Diana Lucifera, a senior majoring in gender and sexuality studies, began every shift at the Peace Garden with a walkthrough of the property. Lucifera greeted visitors and cats between beds of native plants and under the shade of persimmon trees, all nestled in the backyard of the historic house north of campus.
At the end of May, she and her work-study coworkers received an email stating the property’s garden would cease operations in just over a month.
On June 30, USC is expected to sell the land that holds the Peace Garden, a three-year-old community space under the USC Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.
The mission of the Peace Garden is to help people “connect to nature in their daily lives.” Since its founding, students and neighbors alike have visited the free space to garden, collect produce, adopt plants and receive informal tours from staff.
“We have the privilege to host like these animals and these volunteers and these events. They have to be evenly distributed throughout the community,” Lucifera said. “I’m still in shock that in less than 30 days, the Peace Garden might not exist anymore.”
For Anya Jiménez, a senior majoring in writing for screen and stage, losing the Peace Garden means losing an integral part of her university experience. Jiménez said the garden introduced her to college student life before the start of her freshman year, and learning of its scheduled sale left her “devastated.”
“At first, it was something that just sounded so comically nefarious to me that I was like, ‘Surely this can’t be real,’” Jiménez said. “I can’t believe that something that’s been so important for the USC community and the broader community is being done away with so quickly.”
Arian Tomar, a senior majoring in Film and Television Production, first came to know the Peace Garden as a Video Production Intern for the Office of Sustainability. Tomar said that for him, the impending loss has spurred “tremendous grief.”
“It’s a loss of an educational space,” Tomar said. “It’s the loss of a place of gathering and community building and the loss of a space where students can feel empowered to really shape the world with their hands, getting [their] hands dirty, planting seeds and practicing stewardship, and being able to, over four years, see the impact they have on a space physically.”
In an email statement, USC Real Estate and Asset Management said the garden property has always been provided on a temporary lease.
“From the beginning, we have been upfront that the space for the garden was being provided on a temporary basis. We now must relocate the garden and are working hard to identify a new location close by and look forward to resolving this quickly.”
The university did not disclose the reason for the sale, alternative locations being considered or when the public could expect a new space to be announced.
According to a post from the Peace Garden Instagram account, the space will operate under limited hours “until further notice.”
Lucifera said she received no communication of the sale prior to the email, and that even if the university designates another space for the peace garden, many challenges like preparation time, soil health and labor sourcing could hinder its revival.
“If they had told us this six months ago, we might have been able to figure it out,” Lucifera said. “But given a month, it’s absurd. It’s a total non-starter.”
An online petition protesting the imminent closure has amassed over 1,000 signatures.
Sophia Leon, a second-year master’s student studying digital social media, had worked at the peace garden since January. At a community forum held on June 7, all three of the Peace Garden’s student employees stepped down from their positions.
“I can’t be the one to sell this new narrative, this new version of a peace garden, that this is for the better,” Leon said. “Because it’s not what I believe in.”
In an interview with Annenberg Media, Leon said she knows many residents of the neighborhood who are not affiliated with the university but rely on the Peace Garden as a community space.
“It’s not just something that’s being taken from us,” Leon said. “It’s something that’s being taken from everybody.”
Jiménez said she doesn’t predict the next point of connection between students and their South Central neighbors, but that will come from people who “have that passion within them.”
“Knowing firsthand how many people are passionate about this place makes me feel that at the very least, I know it won’t be forgotten,” Jiménez said. “That’s something that is important to me, that the memory of it lives on, and that the spirit of it can live on too, that the idea of community that was so beautifully crystallized into a physical space can live on in other places.”