Outlaw Group Battles Odds in Hollywood Preservation Effort : Redevelopment: The advisory panel has been supplanted by one with official status but continues to function. Developers aren’t sure which group to approach.

Robert Nudelman can’t get enough of Hollywood. The self-employed researcher has gone to 983 movies during the past three years. His favorite pastime: scanning the films for scenes shot in Hollywood, especially old buildings on Hollywood Boulevard.

It is little wonder then that Nudelman, 33, settled in the film capital when he moved to Los Angeles from Arizona 12 years ago. And, his friends say, it is little wonder that he is now the driving force behind a scrappy band of residents and merchants determined to keep the wrecking ball from altering the face and character of their tattered town.

Doreet Hakman opened her first coffee shop in Hollywood in 1974, a decade after she and her family fled Romania with two suitcases in tow. The mother of four now runs the Snow White cafe on Hollywood Boulevard, which dates back to 1937, when the Walt Disney film of the same name premiered down the street.

Hakman joined Nudelman’s crusade because she worries that urban renewal will uproot the community’s poorest residents, including many struggling emigres following in her footsteps.

Ruth Goulet bought into Hollywood four years ago, leaving her Western Avenue apartment for a 76-year-old house near the intersection of Hollywood and Vine Street. A grandmother and nutritionist, Goulet spends her spare time poring over legal notices about proposed construction projects.

Goulet has joined the others for fear she might lose her home, which could be taken against her will by the Community Redevelopment Agency.

Nudelman, Hakman and Goulet are members of the Project Area Committee, the one-time official voice for Hollywood on issues concerning the city of Los Angeles’ 3 1/2-year-old plan to redevelop the community. The $922-million renewal effort covers 1,100 acres in the core of Hollywood, including Mann’s Chinese Theater, the Sunset-Gower Studios and many of the community’s most historic buildings and neighborhoods.

For the past eight months, the committee has been like a government in exile. The City Council disbanded the group last May after Hollywood-area Councilman Michael Woo, a strong advocate of redevelopment, complained that members were trying to undermine the revitalization effort.

But committee members say they were just trying to protect the people of Hollywood and its historic buildings from a redevelopment plan bent on transforming their town into a high-rise jungle of steel and glass with little regard for the community’s “heart and soul.” Despite a judge’s ruling upholding the committee’s disbanding, 14 of the committee’s 25 members continue to meet.

“I remember going through Europe when I was 10 years old,” said Nudelman, who as chairman of the committee works about 40 hours a week on Hollywood matters. “You see all of those old buildings, and you see how groups had fought to keep them. Well, we are at a crossroads in Hollywood. We are deciding how much of Hollywood is going to be left for people to see 20 or 50 years from now.”

All of the committee members are volunteers who dig into their pockets to cover telephone, photocopying, transportation and mailing expenses. The committee lost its official meeting place last May, so it now convenes in the first-floor reading room at the Hollywood YWCA. The room is cramped and littered with dusty paperback books and curled magazines. But it is free.

“We do our work on a shoestring, I am sure you can see that,” said Goulet, the group’s second-in-command. “We pass the hat when we remember. If we come up short, we call around and get some donations.”

The committee brings together an odd collection of community activists, homeowners, renters and merchants, and includes an actor, paralegal, nutritionist, photographer, housewife, two retirees, two teachers and several business owners. The 14 holdouts are united by a common disdain for Woo and the Community Redevelopment Agency, and a shared vision of a Hollywood free of both of them.

Some committee members, who also belong to a residents group, Save Hollywood Our Town, have been at odds with the city over the redevelopment plan since it was adopted by the City Council in 1986. They claim that the plan was crafted with big-business interests in mind and have been locked in a protracted lawsuit with the city over whether the plan is legitimate.

The committee opens its meetings to the public, posts its agendas, sends press releases and forwards recommendations to the Redevelopment Agency. The monthly agenda routinely lists “CRA reports,” even though the agency never sends a representative. It is important to keep things official, says Nudelman, who makes the report himself based on what he learns at agency meetings and “just asking around.”

In the past few months, the committee has pushed to save a poor, residential neighborhood in central Hollywood recently rezoned for industrial use; have gotten involved in efforts to ensure that the owners of several historic buildings, including the Paramount and Holly theaters, properly restore their buildings; and last week voted to oppose a proposed new tax on commercial property near three planned Metro Rail stations in Hollywood.

The problem is no one is officially listening.

“They may be meeting and discussing redevelopment issues, and that is probably healthy,” said H. Cooke Sunoo, who oversees Hollywood for the Redevelopment Agency. “The more discussion the better. . . . But if they are purporting to be advising the agency, they are failing miserably.”

Redevelopment Agency officials say they are happy to be working with a new committee, the 38-member Hollywood Community Advisory Council appointed by Woo last summer.

The new committee has a decidedly professional image. It meets in the seventh-floor conference room of the Redevelopment Agency’s Sunset Boulevard offices, where walls are dotted with architectural drawings and renderings, and windows offer a panoramic view of Hollywood and the hills. Its membership includes architects, social service experts, corporate executives and community leaders.

Many of the new committee members are Woo’s friends and political supporters. All of them, Woo says unapologetically, share his enthusiasm for the redevelopment plan and serve at his discretion.

“The advantage provided here is that it enables me to have a citizens advisory committee, which I will be able to work closely with,” Woo said last year when announcing the new committee. “And I will be able to find panel members whose views on transportation or economic development or urban design are compatible with my own.”

At a recent meeting, about a dozen committee members were joined by nine staff members from the Redevelopment Agency and Woo’s office. The agency’s recommended work program for next year will include several suggestions from the committee, including funding for the historic preservation of homes and buildings, agency officials said.

“They have helped focus the direction of the agency,” said Sunoo. “That is something the former (committee) had been totally unable to do. They bickered a great deal about internal procedures and were opposed to things, but didn’t give us any constructive . . . direction.”

Nudelman and others say the new group has become a “rubber stamp” for Woo and the agency (they have dubbed it the “Vichy Project Area Committee”), but its members say cooperation should not be confused with compliance.

The Project Area Committee members “are good people and they mean well, but they get involved in a lot of rhetoric and are very pessimistic,” said Fares Wehbe, co-founder of the Hollywood Sentinels neighborhood organization and vice chairman of the new advisory group. “When we were having problems in our neighborhood, people said we weren’t going to be able to change it. Well, our neighborhood did change. Rather than complain about the police, we went and worked with them. I think the same way about the Community Redevelopment Agency. We need to take an optimistic approach and make sure we use it as a vehicle to do things for the people who live here.”

Nudelman is a fixture at meetings of the new group’s planning and design review committee, where agency officials discuss projects submitted by developers as well as long-range plans to upgrade Hollywood Boulevard and deal with vexing traffic problems. Some members of the official group welcome Nudelman and concede his outlawed committee still plays an important role.

“They have a good sense of what the community is interested in,” said architect and committee member Bruce Sternberg, who lives and works outside of Hollywood. “I am glad that they are there.”

The dual committees have created some confusion in Hollywood, particularly among developers. Some do not know which committee to court in their quest for approval of projects. Bewildered, they turn to Woo and the Redevelopment Agency for guidance. One developer agreed to talk to members of the renegade Project Area Committee, only to back out at the last minute when he learned they had been stripped of their official status.

Some members of the new advisory group worry that members of the Project Area Committee may attempt to thwart their plans for upgrading Hollywood Boulevard, expected to go to the agency’s board of commissioners in the next few months.

The boulevard plan will serve as the blueprint for development, governing everything from the width of sidewalks to the height of new buildings. The plan will need various city approvals and require public hearings.

“If we can’t get this thing through, it will be very, very dispiriting,” said Barton Myers, an architect on the new group who has consulted extensively with Nudelman over the past few months to ensure the outlawed committee’s suggestions are not ignored. “The pressure is on everyone.”

Woo said he hopes time will heal the wounds.

“There is no way I can compel them to not have meetings,” he said about the Project Area Committee. “I would rather have the (two advisory groups) make amends somehow. . . . It is disappointing, but on the other hand, life goes on.”

NEXT STEP

Attorneys for the Project Area Committee and the city will appear in court Wednesday to debate once again whether the Redevelopment Agency is required to consult with the disbanded group. Superior Court Judge Kurt J. Lewin ruled last month that the city could break ties with the committee. Committee members are hopeful the judge will change his mind when he looks at the evidence again. They contend his ruling was based on erroneous assumptions and a misreading of the record. Attorneys for the city defend the ruling. If the committee should lose again, members say they will appeal. But their attorney may recommend that they incorporate as a nonprofit group, a change that he said would not preclude them from remaining active in redevelopment issues.