Digging Up Dirt in a Back-Alley Garden of Eden

“Well, my God, she had a telephone! How can you get a telephone in a vacant lot?!? . . I don’t know, maybe she sweet-talked the lineman.”

Let the record show that Milo Patet, an 88-year-old widower, isn’t the neighbor who sicked authorities on Victoria O’Casey, the rogue gardener of Sylmar. The complaint was filed confidentially, and the complainant says she still fears reprisals. Besides, the way this tale has unfolded, with the plucky, resourceful O’Casey assuming the role of the martyr with a green thumb, the disgruntled neighbor must know she looks like the villain.

“She’s been nothing but grief,” the complainant said. “The main point I want to stress, this was not ever a neighborhood garden. . . . This woman is not doing something for the neighborhood. She is a leech.”

Such harsh words may serve to create more sympathy for O’Casey. Perhaps it’s unfair not to identify the source, but be assured that this critic isn’t anonymous to O’Casey or Patet or other neighbors. And be assured that O’Casey can give as well as she gets.

*

Neighborhood feuds are so messy, so personal. But when I read my colleague Jon D. Markman’s accounts last week of O’Casey’s troubles, I wanted to see O’Casey’s enchanted, bedeviled garden for myself.

Markman’s first story described how O’Casey, an Irish immigrant who speaks with a thick brogue, had during the last five years cleared an unpaved, dead-end city alley between Astoria and Berg streets of rotted timber and broken glass and transformed it with succulents, roses, fruit trees and vines, much to the delight of neighbors. It also described how, after one neighbor (the one you’ve already met) complained that O’Casey played classical music too loud, noisily raked at 6 a.m. and built a shed that obstructed her view, the city’s Bureau of Street Maintenance had given O’Casey a nuisance abatement order, forcing her to get rid of a gate and a shed. O’Casey applied for a permit to use the city-owned property but was rejected because she doesn’t own adjacent land. (She lives a block away.)

The second story described how readers, moved by O’Casey’s plight, showered her with moral support, job offers and suggestions of other plots of neglected public land she might beautify. Thus, a folk hero was born.

Not every reader, however, was so enamored. Markman passed along a letter from Tujunga resident Stephen Small, criticizing his coverage as “grossly unfair to the Sylmar homeowners subjected to O’Casey’s illegal squatting.”

“She is not creating an alley paradise; she has been running a ‘for profit’ growing operation for five years,” Small continued. “Until very recently that easement has been full of potted plants behind locked gates. This is not a community beautification project, but a selfish business operation.

“Several neighbors supplied her with water until they grew tired of being used. Let her get a business license and rent property for this venture rather than freeload.”

Small didn’t even mention the phone extension. In any case, O’Casey denies she used the public land for a commercial enterprise. Small’s letter also raises an unintended question: Why would a Tujunga resident come to the defense of Sylmar homeowners? Small told Markman that he is a friend of the anonymous complainant. The complainant explained to me that she was one of those neighbors who used to supply O’Casey with water--for 1 1/2 years, in fact--before parting ways. Why the split?

“I was conned by her,” the complainant claims. (She acknowledges, however, that O’Casey paid for the water.)

“I didn’t approve of her lifestyle,” O’Casey sniffs.

The details were disparaging, spooky and off the record. But let’s allow O’Casey to level her countercharge: Could it be that her critic wants to boot her out to claim the garden for herself?

*

“Vic’s Garden,” says the sign where the greenery begins. Milo Patet, who also used to supply O’Casey with water, says he made the sign for her before they had a little falling out. When I arrived, the first gate had already been removed. I strolled along and admired O’Casey’s labors until reaching the second gate, still padlocked.

A community garden? O’Casey says she put up the gates to discourage vandals, and that she’s usually there 40 hours a week, with the gates open, and everyone (almost) loves it.

Fortunately, it’s Elaine Pfefferman’s job, not mine, to try to resolve the feud. Pfefferman, a field deputy for Councilman Hal Bernson, has heard all the allegations and spoken with neighbors both pro- and anti-O’Casey. Pfefferman expressed hope of finding a happy compromise.

That seems doubtful. Victoria O’Casey, meanwhile, says she’s so fed up she might say to hell with her back-alley Eden. She’s got offers. She’s in demand. She’s got other gardens to grow.