Easy Street : Public works: After 30 years of bone-jarring rides and accidents, a rough stretch of Venice Boulevard has been resurfaced.

It is a small thing, maybe, but Marilyn Martin is happier now that her house sits still all day.

“There’s no more tremors,” said the Venice Boulevard resident. “We felt the tremors, like an earthquake, every time the buses would go by.”

And then there were the car crashes. Those would happen when drivers lost control after bashing one of the street’s legendary potholes or swerving to avoid them. Other cars snapped axles or were knocked out of alignment.

“It just beat your car up every day,” said Frank Murphy, who lives and works on the offending stretch of road between Lincoln Boulevard and Pacific Avenue.

Added Gwendolyn Howard, another veteran of the 30-year campaign to prod the state and city to repair the bouncy one-mile strip: “It was like riding a horse.”

But that’s over. The awful foe of three decades now lies vanquished: curbed, widened, bike-laned, lighted and very, very smooth--never mind that it took Egyptian slaves less time to muscle together the Great Pyramid.

Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who takes credit for finally breaking the bureaucratic logjam holding up the reconstruction job, was exultant last week as she led 15 or so former sufferers on a quick bus tour of the newly completed project.

“I just want you to think about this every 10 feet--what there was every 10 feet,” Galanter announced through a purse-sized speaker. “Feel this! Isn’t this great? You can make left turns. You can cross the street relatively safely. You can ride your bike.”

As part of the $5.5-million reconstruction, turn lanes were cut, a bridge over Grand Canal was replaced, sewer and drainage systems were improved, and new street signs were put up. And the street was built anew and resurfaced.

None of this was easy. If the raggedy road wasn’t bad enough, residents and the thousands of beach-goers who travel it regularly then had to suffer through 18 months of noise, closed lanes and diverted traffic. Others feared that treasured parking spaces would be lost or that plans to widen the road at the expense of the spacious (if trash-strewn) median would preclude any other use for the strip, such as a public garden.

Volumes could be written about why the project took so long to get moving. Suffice it to say that with two levels of government--state and city--eventually involved in the planning, the job was proceeding with all the speed of continental drift when Galanter took office in 1987. “Thirty (years) is a little extreme,” acknowledged Patrick Tomcheck, a city Department of Transportation engineer who worked on the project’s last phases.

By the end, desperate motorists had resorted to bumper stickers, begging their government leaders by name for help. The last one: “Anyone: Please Fix Venice Boulevard.”

Galanter isn’t shy about taking credit for finally getting the city and Caltrans together, and getting the job started and then finished ahead of the two-year schedule.

“It proves once again that if you really care about it . . . it is possible even to fix Venice Boulevard,” Galanter said.

At an outdoor gathering after the bus tour, residents munched fruit and sipped ice tea alongside bureaucrats who had been involved in the project. But it was hard to find anyone there who had been present at the very beginning.

Community activist Dell Morgan knew why.

“They’re all dead now,” she said. “It’s been really a long time.”