From Laundry Room to City Hall : Architecture: Tenants tackle problems at a faded but special Hollywood apartment building.

Bruce McKane, a florist with an eye for architectural detail, lives at Highland Towers, an old Hollywood apartment-hotel with carved wood cornices, a rooftop garden and a basement swimming pool that, though it has been out of use for decades, is a curious reminder of the grand history of the building, as well as Hollywood itself.

The 61-year-old steel and concrete structure is a bit tattered now, but McKane sees past that. He loves the sweeping city view from his fifth-floor unit, and he especially loves the rent: $500 a month.

What McKane doesn’t love is that the building’s elevator has been out of order for the last six weeks and that the heat hasn’t worked for more than a month. And so he has joined in what might be called the tenant revolution of Highland Towers.

It all began a month ago, in the laundry room, where two of McKane’s neighbors held an impromptu gripe session in between the wash and dry cycles. They formed the Tenants Coalition for Preservation of Tenants’ Rights, a long name for a loosely organized group whose members have been filing complaints like crazy--and have, in the process, learned a little about the bureaucracy, as well as one another.

“I started off with Councilman (Michael) Woo’s office,” said Mike Yabroff, one of the laundry room conspirators and the unofficial leader of the 20-member group. “I have been to the building inspectors, the heating inspectors, the elevator inspectors, the county Health Department, rent stabilization. . . . I don’t think that there’s an agency that we didn’t call.”

With more than 720,000 apartments in Los Angeles and a broad spectrum of agencies to which renters can complain, city officials estimate that thousands of tenants take some form of action against their landlords each year. Anna Ortega, assistant director of rent stabilization for the city, said frustrated tenants are increasingly banding together on the theory that there is strength in numbers.

In the case of Highland Towers, the tenants’ group has prompted at least two citations--one from the Health Department, which gave owner Herbert Cowan until Wednesday to fix the heat, and another from the city Building and Safety Department, which ordered that the elevator be repaired by last Monday. With that deadline come and gone, inspector Cecil Smith said the matter may be referred to the city attorney’s office.

Cowan, meanwhile, says he is trying his best to fix the problems. “I don’t break these things,” he said. “They are old, they had a problem and it will be taken care of.”

But McKane and other tenants say their landlord hasn’t moved fast enough.

The tenants--an eclectic mix that includes a retired artist, a young guitarist who attends the nearby Musicians Institute of Technology, a singer who says he has “been a headliner in the city for 20 years,” a collections clerk for United Parcel Service and a 78-year-old woman who needed help walking up the stairs--said they banded together only after getting no response to their complaints.

“This is Hollywood,” said McKane. “This is not a neighborhood kind of place. It has taken a lot of frustration to bring us together.”

Building manager Maurice (he won’t give his last name; “It’s a family name,” he explained) acknowledged that, what with all the inspectors parading through, life has been sort of tense around Highland Towers of late. He lamented that the six-story, 48-unit apartment building at 1922 Highland Avenue is not the friendly place it once was.

“I’ve heard enough of it,” Maurice said with a sigh. “They blame me and give me dirty notes. I’m talking about dirty notes--four-letter words, which is really cheap. . . . They’re mad and they take it out on me. I wish I could be like Jeannie on television and I could blink and it would be, like, perfect.”

But until the building is perfect--or at least has heat and a working elevator--the members of the Tenants Coalition for Preservation of Tenants’ Rights say they will not abandon the cause. They have just served Cowan with a formal “demand letter” instructing him to fix the code violations by next Wednesday.