A Happy Ending in Hollywood : Development: Neighborhood escapes the bulldozers. Studios will have to look elsewhere to expand.

Steve Hunter was making the usual rounds Friday in his Hollywood neighborhood, but things were different this time. He was smiling.

“Hey, I think we’ve saved the neighborhood!” he yelled as Mary Lou Butler peeked out of her white stucco bungalow on Tamarind Avenue. “They’ve finally come around.”

It was a welcome change of roles for Hunter, who has had little cause for celebration over the last 10 months. The bearded, 36-year-old carpenter has written letters, attended City Hall hearings, pleaded to politicians and even organized a candlelight vigil in a seemingly futile bid to save his ramshackle neighborhood from being bulldozed for film and television industry expansion.

“I learned more about city government than I ever wanted to know,” said Hunter, flipping through a thick wad of letters and documents on his front porch. “We were treated like small potatoes.”

But it all paid off on Friday.

Mayor Tom Bradley and Councilman Michael Woo, who represents Hollywood, joined Hunter and a handful of his neighbors at a City Hall press conference to announce that they have temporarily blocked pending zone changes for the three-block neighborhood that would have allowed the industrial expansion. The City Council is expected to approve their proposal on Wednesday and Woo said he will “do everything in my power” to ensure that the zone changes never take place.

The decision means about 1,000 residents, many of them working-class immigrants struggling to make a go of it in their adopted country, can remain in a community they have grown to know and love. It also saves at least three turn-of-the-century bungalows on Tamarind--including one said to have been the home of the late actor Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in the TV series “The Lone Ranger”--that were slated to be demolished for industrial projects.

“This is like Christmas,” said Linda Chalikian-De Fazio, who lives in a small apartment building across the street from the Silverheels bungalow.

Over the next year or two, the neighborhood of modest homes and apartment buildings--some with rents under $400 a month--will be untouched while the city looks for other areas to encourage entertainment industry development, Woo said. The neighborhood had been targeted for entertainment use by the city because it is sandwiched between the Sunset-Gower Studios and KTLA one block south of Sunset Boulevard.

“It became apparent to me that we were headed for potential disaster when a magnificent neighborhood was about to be eliminated by virtue of a zone change,” Bradley said. “This neighborhood has the kind of diversity, has the kind of mix, that we are all very proud of in this city.”

No one along the 1400 blocks of Tamarind, Bronson and Gordon avenues used words like magnificent to describe their corner of Hollywood on Friday, but they all seemed to agree that it didn’t deserve to be flattened for new sound studios. They complained about the usual things--graffiti, crime and the boarded-up building down the block--but they also boasted about the not-so-usual.

“We all get along quite well here,” said Butler, who moved to the neighborhood from St. Louis 30 years ago with her family. “It is a nice neighborhood. It is home.”

City officials say plans have called for limited industrial development in the neighborhood since 1973. But problems first arose last year when the City Council moved to change the residential zoning to industrial to conform with the plans. Hunter and others say they were never notified of the proposal, and learned about it only last June when a developer published a legal notice announcing he would demolish a nearby house.

Residents quickly turned to Woo, but the councilman initially offered little assistance. In a letter to residents last August, Woo promised to help them find new housing, but he said he supported the zone change because it promoted the entertainment industry in Hollywood and would create jobs.

The residents kept badgering the councilman and in October Woo offered another solution. He said the city would provide residential property owners with low-interest loans to rehabilitate their homes and apartments, while also creating strict “design review guidelines” for the switch to industrial buildings. The zone change would stick, he said.

At the press conference Friday, Woo said changing his mind was not easy. “One of the toughest choices we face . . . is how to achieve the goals of providing affordable housing but also providing jobs for people in the area,” he said.

Residents, who credit Bradley’s interest in their plight for Woo’s change of heart, said they are relieved that the councilman finally sees things their way.

“Now I can get about my business and do some work on this house,” Butler said.