Street Squeeze in the Summertime : Parking: The annual invasion of sun-worshiping hordes has descended on the beach cities, turning the streets into battle zones over the rarest of commodities: an empty spot.

Every year about this time, someone driving a car--usually a family car packed with sweating children and aluminum lawn chairs--someone driving a car like that, circles a block in Manhattan Beach, and after an hour or so, encounters Louise Lyons in her meter maid cart.

How much, the driver usually asks, are parking tickets for scofflaws who leave their vehicles in, say, that red zone over there?

“Thirteen dollars,” Lyons sternly replies.

“It’s worth it,” comes the response, and the car pulls in.

It’s just another sign of summer for Lyons, a parking enforcement field supervisor who always follows up dutifully with the citation.

And Manhattan Beach isn’t the only stretch of South Bay coastline where a dogged quest for on-street parking has become a summer rite.

Hermosa Beach police Sgt. Steve Endom says he has “seen everything happen over parking in this town--I’ve seen people try to shoot each other over a parking space.”

A prohibition on street parking along Palos Verdes Drive South in Rancho Palos Verdes has meant for several years now that the parking lot of the landmark Wayfarers Chapel will be jammed with sun worshipers headed for the nude beach down near Abalone Cove.

And Inez McGee of the Torrance Beach Improvement Assn. reports that beach-goers regularly block the driveways of her neighbors near the sand, and sometimes they even urinate on their lawns because driving to a gas station restroom would cost them a parking spot.

“Street parking is difficult at all the beaches this time of year,” said South Bay lifeguard Lt. Tom Hargett of the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors. “There just isn’t a whole lot of it.”

So valuable is beach parking that in Hermosa Beach alone eight residential parking permits were reported stolen during the last two weeks of June.

Katina Tzetzos, who lives about a block from the sand in Hermosa Beach, said that whoever took her guest parking permit on June 22 smashed the window of her visitor’s car just to get at the little tag that residents buy for $25.

“There was an $80 pair of sunglasses right next to it,” Tzetzos said, “and they weren’t even touched. Parking permits are like gold down here.”

In fact, several years ago, Hermosa Beach was hit with a flurry of counterfeit parking permits, said Henry Tubbs, a 12-year veteran in the city’s parking enforcement division.

“Somebody was forging them and selling them in bars for $20 apiece,” Tubbs said. “They were really good replicas, too--there was just one little flaw in the spacing. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you were lost.”

Eventually, Tubbs added, the fake permits disappeared, but the forger was never caught--not because he or she was so clever, but because nobody would snitch.

At the Wayfarers Chapel, on the edge of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the only permit needed to park is your word that you are there to go to church, said chapel administrator Barbara Norris. But during the summer, there are routinely far more cars in the parking lot than people in the pews because the chapel overlooks a secluded cove and an even more secluded nude beach.

There’s a pay parking lot on Palos Verdes Drive South, Norris said, but the chapel parking is free. Hence the parade of casually dressed people “who come to the church to meet our requirements carrying Igloos and backrests,” she said.

Not to mention the others, who simply park and sneak down the cliff side, shucking their shorts when the coast is clear.

McGee of the Torrance Beach Improvement Assn. said her neighborhood’s problem, too, is driven by the urge to save a few bucks. The county operates a pay parking lot at Torrance Beach, she said, “But frankly, if I could walk a block and save $5 or $6, I’d do that too.”

She said her group has lobbied the county to lower its parking fees, but to no avail--and Torrance, by most accounts, is among the less popular beaches in the South Bay.

Around the other side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, parking near San Pedro’s grittier beaches is generally easier to find. However, even there, on hot summer weekends, and almost any Sunday, the parking lot at Cabrillo Beach fills up before noon, and the overflow crowds Point Fermin streets.

The more popular sands, of course, are Redondo, Hermosa and Manhattan beaches, where locals one-up each other with tales about tourists’ pathetic attempts to cadge a parking spot.

“Once,” a tanned Hermosa Beach sunbather named Mike reports, “I saw a guy trying to rope off an empty spot between two cars by running a string from the door of one car across to the door of the other.”

Down the Strand, Daniel Plamondon jokes that some people would risk their wives for a parking space: “Lay down here, honey, while I (drive) to the liquor store!”

Locals say the crunch gets more and more annoying as the season wears on.

“You can’t even run errands (in your car) here during the summer,” said Stacy Holborow of Hermosa Beach. “You have to do everything according to beach hours--before 9 or 10 in the morning or after 4 or 5 in the afternoon. And when you just walk down the street, people will trail you in their cars, thinking you’re leaving and you’re going to open up a space.”

For the city coffers, however, the demand for beach parking has a definite silver lining. Meters in some high-demand areas have shifted exclusively to quarters, and unless beach-goers are prepared to rush back every hour with a steady diet of change, they run the risk of a parking ticket. Those tickets have become one of the top sources of revenue for tiny Hermosa Beach.

In Manhattan Beach, Lyons says, the meter maids will issue between 8,000 and 9,000 citations before summer ends. Which reminds her of another bit of seasonal repartee.

“People ask every summer where I think they should park,” she laughs. “I tell them, ‘Well, you might try San Francisco.’ ”