Empty Buildings Are Constant Reminders

A blocklong apartment building, its tan walls cracked and badly buckled, stands between Laura Stagliano and her attempt to forget the Northridge earthquake.

For Al Goldfarb, the offense is a three-story complex cracked neatly in half. And for Elizabeth Wride, it is the cement-and-wood hulk of an apartment building across the street, listing off its foundation.

More than six weeks after the Northridge quake left almost 600 apartment and condominium complexes beyond repair throughout the city of Los Angeles, the impatient neighbors of abandoned buildings have grown tired of their exclusive view of the worst of the quake damage, and they are starting to complain.

They have watched the vacant and sometimes crumbling buildings attract an eclectic mix of people--from the occasional squatter and the awed tourist to the security guards and demolition workers, who stand by to enter condemned buildings and, for a fee, rescue belongings.

“It’s kind of like a circus here with all these strange people going past all the time,� said Wride, watching a group of eight building and safety supervisors in coats and ties survey buildings in her hard-hit Sherman Oaks neighborhood.

But city officials say the offending buildings probably are not going away, at least not in the near future.

“We’ve been getting complaints from the public as to what’s taking so long, and our response is that you’ve got to give these apartment owners a chance to get this right,� said Larry Brugger, chief of the earthquake safety division of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. “Every engineer and architect in this city is just swamped with work, plus many owners are having to wait to get financing through FEMA . . . and that doesn’t take overnight.�

Apartment owners agree. “Our hands are tied,� said Matthew Hodge, who owns a red-tagged building in Sherman Oaks and has applied for a government loan. “Everyone wants you to jump through hoops, but in the end you just hurry up to wait. . . . You need money before you can do anything and the money hasn’t come yet.�

Granada Hills resident Stagliano, however, who lives next to a boarded-up building on Devonshire Street, is in no mood to be patient. “Having to look at that building every day does nothing to help get the earthquake out of my mind,� she said. “The cracks make my skin crawl. They just need to fix it up, or tear it down.�

That will prove to be more difficult than it sounds. The Jan. 17 quake created a giant backlog for city officials by damaging about 250,000 buildings throughout the city--and more than four out of five were apartment and condominium complexes.

Furthermore, for structures not considered hazardous, city laws usually give owners 30 days to submit repair schedules unless they request an extension, which Brugger said are likely to be granted in the post-quake period.

And, if a structure is declared a hazard--yet is not in immediate danger of collapsing--owners must fence it off and are given 10 days to submit a repair plan, which then must be approved by the city before work can begin.

Only when city inspectors decide that a particular building is an immediate hazard can the structure be torn down without notice.

So far, the city has ordered about 40 buildings demolished, but officials warn that might be only the beginning. “There might be many more if the economy doesn’t pick up,� said building and safety supervisor Jerry Takaki, “because owners might not be able to afford to make the required repairs.�

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During the short time they’ve been empty, many apartment buildings have been transformed from homes into monuments of the earthquake’s destructive force.

Bathroom mirrors and tiles are shattered. Carpeted floors creak underfoot and are rife with sinkholes. Plastic vertical blinds clap together when a breeze blows through broken windows.

At a 43-unit complex at the corner of Reseda Boulevard and Strathern Street in Reseda, signs of a hurried departure are everywhere. The building’s only reminder of life is its pungent odor.

In apartment after deserted apartment, there is no electricity, no running water, the floors are a sea of broken glass and of spilled contents left to mold. Only the most insignificant items--or those simply too heavy--were left behind: A broken-down yellow Camaro sits under a carport, which itself leans badly to the right. Two brick chimneys, each once more than 20 feet high, lie in pieces on the cement. A child’s bicycle sits in front of one apartment, next to a collapsed staircase.

Inside a well-stocked kitchen, its cupboards jammed with crackers and peanut butter and cans of soup, the smell of spoiling mayonnaise and rotting ground beef waft from a refrigerator left open.

At a California motel-style complex on Devonshire Street in Granada Hills, a living room that might once have been the center of a family’s social life is battered--its walls split open, revealing water pipes peeking out from behind tufts of yellow insulation.

An aquarium that fell and broke lies in shards on the floor, but there is no sign of the fish. In the middle of the room, a pink tricycle and a pair of underwear also have been left behind.

Outside, Apartment 202 has had a mail delivery: the February issue of Sunset magazine, which includes a feature about roses.

On the complex’s bulletin board, a flyer for a construction company advises residents to call 1-800-IM-SHOOK to receive rebuilding help. A newspaper announcing the earthquake, dated Jan. 18, sits yellowing in a hedge out front.

In the days following the quake, refugees from the Reseda apartments set up camp in a vacant lot out back. Weeks later, the people are gone, but they have left behind their lean-tos--made from plastic garbage bags and cardboard propped up by sticks, the ground covered with carpet remnants pulled from the apartments.

The field has attracted children, who haul away junk on their bikes, and other scavengers who look for things of value. On one recent afternoon, Jesus Ortiz walked around the field, scanning for recyclables that would earn him a few dollars. Eventually, he lashed 25 water-soaked mattresses onto his pickup truck. At a mattress reconditioning factory downtown, he hoped to earn $4 for each one, which, he said, is “not bad money.�

But the boarded-up buildings also have been a bonanza for those less than honest. For instance, the vacant Park Balboa apartments in Granada Hills have been hit twice by burglars. First, thieves took stereos, jewelry and clothes, the apartment manager said. The next time, they took all of the apartment’s circuit breakers.

“I don’t know if the thief is an electrician or what,� mused manager Gabriel El-Tawil.

In all, there have been more than 200 burglary-related arrests at vacant buildings in the Valley and dozens of trespassing arrests, police say, creating a booming market for fence and security firms.

The Northridge Meadows Apartments have been patrolled at various stages by the National Guard, the police and now private security guards. Of all the apartment buildings destroyed by the quake, this is the most infamous because 16 people died inside when the three-story structure pancaked into two levels.

Here, a security guard actually spends most of his time talking to tourists who “oohhhh� and “aahhhh� at the building as parts of it continue a slow descent to the ground. He overhears rumors--that people are paying day laborers $50 to retrieve their possessions, that there is another body still buried inside.

“Some of (the people) are pretty morbid, but some live in the area,� said the guard, who declined to give his name. “Most are just awed. They ask, ‘Is this the building where all those people were killed?’ Then, they pose for pictures in front of the building.�

Anne Dell of Canoga Park and Thelma Mahaffey of Reseda were two of hundreds of people who have viewed the collapsed building. Dressed in pink and purple warm-up suits, the two were taken aback by the sight.

“This is a real loss, and unless you see it in person, you don’t appreciate it,� Dell said. “If the developers don’t take more responsibility for people’s lives, then they should be shot. They’re playing with people’s lives.�

Mahaffey nodded in agreement and the two walked away.

Around the corner, Michael McPhilomy--a demolition man who has a contract with the building’s owner to rescue belongings for survivors--lives out of a mobile home, waiting to be of service.

McPhilomy charges $250 to clear a one-bedroom place, $350 for two-bedroom apartments. Armed with a building plan, his four-person team enters apartments, usually by drilling holes into walls.

In all, about half of the residents of the Northridge Meadows complex and the apartment building next to it have used the company’s services.

“We’ve gotten hospital beds and everything else out of there,� McPhilomy said about the collapsed complex. “How do we get them out of there? Very carefully. . . . We try to get the stuff they need to go on with their lives.�

At some complexes, former tenants have not faced that additional expense, either because they were allowed to venture back inside to retrieve their own possessions or because rescue workers agreed to carry things out for them for free.

Alf Kelly watched recently as firefighters brought out his neighbors’ belongings from a Sherman Oaks apartment building on Woodley Avenue--which collapsed when a ground-floor parking garage gave way--and swore he was finished with apartment living.

“I won’t go into any apartment, because I don’t believe any are safe,� he said. For the present, Kelly lives at his girlfriend’s house, sleeps in his clothes--wallet and keys in his pockets.

“It’s not that I’m scared of earthquakes,� he said, glancing at the complex’s caved-in roof. “I just don’t want to be buried.�