that it was an offhand arrangement.

It became her life’s work, and the area’s pride.

But Los Angeles’ roadway authorities see it as a violation of the law.

A few weeks ago, the Bureau of Street Maintenance sent her an official “Notice to Abate Nuisance.” Its warning, according to O’Casey: Clear out, or we’ll bulldoze. And send you the bill.

The warning has shaken the artist, and confounded her neighbors.

“How often do I hear politicians say, ‘Let’s beautify Los Angeles?’ Perhaps that’s all nonsense,” O’Casey said.

A civil engineer handling the case for the city’s Department of Public Works contends that the notice followed a complaint from a neighbor, who he said asked not to be identified.

“I don’t know what goes on in that garden, there might be loud music or something,” said engineer Roger Ketterer about the tranquil oasis. “The place is kinda cute, but we did get a complaint and so we have to respond.”

His reasoning bewilders O’Casey, who says she has received nothing but laurels from neighbors over the past five years. Fellow gardeners stop by for cuttings, mothers stroll past with their children, and others arrive at all hours just to sit on a wooden bench and read a book amid the rich smell of jasmine and lemon.

“People always say what a flaming grace this garden is,” she said in the brogue of her native County Tipperary.

The main problem: Under city regulations O’Casey is ineligible for a revocable permit to establish what the city notice calls a “plant-growing operation” in the alley because she does not own land directly adjacent to it. She recently moved to a rented house half a block away.

Her attempt to obtain such a permit was rejected, Ketterer said, because “she has no direct rights.”

“What if I showed up one day and wanted to plant corn across your front yard,” said Ketterer, drawing an analogy. “What would you say--’Nice corn?’ ”

He said O’Casey is entitled to appeal his bureau’s decision to the Board of Public Works after accumulating written approvals from all surrounding neighbors. But that can cost hundreds of dollars.

So last week O’Casey tore out a small shed she used for sketching there, and removed a gate she installed to keep out vandals. And she will await assistance from the office of her councilman, Hal Bernson.

Meanwhile, she continues to meticulously rake the garden’s dirt entrance every day, and fertilize her rare yellow camellias.

Even Ketterer concedes that it’s unlikely that her project has put the city in harm’s way, and doubts that the city would bulldoze it.

“Those petunias don’t appear to be hurting anybody,” he said.