Hasan Piker: “The idea of loving America has been totally held hostage by some of the worst fucking figures that unironically destroy America with regular frequency whether it be the Republican Party, whether it be Donald Trump, whether it be the parasitic capital owning class. America the entity has not served Americans. I fight for the American people, I fight for the working class. I don’t fight for America the entity especially if America the entity does not serve the interests of it’s people and it clearly does not”
In the early 1900s, a Sicilian immigrant looked at California’s summer heat and decided the answer wasn’t a better house.
Baldassare Forestiere arrived in the San Joaquin Valley expecting to grow citrus. The ground gave him hardpan instead: a dense, cement-like layer under the surface that fought roots, held water, and made a normal orchard almost useless.
So he started digging.
For nearly forty years, mostly by hand, Forestiere cut almost ten acres under Fresno into rooms, tunnels, arches, courtyards, and gardens. Sun came down through openings. Air moved through shafts. Oranges, lemons, grapefruit, grapes, and pomegranates grew from sunken courts, with the worst of the San Joaquin Valley heat left above them.
He had no architecture degree. No engineering firm. No machinery doing the real work. Just hand tools, Sicilian memory, and a problem that kept getting deeper the longer he answered it.
The Forestiere Underground Gardens are usually treated like a roadside oddity. That undersells them. This is immigrant architecture, climate adaptation, stubborn farming, and one of the strangest built landscapes in America all sitting under the same patch of Fresno.
A failed orchard became a buried world.