Mail Goes to Brentwood--and That’s the Problem : Image: Namesake to the north gets letters meant for upscale enclave here, where address is really L.A. 90049.

After you’ve tucked yourself away in the lush Westside enclave of Brentwood, paid an average of $787,000 for a house or a thousand bucks for monthly rent, it seems natural that as an act of bonding with your community or a little sinful pride you would use Brentwood, California, as your mailing address instead of Los Angeles.

If you do, you may have a secure sense of identity, but your mail won’t.

Rather than finding its way to your front door, it may land about 500 miles north in the one and only city of Brentwood, a small and somewhat rural community 50 miles east of Oakland. The big event there is the annual Corn Fest.

“A lot of people down there don’t want to say, ‘I live in L.A.,’ ” postal clerk Don Gadd surmised from his northern perspective. “They want to say ‘I live in Brentwood.’ Well, there’s only one Brentwood, and it’s up here and it’s existed a lot longer than the Brentwood down there.”

Earlier this year, the mail mix-up had become enough of a problem that the Los Angeles post office sent a painfully polite letter to L.A.’s Brentwood residents asking them to refrain from this “unique addressing” and simply write Los Angeles, 90049. Still, about 250 pieces of errant mail a day accumulate in northern Brentwood, which moves about 35,000 pieces daily. Hardly a catastrophe but an amusing lesson for these Northern California postal workers on how the southern half lives.

“Beyond their means,” said Leah Shipherd, supervisor of the northern Brentwood post office. “We get a lot of certified letters for people down there who owe money.”

Shipherd, who first alerted postal officials to the problem, even gets to see how people party.

“Somebody got these beautiful invitations printed up to something like a black and white ball,” Shipherd said. The RSVP postcards, which also came through the Northern California city, also had the wrong Brentwood written on them. By the time the cards could be forwarded back down to Los Angeles, Shipherd said, the RSVP date had already passed--”or maybe the whole party.”

And then there’s the fan mail. “Stallone and Betty White and Gregory Peck,” said window clerk Gadd, guessing that the mail comes from fans because it’s handwritten on non-business stationery.

“We had a lot of mail come through recently for Fred MacMurray. I think he passed away. A lot of condolence cards.” (Actually he died in November, 1991). “We forward it as a courtesy.”

Actually, they send it all back, and redirect lost delivery truck drivers who wander in with packages bound for L.A.’s Brentwood.

At its worst, two years ago, about five feet of mail--that’s about 1,000 pieces in lay terms--collected at the northern post office. “We were sending bags out of here,” Shipherd said. “It doesn’t take much for magazines to fill up a bag.”

The mail for Brentwood in L.A. ends up in Northern California in several ways--the wrong city is listed, no ZIP code is written or people use a ZIP code for the real Brentwood found in a national directory and assume it is for the one in Los Angeles.

Larry Moore, a senior operations analyst for the post office in Los Angeles, insists that the Brentwood foul-up isn’t all that big of a deal now because of tinkering that’s been done to mail-reading machinery, giving ZIP code priority over city.

Even so, workers at the post offices serving both Brentwoods report that a small amount of mail still eludes even the best-intended automation.

But there is no way the differences between these two places could escape even the most casual observer.

“It’s probably about as different as you can get,” said Eric O’Neill, postmaster for northern Brentwood. “There are fruit stands on all the main highways.”

In northern Brentwood, a delta area where farms coexist with new tract developments, next month’s festival of corn will be celebrated with contests for corn eating, corn shucking and corny jokes.

L.A. Brentwood, which is located just north of Wilshire Boulevard and west of the San Diego Freeway, is a place where people promenade with babies in strollers and pedigreed puppies on leashes, where residents actually buy the offerings in the area’s expensive boutiques--maybe sitting down afterward for a cappuccino or frozen yogurt. The neighborhood’s main drag, San Vicente Boulevard, is dappled with coral trees and joggers.

Brentwood north has a population of 9,669; Brentwood south: 39,414. In northern Brentwood, the average house price is $170,000 to $200,000. In Brentwood L.A., house prices range from the high $300,000s (“the entry level part of Brentwood near the freeway,” one realty agent says) to $10-million estates.

The mayor of northern Brentwood is a high school teacher. The mayor of Brentwood L.A. is TV consumer avenger David Horowitz. Last year it was Sally Struthers. It’s just an honorary title, of course.

Not that there aren’t some similarities in this tale of two towns. Both have newspapers called the Brentwood News, and each has done stories on the other Brentwood.

Lynn Clousing, the former publisher of the northern Brentwood News, said he had great fun collecting all the mail mistakenly sent there from publicists promoting their stars and developers pushing half-million-dollar homes.

“It got to be kind of a joke,” said Clousing, who wrote an article about the confusion. “In fact, when the Olympics were in L.A., we got an inquiry about where our coverage was so we could get credentials. Obviously they weren’t talking about our paper with its 3,500 circulation.”

Although most Brentwood L.A. residents are now using Los Angeles as their mailing address, there are still holdouts.

“It’s really kind of a Bosnia phenomenon,” said lawyer Stanley K. Sheinbaum, a member of the Police Commission and resident of Brentwood. “It’s people saying, ‘God, I don’t want to live next to non-Brentwood people.’ . . . I think there’s no sense of L.A.”

Sheinbaum lives in ultra-expensive Brentwood Park (of course, Brentwood can be broken down into little enclave-ettes).

You can forgive denizens of Brentwood for feeling so Balkanized; the practice of addressing mail to a neighborhood crops up all across the Westside. They do it in Westwood, they do it sometimes in Bel-Air, they do it all the time in Pacific Palisades. In fact, the post office requires it in the Palisades, which for all purposes other than mail is part of Los Angeles. (Their mail doesn’t get processed through L.A.)

“If you’re part of Los Angeles, you’re lost in this vast sea,” said Jeffrey Hall, publisher of the Brentwood News down here.

“If you’re part of a community, you have roots,” he said. “And I think there’s some pride involved: ‘I live in Brentwood’ instead of ‘I live in Los Angeles.’ . . . I think it helps fix in the listener’s mind where you’re calling from.”

Realtor Don Correia says that when he first moved to Brentwood he thought it was “really neat” to use it as his address. “And then I found out all my mail was going up north.”

Correia, a director of Rodeo Realty in Brentwood, recently moved a little farther east. “I live in Bel-Air,” he says. He then corrects himself. “Los Angeles. Sorry.”

Home Away From Home

The two Brentwoods have little in common besides their name. The Northern California Brentwood has fertile farmland and growing bedroom communities. The Brentwood are of Los Angeles is lush with coral trees, expensive homes and fashionable boutiques.