A FULL FIVE (5) Page Article in the Los Angeles Times today!!!!!!

It is said that Forestiere falls in love with a woman who dreams of a more material life. When that love turns sour, Baldasare sublimates his pain by digging a series of quixotic underground gardens in Fresno,CA.

Eleven thousand square feet, one mile in length, two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, a chapel, a carport, a dance hall and a fish pond with a room sunken below it — Forestiere's home had it all. Some 90 rooms, Most 20 and 35 feet below ground.
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Thanks to Pat Gabriele
DREAMS DWELLED HERE

'Singolare come il mare,'  Forestiere told visitors to his underground masterpiece, as unique as the sea. Some say he was trying to dig his way back to Sicily.

Los Angeles Times
By Thomas Curwen
Times Staff Writer
January 29, 2004

CHAPTER 1

One hundred years ago, California was a dream, and for Baldasare Forestiere, that dream was his home. No rambling estate, no soaring edifice — when Forestiere closed his eyes, he saw a world no one had imagined.

Summers here were cool, winters warm. Lemons grew on orange trees, and orange trees sprouted lemons. Starlight and sunshine carpeted the ground. Fish swam in ponds overhead, and tree roots laced the sky.

The year was 1905, a time when such dreams were possible, and when Forestiere set out to pursue them, he didn't pick up a hammer and a saw but turned instead to a shovel and pick.

Some people thought he was digging a cellar, but when a local reporter visited him seven miles north of town, out where the hog wallows were, the story of a fantastic subterranean dwelling began to emerge:

"Beneath the well cultivated acres of his ranch, beneath the flourishing peach orchard, Forestiere has dug a veritable Tut-ankh-amen tomb, a catacomb such as afforded the early Christians refuge from the persecutions of the Roman Caesars."

Today Forestiere Underground Gardens — as Forestiere's home is known today — lies somewhere between yesterday's hyperbole and tomorrow. Its dreamer died in 1946. The original 70 acres have long since been sold, and the gardens are fronted by a major thoroughfare, hemmed in by fast-food restaurants, gas stations and hotels. That flourishing orchard is a tattered relic, and only tourists and novelty seekers visit its secret rooms.

Sixty years have taken their toll on everything but memory and desire.

CHAPTER 2

Highway 99 through California's Central Valley is a quick course in nostalgia. Billboards tout new home developments where open fields once stood. Traffic slows on roads once empty, and everywhere the past fights the present.

On Shaw Avenue in Fresno, neither seems to have won — just yet. Two blocks past the In-N-Out and one block past the Formosa Inn, Forestiere Underground Gardens is a trapdoor to the past.

Follow the grape arbor down three flights of stairs and the sounds of the city drop away. Sunlight, filtering through citrus and grape leaves, falls in broad open swaths. Dust motes drift in its beams. A maze of tunnels and rooms leads into darkness.

Call it vernacular, call it spontaneous, call it outsider: Forestiere Underground Gardens belongs to a community of dwellings — as nearby as Simi Valley and Cambria ("Grandma" Prisbrey's Bottle Village and Nitt Witt Ridge) and as faraway as Georgia and France (Howard Finster's Paradise Garden and Ferdinand Cheval's Palais Idéal) — that challenge everyday life.

As they should, according to John Beardsley, a senior lecturer at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

"These places … demonstrate the resilience of creativity," says Beardsley, who has written about the Forestiere in his book "Gardens of Revelation."

"There is no question that culture is increasingly homogenized, and this is an antidote to this kind of homogenization. With creativity governed more and more by the mass market, there seems to be less room for idiosyncratic genius."

Critics have long argued that because the history of architecture is a history of money and power, any dwelling that falls outside that purview is often ignored, disregarded or threatened. Forestiere Underground Gardens fits the bill. If we marginalize these creations, we must be willing to accept that they tell us more about ourselves than we're willing to admit.

CHAPTER 3

Lorraine Forestiere leads a group of tourists through the gardens. Baldasare's niece by marriage, she marvels at his self-taught sense of design, architecture, geology and horticulture. Here, he slanted the floors to control drainage. Here, he created a "hydrostatic pressure convection thermal siphon with the Venturi concept" to keep air moving, and here he grafted two varieties of oranges, two varieties of lemons, a grapefruit and a tangerine onto a single tree.

"And to think what this kid could have done if he'd gone to first grade," she says.

At 71, bad knee and all, she hustles visitors through the tunnels and rooms and talks about Forestiere in well-practiced tones. Her delivery is playful and proud. Get her started on the real mystery of the place, however, and there's no stopping her.

In one room, she pauses at a hand-lettered sign of her own creation. She reads its legend: "One idea would lead to another and he went on to create the gardens. He said, 'The visions in my mind almost overwhelm me.' "

"OK," she says, as if ready for an argument. "Why would he say 'the visions in my mind' unless it was something God brought? See? Nobody wants to admit that, they think he was just a crazy guy living underground."

That crazy guy impression has dogged Forestiere since his death, and early tours billed him as "the human mole." Resurrecting his reputation is Lorraine's mission, and applying religious iconography to the gardens is an easy step.

The clues are everywhere, she'll tell you, once you start looking. There's the planter shaped like a boat ("Christ was a fisher of men," she explains), and then there's the numerology — all the threes and sevens, numbers of salvation and the apocalypse — found in the arches of a room, in the grafts of the trees, in the number of steps between rooms.

Later on the tour, she stops in one of the largest rooms, whose ceiling is a tangle of kumquat, grapefruit and lemon tree limbs and a grape vine pruned into three long branches. She points to the planter in the middle.

"Three seats, three trees and three varieties of fruit," she says. "You don't realize it, do you? But we're standing in the middle of a three-dimensional Trinity."

At the end of the tour, she pulls out a photograph of Forestiere.

Dark hair, wrinkled brow, he holds his gaze straight ahead, but in his eyes and in his pursed lips, there is the suggestion of something imminent, as if he's holding something back. He is, she'll tell you, pointing to the blurred corner of one of his eyes. It's a tear, she says, as if he were remembering something faraway and lost.

CHAPTER 4

To understand Forestiere's accomplishment, take a sheet of blank paper. Draw a line anywhere across it. Above is the sky; below is the Central Valley. Baldasare Forestiere was 26 years old when he arrived in this wilderness, the second-born son of a Sicilian family that valued only the first-born son.

He had paid his dues — immigrating to America from a small village in Sicily, working as a sandhog in the Holland Tunnel, the Croton Aqueduct, and traveling west to California, where his brother lived and where he purchased — sight unseen — 70 acres north of Fresno.

Stepping off that train, cardboard suitcase in hand, he is imagined by novelist T.C. Boyle in a whimsical short story called "The Underground Gardens." The land may have been desolate, Boyle writes, but "Baldasare wasn't discouraged — he knew he was destined for greatness. Unlike his brothers, he had the gift of seeing things as they would one day be, of seeing himself in America, right here in Fresno, his seventy acres buried in grapes."

But something went wrong. The soil that Forestiere had hoped would produce grapes and the wine that would make him a famous vintner was hardpan, an amalgamation of silt, sand and clay as unforgiving as concrete.

Yet for reasons no one clearly knows, he threw himself at it and he dug and he dug and he dug. Eventually he learned how to plant in this formidable soil, here and elsewhere — Forestiere owned more than 1,000 acres in the Central Valley — but by then digging was everything. He worked without any plans, and the shapes of these rooms slowly revealed themselves to him. "Singolare come il mare," he told visitors, as unique as the sea.

Eleven thousand square feet, one mile in length, two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, a chapel, a carport, a dance hall and a fish pond with a room sunken below it — Forestiere's home had it all. Accounts vary: Some say he had 90 rooms, others say 65. Most were 20 and 35 feet below ground, shaped like inverted teacups, with skylights covered by arbors or filled with the branches of a citrus tree. Forestiere, it was said, could wander his property above ground and reach down to pick an orange.

Perhaps on clear nights, he stood outside his home and looked south to the Pacific Southwest building, the tallest structure between Oakland and Los Angeles, dominating the Fresno skyline. Perhaps he didn't understand the changes sweeping over the valley. Perhaps all that really mattered was how the sunlight moved across the floors, how the potbellied stove warmed the rooms in winter, how the lanterns and candles lighted the hallways, how the silence settled around him once guests had left, and how his life and work would be remembered.

CHAPTER 5

"This is a story that goes beyond eccentricity," says Ken Scambray, a professor of English at the University of La Verne. Scambray, who grew up in Fresno and recently published a paper on Forestiere and Simon Rodia, the creator of the Watts Towers, believes that we must read these sites as immigrant stories. It is an obvious interpretation that perhaps we shy away from: Forestiere as an outsider, a man whose knowledge of English was halting, a man who was no stranger to the slurs and bigotry of a country not his own, a man who felt more comfortable living by himself.

Scambray also argues that because Forestiere lived in Sicily more years than he had lived in America, by bringing to America remembrances of his early life, he was trying to carve into the Fresno hardpan the grottoes and catacombs and sepulchers that mark the Sicilian countryside. The dance hall he dug, therefore, was nothing less than a piazza and the surrounding gardens a conca d'oro, a horn of plenty such as he knew back home.

But the work took its toll. "Baldasare lived an isolated life, digging these grottoes in remembrance of his past," says Scambray. "There is a sense of tragedy in this. It could not fulfill his dream because this would always be Fresno."

Scambray's words are haunting: these tunnels, these rooms the reflections of a homesick man, eager to recapture a world both loved and missed, a man trying to dig his way home. Sixty years later, is it our own homelessness — as the new ceaselessly supplants the old — is it our own lack of memory that has dimmed his achievement?

CHAPTER 6

Dying in 1946 of pneumonia in a local hospital, Forestiere never married. (Rumors have it that his true love refused to live underground with him.) He had no children, and the gardens fell into the hands of his brothers and sisters.

For two generations, the gardens have been a contentious legacy, most recently and most bitterly pitting his nephews, Rick and Joseph, against one another. "The old scriptural maxim is true," says Rick. "Man's greatest enemies are those of his own house, whether it's Cain or Abel or Absalom or Achitophel."

Their feud is famous in Fresno, and after so many years, the families are leery to speak of it, to corroborate the other's story, but two facts are clear. First: In 1993, the California Supreme Court ordered the property divided in half. Rick got the gardens, Joseph the parking lot. Second: There is no parking at the gardens except on the street.

At the time, Rick characterized the suit as a "mercantile mentality versus a preservationist mentality," a distinction that once again threatens to overshadow the gardens.

When campaigning as councilman for Fresno's second district, Brian Calhoun — who prefers "Fres-yes" to Fresno — told the electorate that he would like to promote the gardens, perhaps even create around them an Italian-themed village, a villagio, with restaurants, retail and perhaps even the Italian consulate. That was four years ago, and Calhoun's patience is wearing thin.

"I'm planning on setting up a meeting with Rick," says Calhoun, "a come-home-to-Jesus meeting, in which I make it clear: We have a major developer — I'm not naming names — who is interested in that area. The land around Shaw and 99 is hot."

Lloyd Carter, president of a once-active, now semi-defunct conservancy for the gardens, is guardedly enthusiastic.

"We could run 1,000 people a day through the place with tour buses. What with Yosemite — they would stop here. If you were commercially minded, you could make a lot of money. Somewhere between hand-written signs and a slick McDonald's, there has to be some medium ground."

CHAPTER 7

It is hard to imagine that this is the future Forestiere would have wanted. That as he sat in the sun reading the newspaper, tourists from around the world would traipse through his home. That as he scraped and dug and molded these rooms, his nephews would fight so bitterly for control. That as he listened to Lowell Thomas reporting news of the war back home, the city would so eagerly hone in upon his achievement.

His work is the antithesis of all this.

"Places like these are important because they take us to the limits of creativity," says John Beardsley. "They show us that creativity is possible even if you have no money and work in a hostile environment."

When T.C. Boyle wrote his short story about Forestiere, he set about imagining Forestiere's reasons for digging. In the story, Forestiere falls in love with a woman who dreams of a more material life. When that love turns sour, he sublimates his pain by digging.

His decision "goes to the bigger question," writes Boyle. "Why do you make art, or make anything for that matter?"

It is a mystery for which there may be no answer. Which may be the best reason to pause and pay attention to the accomplishment of Forestiere. The gardens may be dirty; they may be awkward. They may not be the future anyone wants, but they are the past we all need.

There are 10 revealing Photos on the LA Times Web Site.

Dreams dwelled here
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/home/la-hm-forestiere29jan29,1,893748.story

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Singular tours

Forestiere Underground Gardens is at 5021 W. Shaw Ave. in Fresno, two blocks east of the 99 Freeway. During the winter, tours are conducted at noon and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The cost is $9 for adults, $8 for seniors (59 and older), $7 for ages 13 to 17 and $6 for children 4 to 12. No reservations required, and private group tours are available. For information, call (559) 271-0734.