Their Goal: Saving the Best of L.A.’s Past : Preservation: Cultural Heritage commissioners search for landmarks amid the city’s architectural clutter.

The small group of well-dressed men and women gathered on a West 25th Street sidewalk were an odd sight as they stood scratching themselves, stamping their feet and slapping their sleeves.

“I don’t think we ever had a flea attack before,” one of them, Helen Madrid-Worthen, murmured as she inspected her dress for telltale black specks. “Remember that house where to get in we had to climb the ladder that broke?”

Such are the travails faced by members of Los Angeles’ Cultural Heritage Commission as they crisscross the city, searching for cultural landmarks amid its architectural clutter. More often than not, their quest means crawling through clogged traffic in their yellow city van, climbing rickety staircases or stepping over debris in buildings long past their prime.

This time, the problem was fleas from a sprawling mansion in the West Adams district that was nominated for landmark status by local preservationists who fear that the building’s owners plan to tear it down.

Twice a month, the five commissioners brave the physical and mental challenges involved in identifying the best--or what’s left--of the city’s past.

As it stands, they do it mainly with persuasion since existing law affords them little real power to prevent demolition of even the most significant artifacts of Los Angeles history.

The 1962 city ordinance from which the commission draws its authority allows owners to tear down landmarks even after they are designated as “historic-cultural monuments.” The commission only has the power to delay demolition up to a year, and at least 10 of the city’s 460 landmarks have been torn down.

That could change soon.

After years of prodding by the commission and Councilman Joel Wachs, a strengthened proposed law is scheduled this month to come before the council’s Arts, Health and Humanities Committee, chaired by Wachs. Modeled partly after preservation laws in cities such as New York and Chicago, demolition would no longer be allowed unless an owner can show “economic hardship.”

The council gave the panel another boost earlier this month with tentative approval of another ordinance barring owners who illegally demolish properties from rebuilding for five years.

“I think this will help the commission to do a proper job,” Amarjit S. Marwah, the commission president, said of the proposed changes. “We take a lot of effort in declaring monuments, and if owners can go and replace them, the commission feels disheartened.”

Considered the last resort for threatened buildings that represent the smaller, more human scale of old Los Angeles, the commission has gained attention because of the odd variety of proposals it routinely considers for landmark designation.

Most recently, that has included efforts to stop the city from covering reservoirs and prevent the destruction of a Studio City carwash. While its high-profile cases have drawn considerable attention--and a fair amount of satire--the commission members are themselves relatively unknown.

The tall, bearded Marwah, who has headed the commission for five years, is a native of India and a dentist who has practiced in the Crenshaw District for 28 years. A wealthy and prominent member of the Indian community in Los Angeles appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley 10 years ago, he sports a curling white mustache, always wears a turban, and has a courtly, Old-World manner about him.

He is clearly the leader of the panel, the one who dominates the meetings, leads the way on inspection tours and always sits up front in the city van.

Along with him on a recent tour were members Takashi Shida, the commission’s sole architect and the one with the most technical knowledge; Madrid-Worthen, a gas purchaser for Southern California Gas Co., credited with having the best knowledge of Los Angeles history among the commissioners, and Reynaldo R. Landero, a physician who says architecture is his second love and would have been his profession had he not become a doctor. Another commissioner, Los Angeles attorney Harold G. Becks, appointed only a few months ago, was not along.

Christy Johnson McAvoy of the Los Angeles Conservancy, one of the city’s foremost advocates of preservation, praises the commission for being “accessible” to people. “This is a city that has no organized approach to preservation,” she said, “so the commission is the first line of defense for preservation.”

But the commission does not always see eye to eye with community preservationists.

Consider the proposal to make the Studio City carwash a landmark, which proponents sought to have designated as the “Gateway to the San Fernando Valley.”

Although the news coverage tended to deride Los Angeles’ reputed shallowness, the real issue was neighborhood concerns over redevelopment--preventing the property owner from turning the carwash into yet another Los Angeles mini-mall.

The commission, which has gone out on a limb in the past to include various trees, rocks and even the Venice Canals among major landmarks along with the Calabasas Leonis Adobe or Watts Tower, voted against the carwash.

“I was in sympathy with the neighborhood,” Marwah recalled, “but there was no architectural importance, and no historical importance.”

The same fate, as it turned out, awaited the flea-ridden mansion on West 25th Street.

The large home, with wainscotted rooms, beamed ceilings and upstairs balconies overlooking a large lawn, is typical of the West Adams area--a prime residential neighborhood at the turn of the century that has been in a long decline. Joseph Leslie Phillips, a Los Angeles pioneer, built the mansion in 1907, but the current owners have not maintained it for many years.

A local heritage group nominated the vacant house after it was stripped of its Tiffany glass light fixtures, stained glass windows and mahogany staircase railings--and the owners said they wanted to tear it down.

Residents were not only worried about demolition, but what might take its place.

Unfortunately for the local group, Shida did not like the mansion. He called it “a mishmash” of architectural styles, with elements “tacked on a basically boxy type building.”

The short, dark-haired Shida says little during meetings. But as the panel’s only architect, his opinions carry great weight with the other members. The commissioners voted against the mansion.

Marwah estimates the commission approves about 90% of the nominations it agrees to consider. The City Council, which must vote on its choices, usually goes along. But there have been notable exceptions, such as the Ambassador Hotel. In that case, the commissioners lobbied hard in its favor, Marwah said, “but Councilman (Nate) Holden didn’t want it.”

Holden, who represents the Wilshire area surrounding the hotel, publicly supported commercial redevelopment of the property and suggested that the first of Los Angeles’ major hotels be remembered only by a plaque.

Demolition seems a constant threat to older buildings that get nominated. Of the six buildings the commission toured on a recent afternoon, two were likely to be torn down and a third, the Rialto theater on downtown’s South Broadway, had already been gutted inside.

The 72-year-old theater, which was once owned by theater impresario Sid Grauman, is one of 12 theaters incorporated in the “Broadway Theater and Commercial District” listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

But even a federal listing provides no protection from demolition. The Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation, which seeks to preserve the region’s old movie palaces, nominated the Rialto for local landmark status after learning its current owner, Mehran Forouzanrad, wanted to tear it down and put up a commercial and retail office building.

On touring the Rialto, the commissioners found that only its decorative neon marquee and box office were intact. “It’s just a shell,” Madrid-Worthen said sadly.

David Cameron, a foundation executive committee member who was along on the tour, said his group hoped that the commission could at least give the marquee city monument status. Forouzanrad said the building had been gutted before he bought it, but he “liked the marquee--it’s the best thing about the building” and planned to preserve it.

More often than not, owners are not interested in having landmark designation attached to their properties.

Typical of these were representatives of the owners of a Highland Park house who came to the commission’s recent meeting to request the home be “de-designated.” The property had been sold and the new owners said they were thwarted from redeveloping because the commission had made the place a monument.

It was clear Marwah had heard such arguments hundreds of times before. “On one side is money,” he said later, “and on the other, keeping the heritage of the city.”

Marwah hopes that proposed changes to strengthen the city’s preservation ordinances also will provide “incentives for owners to keep a monument.” There are none now, he said, adding: “There should be some sort of rebate in city taxes.”

Later in the day, as the commissioners filed through some more dilapidated houses that had been nominated, Marwah noted that he was once “more of an architectural purist” than he is now.

“When you see all this, and this is the only architecture left,” he said, “you make some compromises. Or tomorrow nothing will be left.”