The urban farm is dying, and so are its hopes

THERE was a forlorn quality to the embattled urban farm on the day I visited.

Bulldozers had already begun plowing under areas within the 14-acre plot that had once been rich in the agriculture of the people.

The sound of a flute drifted over the lost urban oasis like a woman's cry, adding to the melancholy nature of the scene.

And the weather itself, hot and humid in the presence of far-off thunderstorms, placed the farm and its environs in an almost surreal setting, as though one was trapped in the unnerving embrace of a bad dream.

It has been only a little more than two weeks since sheriff's deputies evicted the farmers and their followers from the land at 41st and Alameda and turned it back over to real estate investor Ralph Horowitz, but it is already assuming the appearance of abandonment.

What the small bulldozers -- Bobcats, actually -- haven't plowed under, the intensity of the sun is slowly killing off. Padlocks on the gates, combined with private security, have prevented anyone from watering the plants, and it won't be long before they perish in the heat.

Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is cordoned off on the north edge of the farm, allowing protesters and others to gather. There were about a hundred there on the day I stopped by. They were selling trinkets on sidewalk blankets, dealing with occasional journalists and listening to live music from a makeshift bandstand.

I was captured by the high, hollow wail of the flute that floated over the small crowd of believers, drifters and hangers-on. Without words, it seemed to articulate the mood of those who assembled on the street and at other places around the farm.

To be sure, hope still simmers among at least some of them that Horowitz will change his mind and allow the land to be sold back to the farmers with money offered by the Trust for Public Land and the Annenberg Foundation.

They have come up with the $16 million he was asking on a $5-million investment, but he turned them down after enduring vilification at the hands of his detractors and an anti-Semitic slur on the website of the farm supporters. They have said it was put there by an unauthorized hacker, and deplored its presence, but it was too late.

Generally, it was all too late, even though the farm's backers are still going to court in an effort to force Horowitz to accept the offer he once said he would.