Merridy Street Lies in Heart of Destruction : Northridge: Woodside apartments are the only habitable units on the block. Neighbors have been replaced by rats and feral cats, and residents must dodge the dregs of chaos.

A disturbing quiet has settled onto Merridy Street like fine dust. In building after deserted building, the only noise is the clapping of vertical blinds as breezes blow through broken windows. In a parking lot, thigh-high weeds sprout through the pavement. When the mail carrier comes, he makes just one stop.

At the end of the one-block Northridge street is the sole survivor, The Woodside apartments, boxed in and dwarfed by five buildings that look as if they had been hit by bombs. These buildings have been deemed unlivable and stand empty--lifeless sentries over a neighborhood that could go either way.

Of the 281 dwelling units on the street, The Woodside’s 40 are the only ones where people still live.

“We’re at the end of the world here,” said the apartments’ resident manager, Allen Sphatt, only half-joking.

The Jan. 17 quake’s hopscotch pattern of destruction left thousands living next door to damaged buildings. But Merridy Street is one of the few places where remaining residents are surrounded by a ghost town.

Those who have stayed did so because the neighborhood is centrally located and because, as damaged as the area is, it is home.

Still, certain adjustments have been necessary.

Scott Juceam likes the peace and quiet, but hates the flies that seem to breed in the abandoned buildings. Marilyn Mohlmann cares for neither the silent nights, nor the rats she fears will swarm out of the listing blue-and-white building across the street, which on hot days stinks of rotting food.

Claire Marklin hung extra pictures inside her house to try to buffer the echoes that bounce off her living room walls.

“When it’s quiet, it’s very, very quiet,” she said, standing in her bedroom with its panoramic view of destruction. “So, when I do hear a noise, I jump.”

In its heyday, this section of Merridy Street, just northeast of Cal State Northridge, was one of those rare places where lawyers lived across the street from day laborers and professors lived next door to students.

And The Woodside is a gated, salmon-colored Cape Cod-style complex built in the 1980s, where tenants pay $725 for a one-bedroom apartment, $895 for a two-bedroom unit.

While the buildings around it crumbled and cracked during the earthquake, The Woodside suffered no major damage, although many residents moved out temporarily when replastering and painting was done.

Many never came back.

“Some of them just left, no forwarding address, nothing,” building owner Andrew Weissman said.

A couple with children moved back home with their parents. A pregnant woman thought staying there would bring bad luck to her unborn child. At rock bottom, the Woodside had 17 tenants.

“We had some really nice neighbors,” Mohlmann said wistfully.

The neighbors across the street have been replaced by rats that feast on food left behind the morning of the quake. And in pursuit of the rats are former house cats, dozens of them, screeching loudly in the wee hours.

“We’ve really just been overrun by stray cats,” said Michael Lang, who lives on the first floor. “In any other time, it’d be too many because they’re everywhere, and having kittens and all. But as long as they keep the rats away, I don’t think anyone’s going to complain.”

And like Los Angeles’ other ghost towns, Merridy Street--before city-ordered fences were put up and security guards were called out--had become a playground for the twisted and the desperate.

The Woodside’s tenants routinely were awakened by blaring burglar alarms. On some mornings, the manager found VCRs in the street, accidentally dropped by hurried thieves. Once, someone set fire to a carpet that had lain untouched on the street for weeks.

Nearly everyone at The Woodside has a story.

“One night, people were on the side of the building,” said Mitchell Lawson, who has lived in his apartment for five years. “We heard them wrestling on the side yard, so I closed the window. My wife heard a big thump, it got her really scared.”

Then, he adds, came the frightening part, “I found a slash in the screen window the next morning.”

The new chain-link fences and security guards have calmed some people’s nerves, but not everyone’s: Marklin comes home, bolts her door and doesn’t reopen it until the morning.

“For me, as a single female, coming down these streets is awful,” she said.

Such fears influence potential renters, too. Despite The Woodside’s spacious apartments, their apparently sturdy construction and amenities such as a swimming pool and gym room, finding people willing to move into this ghost town has not been easy.

There is no way to soften the blow for apartment hunters because the only route to The Woodside is down Merridy Street, past piles of broken furniture and spray-painted warnings to “Keep Out.”

“People think they are driving through the gauntlet to get here,” said Weissman, the building’s owner. Not one to give up easily, he has posted a “For Rent” sign on the fence of the vacant building on the corner and advertised in newspapers.

And, amazingly, he has found renters. All but seven of the units are filled.

Sometimes, residents find themselves yearning for the banal sounds of their old suburban life: the cacophony of garbage trucks; gardeners gunning their leaf blowers.

They realize, unhappily, that normalcy is a long way off.

“Our block, it’s like there’s no progress,” Mohlmann said. “If they’re not going to do anything, I wish they’d come and just knock them down.”

When rebuilding does start in earnest, life on Merridy Street could take a noisy turn for the worse, as crews jackhammer and saw to bring the adjacent buildings back to normal.

For this ghost town’s residents, though, what happens next will pale in comparison with what’s already occurred. Marklin said: “Nothing else is traumatic anymore.”