Los Angeles, which has an appreciation for...

Los Angeles, which has an appreciation for the unusual, has conferred historical-cultural monument status upon such sites as a tower of 2,000 wooden brewery pallets, a 22-foot-long street and a 75-year-old cafeteria. But, somehow, the Freeway City has never honored a carwash.

That omission may be resolved soon. Commissioners of the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board will motor to Studio City today to make an official on-site inspection of the Pat Galati Car Wash, which is topped by distinctive 55-foot-tall boomerang-shaped girders.

Galati, to paraphrase the late singer Jim Croce, has a bad case of the “steadily depressin’, low-down, mind-messin’, developers-threatenin’-my-carwash blues.”

Developer Ira Smedra, who recently purchased the property, said he intends to demolish the carwash to make way for a mini-mall. However, Smedra would be stymied for at least a year if the cultural board designates the carwash a landmark.

Commission President Armarjit S. Marwah says the wash-and-wax emporium, whose girders have won it the semi-historic nickname of “The Gateway to Studio City,” “definitely meets some of the criteria” established by the city for cultural monuments.

Besides, it’s three decades old, an age that smacks of antiquity in the San Fernando Valley.

More than 100 residents recently staged a demonstration in support of the carwash. A few gave practical, rather than sentimental, arguments.

“It’s not a cultural monument,” said William Griffis, a television actor who lives in Studio City. “But it certainly is a handy place to get your car washed.”

Now don’t get the idea that state Sen. Diane Watson is lumping these two videotapes into the same category. But she does say that both “impact on the quality of life.”

That’s why she used the same press release to announce that her office has furnished local libraries with copies of:

* --”In the Burglars’ Own Words; How They Break Into Your House and What You Can Do About It.”

* “Auto Insurance in the Wake of Proposition 103.”

Gang graffiti can take on a different aspect on the upscale Westside. Sprayed on a tennis court near Will Rogers State Beach--and near the site of a proposed Occidental Petroleum project--was the defiant, spray-painted slogan:

“No Oil.”

During a recent discussion of a cardiopulmonary resuscitation class, this column lapsed into temporary unconsciousness and gave the incorrect name of the instructor. It was Dennis Baker.

Also, Kathryn Shapero notes that Cal State Northridge’s recent graduation ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl was not the first such exercise there since 1950--as exclusively reported here--inasmuch as she received her diploma from Dorsey High at the bowl in 1968.

Let the tourist wars start. Sara Schantz, a columnist for the Long Beach Business Journal, fired broadsides at two rivals when she wrote that her city is a great place to vacation because “the natives here are still friendly,” a quality that is “somewhat of a rarity in Anaheim or Hollywood.”

Speaking of vicious attacks, a controversial, Chicago-based study that concluded that Beverly Hills is only the 57th wealthiest suburb in the nation also took a second, less-publicized slap at the “Most Famous Small City in the World.”

Roosevelt University professor Pierre deVise asserted that of the 75 suburbs he examined, Beverly Hills had the second-worst fertility ratio--his term for the number of children under 5 years of age per 1,000 females who are 15 to 44 years of age.

And, he added, lest we forget, Beverly Hills is the town that has a “reputation as home of the nation’s best-known sex symbols.”