Doctors Battle for Their Rubble : Demolition: Tenants hire lawyer in effort to get files and valuables from building torn down after quake.

A wrecking ball has reduced the six-story Barrington Building--once the home of scores of prominent dentists, psychiatrists and other medical professionals--to a pyramid of rubble. But this is better than average rubble, say the quake-damaged building’s tenants, who hired a lawyer Tuesday to ensure that it will be handled with care.

Somewhere inside the mountain of wreckage on Olympic Boulevard are irreplaceable medical records--some of them sensitive, given the Barrington’s high-profile clientele. There is a huge inventory of prescription drugs. There are X-rays and chunks of precious metals--the stuff of fillings. There are file cabinets and safes whose contents could mean the difference between survival and financial ruin, tenants say.

But since demolition began Saturday, they say, their valuables have been treated like so much garbage. To keep asbestos dust from flying, the building has been wetted down as it has been torn down, making its contents soggy even before this week’s rain. And instead of carefully sifting through the debris, tenants say, the crews appear to be concentrating on its speedy removal.

“There is no salvage. There’s only rubble,” said L. James Grold, a psychiatrist who worked in the building for 25 years. “ Salvage is certainly not a word that has any meaning for what they’ve done.”

An executive at the Cleveland Wrecking Co., which was retained by the city to level the building, said his crews have tried their best, when possible, to rescue valuable items. But Donald Fenning, the company’s executive vice president, said he was not hired to conduct the intensive recovery effort that the doctors are demanding.

“The contract was basically to get rid of the building as quickly as you can get rid of the building. It would have been our pleasure to undertake a prolonged demolition process. . . . But the city did not retain us to do salvage and recovery on a minute scale,” said Fenning, who added that his company has become “the fall guy” in an emotional battle it did not cause.

“It turned my stomach that we had to do that to people’s possessions and records,” Fenning said, adding that his company is a “wrecker with a conscience” that has rented storage space at its own expense to safeguard items recovered from the Barrington.

On Tuesday, Michael R. Leslie, a lawyer hired by the tenants, was working with city officials, the wrecking company and the building’s owners to try to finance a more rigorous salvage effort.

“Obviously, we’re not expecting to get office furniture out intact. But file cabinets? Safes? It’s not like they’re looking for a needle in a haystack--one tooth or something,” said Leslie, who also sent a private investigator to the site to be the tenants’ “eyes and ears.”

Leslie also did not rule out formal legal action. Many of the tenants have alleged that the Barrington Building was demolished too quickly and that tenants were unnecessarily excluded from the premises, even though the city had deemed it an “imminent, extreme and immediate hazard” after the quake.

Some also believe that the building, whose condition caused traffic to be diverted, was a victim of its location--Olympic Boulevard, which was needed to relieve congestion resulting from damage to the Santa Monica Freeway.

“I can’t help thinking: If this had happened on some backwoods part of Silver Lake, not near any thoroughfares, that building would still be standing,” dentist Janet Lent said at a tenants’ meeting Monday.

“We could have gotten in there,” said Leslie P. Lipson, a psychiatrist who lost his patients’ records. “(The building) wasn’t going to go over in the wind. Did you see how long it took them to knock it down? It was solid as hell.”