Church Given 60 Days to Reach Agreement on Building Changes

The Glendale City Council on Tuesday gave leaders of a local Armenian church an additional 60 days to negotiate with city planners over city-ordered structural and landscape alterations, including some that would preserve the church as a historic landmark.

Leaders of St. Mary’s Armenian Apostolic Church, 500 S. Central Ave., have argued that some of the alterations are unreasonable. A city order to remove a rolling gate in front of the church would eliminate security, and required landscaping and irrigation would be too expensive to install, they have said.

Church leaders also have refused to erect an exterior plaque noting the 60-year-old building’s historic status. They said that when they bought the building in 1984 they were not told that city officials had designated it a historic landmark nine years earlier.

Historic status requires that any proposed building alterations be approved by the city’s Historic Preservation Commission and the council, a process that church leaders say imposes higher costs and unreasonable demands.

Last year, church leaders erected a wall around the building, changed its signs and began seismic improvements.

But city officials stopped the work because it had not been approved by the commission or council.

The council in August approved, with some revisions, the church’s request to alter several windows and other features. But it ordered church leaders to erect the plaque, add landscaping and an irrigation system and remove the gate and parts of the exterior wall that already had been installed.

The council on Tuesday warned church leaders that any negotiation plan must include the plaque.

Council members will reconsider the issue March 19.