To the Rescue : Community Saves the Day for ‘Fonz’ and Fairy-Tale Cottages

People ordinarily don’t cherish their gas station. But Jerry’s Gas Station in Westwood is different. That’s because 44-year-old Jerry McCormac, who owns it, is different.

Attorney Chip Chasalow calls him “the neighborhood Fonz” because he loves cars and kids and seems to know all his customers by name. In an increasingly crowded and impersonal city, Westwood resident Liz Fitzgerald said, “Jerry is personal.”

So when Weyerhaeuser Mortgage Co. of Woodland Hills moved to evict McCormac, who had been at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Westholme Avenue for 24 years, because of a planned development there, the neighborhood got mad and mobilized.

Usually controversies between developers and community people don’t end pleasantly. This time, it looks as though McCormac won’t be going out of business, and a complex of cottages called The Grove, which are city landmarks next door to his station, will also be saved.

Weyerhaeuser plans to build two large office buildings on Santa Monica between Fairburn and Manning avenues. They wanted to tear down Jerry’s and The Grove.

But under agreements recently reached among Weyerhaeuser, community groups, preservationists and city officials, the company will move the gas station and cottages about a block and incorporate them into their project’s design.

Jerry’s eviction and the planned demolition of The Grove have been something of a cause celebre in Westwood over the last several months, although for different reasons.

Jerry’s, an independent station, is one of the few auto repair shops left in the area. With all the development in Westwood, Chasalow said, “we have a community where we’re losing these kind of consumer services.”

But more than that, “he’s like a neighbor; he knows me,” Aliza Chertkow was saying Thursday, when she stopped in, with much arm waving and gesturing, to try to explain to McCormac what was wrong with her car’s air conditioning.

The Grove, at 10567-10579 Santa Monica, is an eight-unit complex built in 1934 with a stone courtyard filled with trees and a wishing well. The small French Norman revival buildings, with sloping “fairy-tale roofs,” as Daniel Hoye of the Los Angeles Conservancy put it, are so full of fantasy “you just expect Hansel and Gretel to walk out any minute.”

The cottages, designed by Alan Siple, architect of several of Westwood’s early buildings, are the kind of smaller-scale buildings fast disappearing, Hoye said, “in areas where real estate values are skyrocketing.”

City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky and preservationists worked to have The Grove designated a city historic-cultural monument in early 1987 after Weyerhaeuser sought demolition permits. That delayed the company at least a year in its plans.

Meanwhile, community residents became aware that McCormac was going to be evicted from his site. The Holmby-Westwood Property Owners Assn., which Chasalow heads; Friends of Westwood, and the Westwood Homeowners Assn. began to press Weyerhaeuser to let McCormac be.

“We worked out two deals,” Weyerhaeuser Vice President James C. Smith said. One, approved by the city Cultural Heritage Commission Wednesday, provides for four of The Grove’s buildings to be preserved. The company will spend about $750,000 to move them about 800 feet west, Smith said, where they will be used for a coffee shop or other small commercial establishment in the project.

The other, made with the community groups last month, was for McCormac’s station. Two Grove structures will be moved and revamped to house McCormac’s repair shop.