Earthquake: The Road to Recovery : Busy Sherman Oaks Street Silenced by Quake

Sharon Cooper would give her eyeteeth just to hear the music again--those same loud rock ‘n’ roll songs that blared from the apartment complex next door, driving her and her tenants so crazy.

But what years of arguing among apartment managers could not resolve, the Northridge quake took care of in a day when it wreaked havoc on the neighboring building, triggering its tenants to flee and take their tunes with them.

“It’s an eerie feeling when there is no noise,” said Cooper, who manages the Villa Bonita Apartments on Willis Avenue.

Now abandoned buildings like the one next to Cooper’s place dominate Willis and authorities estimate that 80% of the street’s more than 500 apartment units and condominiums will have to be rebuilt at a cost of at least $24.3 million.

The same scenario is being played out on countless streets throughout Sherman Oaks, where building inspectors have red-tagged 3,000 apartments and condos and where damage has caused postal officials to stop delivery to more than 11% of the community’s 29,000 addresses.

Cooper and other residents who survived last month’s disaster and chose to stay on Willis described their avenue before the quake as a bustling community with car-packed curbs and sidewalks that led the street’s condo and apartment owners to nearby Ventura Boulevard.

“It was one of the most desirable streets in Sherman Oaks,” Cooper said.

In less than a minute on Jan. 17, the neighborhood’s appeal all but vanished for hundreds of Willis residents.

Boards, fences and red tape now decorate apartment facades on Willis which, before the quake, attracted residents with its appealing location--near major freeways, movie studios and Ventura Boulevard.

Around the corner, some of the same businesses where Willis residents used to run their errands and grab a bite to eat remain boarded-up and closed.

Within days of the quake, residents jammed the street with moving vans as they prepared to flee their homes with the National Guard standing by to prevent looting. Recalling the chaos, Willis dwellers spoke of elderly neighbors, whose homes survived the quake, watching the mass evacuation from their lawn chairs and looking on as fights broke out over parking spaces for moving vans. Some said they saw couples cry as they packed their belongings.

Grant Rothhammer, who moved out of his red-tagged condo to a nearby rental unit the second day after the quake, said the atmosphere on Willis that morning scared him as much as the earthquake.

“It could have been nuclear war,” Rothhammer said. “Tempers were running very high and the sense of desperation was running even higher.”

An eerie silence has replaced the sounds of life that had echoed up and down the street just a week before. Willis has become so desolate that it is “rare to see a man out walking his dog,” one resident said.

With all the migration, Cooper is baffled as to why so few of her neighbors who fled their homes chose to move into the dozen empty units in her building, which was among those found to be safe. She joins other apartment managers throughout Sherman Oaks whose buildings were able to withstand Mother Nature’s wrath, but who must now search for tenants to fill units vacated by residents.

“I have no idea where the people went,” Cooper said.

Some, like Andy Dorfman, say enough is enough. Dorfman says he’s had it and does not plan to return to Willis. Dorfman, who lived in a third-floor apartment in the 4600 block of Willis, said he spent the first week after the quake in a hotel before deciding to move into a duplex in the Burbank foothills.

“I have a really bad feeling from what happened there,” Dorfman said. After the quake, Willis was “not a pleasant place to be and now it strikes me as a desolate place to be,” he said.

Other residents say they want to return regardless of Willis’s abandoned state and the potential of another earthquake because the street remains home to them.

“I told the owner of my condo that, if the building can be fixed, I will go back,” Milton Silver said. “When you’re almost 76 years old, it doesn’t really matter that much more” where you live, he said.

In the meantime, Silver has rented a guest home four blocks away from the condominium he had rented on Willis for a little more than a year. With only about half the space his condo had, Silver said his new place leaves him yearning for the old residence.

“I feel sorry for everybody involved, including myself,” Silver said. “That apartment was my security blanket.”

Indeed, some residents, like Rothhammer--who owned a condo in the same building where Silver rented--face no choice but to stay and rebuild.

With no earthquake insurance, Rothhammer said he and his neighbors plan to apply for a $1.5-million, low-interest federal loan that will cost each owner of the 33-unit building roughly $50,000.

Rothhammer was married in December and was on the verge of purchasing a new home and starting a family when the quake hit, forcing him to put his life’s plan on hold.

“I feel like a disaster has struck and I’m in the middle of it,” he said.

Back on Willis, Steve Sturman reflected on the effect of the quake on his home and community. He shares Rothhammmer’s sense of defeat, but says he too will stay.

Sturman’s condo was one of the few buildings to receive a green tag from building inspectors. Yet the inside of his once-showcase home has been in ruins since the quake shook his 750-book collection to the floor along with the 50 paintings of his art gallery.

He estimates 90% of his possessions were destroyed in the quake.

“I feel like my life started on Jan. 17, because I now have nothing that validates my past,” Sturman said.

Escaping his home provides little solace for Sturman, who describes his neighborhood to friends and family as “Sarajevo, Calif., without the gunfire and the deaths.”

“Not only was my home destroyed but my neighborhood was, too,” Sturman said. “I’m just waiting for a plague of locusts to land next.”

Upstairs from Sturman, Hannah Glickman wears her optimism with the same ease that Sturman wears his devastation. She remains confident that life will return to her beloved neighborhood, which she predicts “will be better than before” once the buildings are refurbished and filled with tenants.

“It’ll feel as good as a new hairdo,” she quips.