Canceled : Neighbors Make Way; Post Office Fails to Deliver

One of Tarzana’s oldest neighborhoods is dying a death that has turned agonizingly slow--and unexpectedly painful.

Fourteen families on four streets are voluntarily moving out to make way for a new community post office that many now fear will never be built.

The U.S. Postal Service purchased the neighborhood along Philiprimm Street and Yolanda, Rhea and Geyser avenues last fall in order to build a $3-million post office this year. But officials canceled the project two weeks ago as part of a $1.2-billion spending cutback.

The situation is doubly troubling to Lou Trekas, who has lived on Rhea Avenue nearly 28 years. Trekas figures that she and her husband, John, will be the last of the 14 homeowners to move out by the March 11 deadline.

“It’s a shame. Tarzana needs a new post office so badly,” said Trekas. “And it’s been so sad to see all of our friends around here leave. As each one has moved, they’ve come over to say goodby.”

Postal officials say they still would like to build a new Tarzana post office on the triangular, 2.3-acre residential site. The tree-shaded single-family homes are sandwiched between Ventura Boulevard shops and the Ventura Freeway.

“ Canceled is a good word,” John Conti, Postal Service spokesman for the Van Nuys district, said of the Tarzana project. “It’s canceled for the time being. It’s in a holding pattern. We hope to eventually proceed.”

Little Room

The proposed 21,357-square-foot facility would have replaced Tarzana’s 25-year-old post office at 18648 Clark St. The cramped facility is about a quarter that size, with scant room for its 50 employees to sort mail and no room for them to park, according to Postmaster Constant Angeleri.

“There is only room for 10 customers’ cars in the front,” said mail supervisor Doug Popick, who has worked in the tiny post office for 21 years. “People end up having fistfights in the parking lot, it’s so crowded.”

Some fear that private developers and real estate agents may soon be the ones fighting it out over the post office site. The cancellation notice has sent a parade of prospective builders to the soon-to-be-abandoned neighborhood to check rumors that the land soon may be offered for sale by the government.

“We’re looking at the area to see what kind of commercial project you could put up here,” said Andre Sarai, an Encino architect and developer who toured the abandoned Tarzana neighborhood Thursday.

Sarai said the occupancy rates of businesses on nearby Ventura Boulevard would determine whether the neighborhood is best suited for a shopping center or apartments.

Such talk angers Tarzana residents.

‘Need Another One’

“I don’t mind a post office being built there because we sure need another one. But shops wouldn’t be appropriate,” said Clarence McCartney, who has lived at the edge of the neighborhood for nearly 38 years. His front porch overlooks a row of abandoned houses whose lawns are quickly becoming overgrown.

“It’s pathetic to see a neighborhood go like this. They’ve screwed up a good neighborhood. Are we to sit here now and watch those houses deteriorate and transients move in? The government should have made sure they had the money to build their post office before they bought all those houses and kicked everybody out.”

Louise Frankel, a community activist who helped press Los Angeles city officials for a zone change that postal officials had demanded for the site, said Tarzana residents will fight to prevent private development of the land.

“We’re furious,” Frankel, a director of the Tarzana Property Owners Assn., said Friday. “Developers needn’t start licking their chops. We intend on making the post office hold onto that property.”

The association took the unusual step of asking the city to strip the residential zoning from the neighborhood and replace it with commercial zoning. The post office could have been built under the old residential designation, but postal officials wanted to be able to easily sell the land when the post office was no longer needed.

On Friday, association president Joel Palmer visited congressional offices in Washington to press for the post office to be built. A snowstorm that crippled the capital restricted his lobbying to the office of California Sen. Pete Wilson, however.

Palmer said by phone Friday that he had told Wilson’s office “there would be an uproar if there was any attempt made to divert that site from its intended use as a post office.”

Palmer’s group had spent months helping postal officials look for a new Tarzana site when it learned two years ago that developer Gary Riches was hoping to buy homes in the Philiprimm neighborhood and redevelop the area as a garden office complex.

Post Office Pushed

The association urged Riches to consider a post office instead of the offices.

After negotiating with each of the 14 homeowners to buy their dwellings, Riches in August obtained commercial zoning that the U. S. Postal Service was demanding for the site. With C-2 zoning in hand, he sold the complete neighborhood to postal officials last fall for $5.5 million.

Even though he no longer is involved financially in the project, Riches said Friday that cancellation of the post-office project two days before Christmas was a shock.

“It’s horrible. It’s very short-sighted on the part of the post office,” Riches said.

“I don’t see another spot in Tarzana for a post office. I think it would be an absolute show of bad faith if they did not build a new post office there after all of this.”

Paid $200,000

The homeowners were paid an average of about $200,000 for their small, three-bedroom homes. Riches claimed the price “far exceeded what they’d have gotten if they wanted to put their houses on the market” individually. The homes, built in 1950, originally sold for $9,500.

Postal officials said Friday that the immediate fate of the empty houses is uncertain. They said the federal government usually boards up unoccupied homes it owns to keep out trespassers.

But several homes along Philiprimm Street and Rhea and Geyser avenues stood empty and open Friday. Some had been vandalized. One had a partly filled swimming pool in its open rear yard.

“The Fire Department came by here a little while ago and asked when we were moving,” said James Williamson, who has lived on Geyser for 22 years and soon will move to a new home in the Santa Monica Mountains. “They said they will practice fighting fires on these houses when everybody’s gone.”

But Postal Service spokesman Conti said officials have not talked to the Fire Department about burning down the vacant houses. Nor has the Postal Service talked to any developers about selling the land.

“It’s maybe wishful thinking on their part,” Conti said of development speculators.