Service Group Checks Into Notorious Motel : Activism: Clean-up starts on dilapidated Chateau Motel, once a magnet for crime. Plans call for conversion into a job-training center.

Dozens of neighbors turned out Saturday in support of a plan to convert a motel that was once a magnet for drugs and crime into a job-training center.

Among them was Lucia Yorey, who walked past the stunted brown vegetation in front of the Chateau Motel, 6719 Sepulveda Blvd., and burst into tears.

“I haven’t been here since she was killed,” she said.

Yorey’s 18-year-old cousin, Roberta Mosentheim, was stabbed to death in Room 14 on Feb. 12, 1990. On Saturday, Yorey vowed to recruit volunteers to help a nonprofit community-service group renovate the property and erase its lawless legacy.

The group, Asian Pacific Community Services, Westminster, has taken over the lease of the 46-unit motel--where drug dealing, prostitution and even murders once occurred--and will convert it into a training center for the disabled.

Most of the motel’s rooms are still boarded up. Paint and plaster are peeling and gaping crawl holes have been punched through walls by vagrants who lived in the rooms after the motel was closed in the spring.

The motel’s renovation will serve as on-the-job training for people “who need job skills like carpentry, housecleaning, clerical and computers,” said Alan Woo, executive director of Asian Pacific Community Services. The group is seeking funding for the renovation, which is estimated to cost about $50,000 and take two to three months to complete.

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Van Nuys residents Saturday looked around the motel grounds and examined some of the battered furniture, which was for sale. None of the items--purple, orange and burgundy chairs and large mirrors--had sold by noon.

Efforts to persuade the city to do something about the motel were frustrated because its ownership had been transferred frequently among unreachable landlords, said Judith Hirschberg, an aide to Councilman Marvin Braude.

But Woo said he was able to contact the latest owners, identified in city records as Jin Chan Yang and Guey Dan Hwu, and convince them that he could turn the motel--where rooms once rented for $13 per hour--into a respectable establishment.

Standing behind bulletproof glass in the motel office, where night clerk Feng Chen was stabbed to death by a resident of the motel in 1988, Mary Lou Holte, founder of the local Townkeeper’s Action Group, said she was pleased by the day’s turnout.

“Once, the community was really angry about this place. They wanted it bulldozed,” Holte said. “But I think when the new group starts, the bad memories will go.” Woo said he hopes his group’s work will be acknowledged by those who blame Southern California’s immigrant population for the region’s economic woes.

“The Asian and Pacific communities have been targeted as the problem,” Woo said. “Here, we’re part of the solution.”