Another Jolt Jars Oddity in Simi Valley : Landmark: The Bay Area earthquake only added to the problems of this folk art tourist stop, which already was on shaky ground.

Bottle Village has been called many things in its quirky 30-year history in Simi Valley. An eyesore. Folk art. A historic landmark.

Now, as cities statewide survey buildings for potential earthquake hazards, Bottle Village has been named one of only two unreinforced masonry structures in the Ventura County city.

But no one has to tell the Preserve Bottle Village Committee that the odd collection of bottle-and-mortar huts--or their organization--lies on shaky ground. The new, earthquake-related label is just the latest of the foundering group’s problems.

“What other community has something like Bottle Village?” asked supporter Joanne Johnson. “It’s got to be the most unusual thing in Ventura County, and yet it’s falling apart.”

Ten years after it was formed to save the village from demolition, the committee has dwindled to three artists, is about $5,000 in debt and has lost its tax-exempt status. An engineering study of the village’s 13 unconventional buildings is incomplete and the group has become mired in the city’s bureaucracy as it tries to renew an expired operating permit.

Meanwhile, the village remains closed to the public, except for occasional tours by appointment.

Its new designation as an “unreinforced masonry structure” stems from a state-required survey in which building inspectors are expected to identify structures of brick or stone that are not reinforced to modern, earthquake-conscious standards.

In Simi Valley, a 20-year-old city of gleaming shopping centers and cookie-cutter houses, the only other structure on the list is a nearly 200-year-old adobe in Strathearn Historical Park.

Exactly what the label means for Bottle Village, and the adobe, is unclear. Inventories of cities’ unreinforced buildings and plans for strengthening them are due Jan. 1. Gaddis Farmer, Simi Valley’s chief building official, said he is still preparing his report, which will have to take into consideration the village’s protected status as a California State Historical Landmark.

The village committee’s own engineering study, commissioned four years ago to determine how best to restore and preserve the buildings, is also supposed to address earthquake issues. But that report is on hold because the committee owes its engineer money, said Brian Gabler, an assistant to Simi Valley’s city manager.

Over the last six years, the committee has exhausted an estimated $50,000 in grants and donations for a variety of expenses and, as Johnson put it last week, “We have nothing to show for it.

“Our financial records are so murky I really don’t know what was going on,” she said. “Here we are these three honest people, trying to put back together this house of cards....”

The village immortalizes ordinary objects, otherwise condemned as trash: dolls, scissors, nails, bits of glass and tile. A metal sign embedded in the ground at the village’s entrance bears the cryptic slogan: “They Last.”

A visitor once remarked to Johnson that virtually every object had been held in human hands. Tinted bottles floating in cement, filtering Southern California sunlight like stained glass, give the 1-acre complex of tiny buildings and mosaic walkways its name.

Creator Tressa (Grandma) Prisbrey started Bottle Village in the 1950s to house her collection of 17,000 pencils. For more than 20 years, she added on using refuse from a local dump. The buildings have odd, fairy-tale names--Parade of Dolls, Home of Little Mothers, Bottle House, the Rumpus Room, Cleopatra’s Bedroom.

By the time she died last year in a San Francisco nursing home at 92, Prisbrey was an internationally recognized folk artist and her life’s work was a state historic landmark. But in Simi Valley, Bottle Village might have been razed for condos if not for the committee.

And although the committee received a $25,000 grant from the city, the village today is hardly a celebrated cause among local arbiters of history and lore.

“It’s not the general consensus throughout the population that it’s something that should be conserved. There are those who question what it’s artistic merit is,” said Dmitri Hunt, planning and development administrator for the Rancho Simi Recreation and Parks District, whose property includes the Strathearn adobe.

“Do I personally like it?” said Patricia Havens, the city’s designated historian and director of the Strathearn park museum. “I try to stay neutral on that . . . I’m more inclined to be interested in the ordinary family, the ordinary individuals who made this community what it is, rather than one or two in the limelight for eccentric things.”

“At one time it was Simi Valley’s claim to fame, the only reason we were in the Auto Club book,” Mayor Gregory Stratton said.

Committee President Helen Dennert and Johnson both readily concede the organization’s past administrative failings. Past president David Kaplan, credited with raising much of the committee’s spent funds, could not be reached for comment. Neither Dennert nor Johnson expected to be committee officers when they originally volunteered, they said, and now find themselves leaders by default.

The group’s top priority is regaining its tax-exempt status so it can raise funds again. Because of an apparent oversight, Johnson and Dennert said, the group never applied for permanent tax-exempt status and its temporary designation expired five years ago.

Dennert and Johnson also want to join the committee with a more conventional group such as the park district, because “if Bottle Village had been attached to an institution, people would have been touring it,” Dennert said.

In light of the committee’s more immediate problems, Johnson can’t help but smile ruefully at the prospect of earthquake-proofing Bottle Village.

“Given the choice of where to die during an earthquake, I would rather succumb and be buried in the rubble of Bottle Village than be wasted in the debris of a poorly designed freeway,” she wrote recently while organizing the committee’s paper work.