Earlier this year, two young men stood on a bluff overlooking the unusual camp that homeless man Charles Ray Walker built in Boyle Heights and surveyed the bamboo-pricked hill, seeing how they could revive the swath of land into the green wonderland it had once been.
Below them, hundreds — maybe thousands — of toys, signs and assorted oddities dotted the land, noticeably dustier than they were before Walker died last year.
"We want to do this in his honor, to get this place like a community garden," said Randall Foster, 27, a conceptual artist who met Walker.
But the effort to preserve Walker's folk art garden in the heart of Los Angeles' old industrial district has stalled. People who knew and loved Walker are battling over the camps, which have been barricaded with boards, chains and locks.
The two main combatants can't decide what to do with the space, which gained a measure of fame in the years before Walker died. One of them is Rebecca Buckley, 47, a homeless woman whom Walker welcomed into the space more than a decade ago after she fled skid row. The other is Damian Rete, 25, a cook at a downtown bar who befriended Walker.
Buckley — who lives with her husband at the back of an adjacent warehouse complex along the Los Angeles River — had the camp's entrance barred. She accused Rete of trying to throw homeless people out and disrespecting them. Rete accused her of admitting unsavory people whom he suspects of using hard drugs — something Buckley denies.
At the heart of the debate is a central question: Can Walker's world outlive him? Should the space be preserved as he left it or should it be allowed to change with the times?
Buckley and Rete may be bitter toward each other, but they agree that Walker was an inscrutable human being — and that trying to figure out exactly why he did what he did and the way he did it is impossible.
Though it was exposed to the sky above, Walker's camp had the feel of an enclosed home — a hillside teeming with okra, strawberries, apples, watermelons and other fruits and vegetables on one side, and a wall on the other — a narrow, fertile valley squeezed between warehouses, railroad tracks and the concrete river and a truck yard. Just a few steps to the north was the graffiti-tattooed overpass of the Olympic Boulevard bridge.
Walker was the lord of his manor. Though short and unimposing at first glance, he was sinewy and strong, built like a bantam-weight. No one dared tread in his realm while he lived and even the street outside was kept relatively free of clutter. There has been a hint of gang graffiti scrawled inside the camp since Walker's death, but Buckley and Walker said that wouldn't have happened during the two decades he was there.
"This was Charlie's world," Rete said. "He made it known right off the bat."
Buckley said Walker was hard-working and optimistic. But he was also something else.
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"It takes a man with many talents to think of something like this," she said. "It has to take an artist to think of something like this."
Buckley said she's been homeless since she was 13. Though she and her husband have kicked homeless people out of the camp, she said she's also sympathetic, knowing the hard realities of living exposed in the streets or along concrete riverbeds.
Rete is married and has a young boy.
His circle includes graffiti artists and muralists and bicyclists, mostly young. They turned Walker's camp into more of a chill-out space where they came to drink, talk and smoke.
Rete said Walker tended not to let other homeless people come into the camp. Buckley insisted that he wouldn't just bar people from coming in, especially if they needed help, as she did many years ago when she met Walker. He let her and her husband live with him for months, though he demanded that they follow strict rules, she said.
For a while Rete and Buckley worked to keep the camp in order.
But even their best efforts belied how monk-like Walker had been in preserving his domain. Out of the disorder of discards found in trash bins and on the street — from teddy bears and action figures, to SpongeBobs, street signs and religious iconography — he created themed exhibits out of terraced earth.
He carved staircases, some gently curved, some soaring, out of the hard dirt. And he used his rural background in Texas to grow a garden. He took a cleaner spray — Fabuloso — and doused his exhibits to keep them pristine and his world smelling nice. He raked the dirt floor every day, creating tracks on the unsullied ground as if it were an urban Japanese garden.
Today, the general outlines of Walker's world are maintained, but it has fallen into some disrepair. Objects that Walker neatly arranged have sloughed off hillsides, things have disappeared or been coated in dust, and the shack he built is listing.
"Charles used to say, 'I'm going to be famous.' In a way, he is famous, because he has a lot of people that love him," Buckley said. "Where else can you find a person like that, a homeless person who can keep a whole thing together like Charles did? One individual. It takes a lot."
Buckley insists that the place is being cared for, despite the conflict. Rete said he's not sure it can be saved in the long term, though he said he's not giving up, despite not having returned there after Buckley ordered him to leave.
"I don't know how Charlie did it by myself," Rete said.
hector.becerra@latimes.com
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