This morning the South Central Farmers held a press conference and informational picket downtown at Los Angeles City Hall to object to the building of an industrial warehouse. Most disturbing is that the City Planning Department has announced plans to allow this warehouse to be built where the South Central Farm once flourished.  Even more worrisome is that a required standard guideline for an Environmental Impact Report has not even been made for this warehouse project. Farm representatives and area residents believe that a warehouse of this nature will create more pollution in the area, watershed damage, traffic congestion, poor air quality, increase health hazards, and contribute further to greenhouse emissions.
I was born and grew up in San Diego, then moved to Los Angeles in my early 20’s.  It was quite a shock visiting a friend in Maywood one night and witnessing the factory lights illuminating the skies as if it were daytime!  Later, I found out that there is never darkness in Maywood and that the immigrant families that comprise the majority of residents there live with it.  Isn’t darkness deprivation some sort of heinous torture tactic?
About two years ago I bought a home in Boyle Heights. The first time I smelled the pollution emitted from the slaughter houses in Vernon, I thought something had died and was decaying in my yard.  I looked everywhere, even under the house for the cause of that odor.  It took me two months to figure out what that repugnant permeating smell was.
Maywood and Vernon are blocks from where the South Central Farm once stood. Isn’t there enough pollution and stagnant space there already?  We don’t have to accept the special interest groups and their politicians dumping on our neighborhoods while they boost their personal careers and fill their pockets.  Such city planning would not be acceptable in Malibu or Beverly Hills—we don’t have to accept it either.
Please check in on the South Central Farmers’ website for up coming actions on working together to restore our communities into healthier environments.   www.southcentralfarmers.com
I grew up in Boyle Heights, I know of the smell you speak.
On the way to work I was thinking of my friend from Maywood. I remembered that her mother had breast cancer a few years ago and my friend had two children with birth defects. Its kind of a scary reality to think that possibly the city of LA does not protect all the residents, as we expect them to.
Vernon is a messed up city. There’s something like 90 residents there, mostly poor people, city workers or cops. One family runs the show, and politicians go unchallenged. The Economist had an article about the city, praising its pro-business, industrial policies. It’s a virtual economic dictatorship.
http://davidpritchard.org/sustrans/Dav02/
Oh yeah, Maywood is corrupt, too.
That pungent smell is Dodger Dogs.
ahh yes… the putrid stench of vernon. there’s no invisible wall at the city limits, and the pollution doesn’t distinguish between industrial zones and residential ones.
That’s Farmer John! It’s one of the smells I always accepted as fact, I was never amazed by it or anything. I can’t stand when we have Santa Anas because then the smell blows south and lands on top of South Gate… The smell is a way for me to know I’m back home and it wasn’t until this past year at college that I realized that most people don’t have factories either down the street or a few miles from them.
Imagine that the plans are to place this proposed warehouse right next to a community center—with kids playing and breathing in the gases that the diesel trucks will be emitting. That’s pretty sick!
That smells makes it to Monterey Park! A friend of mine lives there and in the summer we would smell it. Probably solidified our turning vegetarian in our teenage years. The best part is how the Farmer John’s building has a mural covering it with happy pigs wandering around in a “free-range” farm. If only the “factory” had glass walls…
Remember how John Travolta covered poor Carrie with pigs’ blood at the prom? He ripped the blood off at Farmer John’s. How could they have partied with that stench? Maybe they were used to it too. Eeeouu!