The Battle of the Bungalows : Planning: Residents want to save the ramshackle Hollywood homes. But the city might get rid of them to make room for concert-going picnickers.

Talk about fighting City Hall: Ron Max has been butting his head against county government for more than seven years.

At stake is a shady nook--a 1.6-acre bit of old Hollywood tucked away on the west side of busy Highland Avenue--where Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman and other officials want to build a picnic area for Hollywood Bowl music fans.

Max doesn’t mind the picnic tables. It’s the history of the place--once threatened by a developer, then saved when the county bought it in 1986--that haunts him.

Known as the Highland-Camrose Bungalow Village, its 14 ramshackle, wood-sided bungalows once were home to young people who went on to become stars--Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Marilyn Monroe and Tyrone Power, Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne, among others.

There is more to it than memories. Residents of the nearby Hollywood Heights neighborhood fear that removal of half the bungalows, along with demolition of nearby apartment buildings and uprooting of more than 50 mature trees, will allow the roar of Highland Avenue traffic to echo up their hilly streets.

“We’re very supportive and excited about it, but we’re concerned that the county doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” said Victoria Hochberg, a director who lives on Alta Loma Terrace, a steep pathway that rises immediately behind the bungalows.

“It’s one thing to create a park. It’s another to tear down the bungalow village,” said Hochberg, like Max a member of the board of the Hollywood Heights Assn. “All the buildings that front Highland Avenue are buffers for noise, privacy and a perimeter around our community.”

Much of that privacy is thanks to the lofty, leafy, eucalyptus trees and rubber plants that shade the bungalows, built between 1916 and 1924, but as many as 57 of the village’s 76 mature trees may have to go, according to an environmental impact report.

This would threaten the village’s historic status, preservation officials said. Thanks to Max’s efforts, the houses and grounds have been declared a Los Angeles Cultural Historic Monument and listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

But Edelman favors keeping some buildings while using the rest of the land for picnics and walkways.

“There’s another purpose here--to serve the surrounding community, increase green space and enhance the Hollywood Bowl experience for everyone,” he said.

The Hollywood Bowl is now seriously short of picnic space, leaving many concert-goers with no choice but to dine on the pavement for lack of tables, Edelman said.

Most of the bungalows, labeled Dutch Colonial Revival Craftsman by architectural historians, are boarded up now, waiting for the bulldozers. Plans call for the rest to be used as offices, restrooms and a community center. Max and the three other remaining tenants have been told to leave by Aug. 20.

Max, an actor with a New York tough-guy voice who has lived there since 1980, does not find that reassuring.

The ideal solution, said Max, now paying the county $230 a month for his ground-floor apartment, would be to have the bungalows refurbished and picnic tables scattered about the grounds.

But Edelman aide Joel Bellman said that was never in the cards.

“Coughing up the money (for restoration) and just leaving them there wasn’t the best use of county dollars,” he said.

Money is short, said John Weber, assistant director of the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Dept., so short that no funds are available for work to begin on the bungalow village.

Demolition for the apartment buildings has been set for this fall, after the Hollywood Bowl season ends, and the county is trying to come up with a solution to the noise problem, he said.

Though one report said a 20-foot-high sound barrier would be needed to make up for the removal of the apartment buildings, the county originally suggested a six-foot wall.

After the neighbors protested, Weber said, he changed that to an eight-foot wall topped with two feet of ivy-covered latticework. An acoustics specialist is re-evaluating that proposal.

As for the trees, he said, many of the existing ones grow in difficult, bumpy spots. But there may be hope for some of those that were threatened in the original proposal.

“The concentration now is on the apartment area. When we’re actually doing the plans for the bungalow area we may find that we may save more than we anticipated,” Weber said. “We’re big believers in trees in parks . . . but we’re trying to make a project that works well together.”

As for the bungalows, Weber said, some asbestos removal will be done this summer, but no date has been set for demolition or restoration. “There’s a lot of sentiment relative to the bungalows, and we’ve attempted to be sensitive to that sentiment,” he said.

Max’s options seem limited at best. He said an attorney told him that the grounds for eviction would not stand up in court, but attorneys are expensive and the county has great staying power.

Max said county officials told him that he can stay at least another year if he promises to go quietly when the time comes, but Weber said he was not able to confirm that.

The actor started his fight when the Jan Development Co. bought the property to build a six-story apartment house in 1984, a project that was thwarted when the county intervened. Max is keeping his options open for now.

“I don’t want to come off thinking that I’m weak or tired, because I’m not,” he said. “I don’t want them to think they’ve got me on the run, because they don’t.”