Historic Hamlet Faces Ax : Landmarks: County supervisors will consider a plan to demolish a former artists colony to make way for a picnic area.

Seven bungalows that once housed a unique artists colony near the Hollywood Bowl face demolition as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors considers a proposal today to create a picnic area where the structures now stand.

The seven are among 14 small wood-frame cottages known as the Highland-Camrose Bungalow Village, a hillside hamlet that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a Los Angeles city landmark.

Preservationists and community activists have been working for six years to save the Craftsman-style bungalows, which were built between 1916 and 1924 and housed working-class artists, musicians and actors.

“This is one of the few examples of the workingman’s Hollywood left,” said Ron Max, an actor among a handful of tenants still living on the site, who has led the local effort to save the structures.

According to a report prepared for the supervisors by the county Internal Services Department, the demolitions would clear land that would help “reduce the unmet need for picnic spaces for Bowl attendees.”

The plan’s $2.6-million cost would be paid from state bond funds, according to the county report, which noted that the prospect of retaining all 14 bungalows was unacceptable because their preservation would cost an additional $560,000, and 300 picnic spaces.

County officials did not return calls for comment on the plan.

On Wednesday, Max stood on one of several pathways winding up the hillside off Highland Avenue, past bungalows with low-pitched gabled roofs, all shaded by overhanging shrubs and tall trees. “This is unique,” he said, pointing to a courtyard once used as a rehearsal stage by actors and musicians, and a mural of horses in a corral, painted near a bungalow shaped like a barn.

Most of the buildings, which originally housed about 40 people, are now boarded up and empty. The county, at the request of Supervisor Ed Edelman, saved the 1.6-acre site in 1986 by buying the land from a developer who wanted to build an apartment complex there.

Under the county’s current master plan, the seven bungalows, as well as nine nearby apartment buildings now housing 60 people, would be torn down to create picnic facilities and a park. The seven surviving bungalows would be rehabilitated for public exhibitions and use by nonprofit cultural groups.

The proposal to demolish half of the bungalows has been criticized by several organizations, among them the state Office of Historic Preservation, which originally proposed the complex for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Maryln Bourne Lortie, preservation office historian, said Wednesday that if seven bungalows were torn down the state would recommend dropping the property from the national register. “The entire site created something above and beyond its parts,” Lortie said, adding that the “sense of communal landscape” was a major factor in its designation.

Barbara Hoff, director of preservation issues for the Los Angeles Conservancy, said she was opposed to the demolitions.

“What you have here is an early 20th-Century little village,” she said. “Their importance lies in their architecture of the buildings, the relationship of the bungalows to each other, and the setting, the mature planting. When you start chipping away at a resource, what do you have left?”

Max and his group, Friends of the Highland-Camrose Bungalow Village, want to see all of the bungalows preserved and used as an “environmental cultural center.” The group said the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, a film society and other organizations would use the buildings. “This could create a better living environment for Los Angeles,” he said, “and also set an example of what can be done.”