Disaster Brings Out Si’s Best Side

The pink impatiens are in bloom outside 4700 Natick Ave. The stucco looks neatly starched. An electric generator snores gently in the basement.

For those blessings, once taken for granted, residents are breathing a Si of relief.

Simon Greitzer is part Paul Bunyan and part Santa Claus to his peers in this building. Much more of a hero to them--and many public officials--than an Olympic athlete could ever be.

Almost single-handedly over two years, the slender 82-year-old wrestled his condominium complex back from an earthquake that had all but destroyed it. With pluck and charm, brains and tenacity, he quietly led the rebirth of an entire community once so humbled by nature that it had earned the nickname “ghost town.”

Back in January of 1994, before anyone had ever heard the term “red tag,” the titanic shift in a previously unknown fault beneath Northridge shoved the fate of thousands of people in thousands of untold directions. Some of their stories will remain unsung.

Not Si’s.

*

Si Greitzer has a wall of fame in the den of his condo: nearly 20 photographs and fancy certificates commemorating 50 years of pitching in to help the chief of police, the board of supervisors, Superior Court judges and the governor. Below them, in a bookcase, rest seven neatly typed volumes of his work on county grand juries.

I didn’t know about any of that when I met him for the first time in December 1994. I just flagged him down on Natick while reporting on the first anniversary of the Northridge earthquake, and the retired mechanical engineer eyed me as suspiciously as an out-of-plumb piece of timber.

Si’s don’t-mess-with-me-kid nature, I soon learned, had served his neighborhood well.

Half a day after the Jan. 17 quake shook the San Fernando Valley from its slumber, one neighbor recalled, a Los Angeles city building inspector slapped a green tag on 4700 Natick, allowing the condo owners to reenter the smashed-up structure and go on with their lives. Si didn’t believe him, the neighbor says, so the next day Si found a structural engineer who certified the place as uninhabitable.

Indeed, it turned out that Natick and the next thoroughfare west, Willis Street, were ground zero for some of the temblor’s worst destruction.

Of 30 multifamily dwellings, at least 25 looked as if they had lost a war. Beirut was in better shape. Fully armed National Guard troops patrolled the two streets for a week.

The area’s United Parcel Service driver, Mike Goodrich, recalls a Stygian tableau of shattered windows and teetering structures--some occupied by lost souls who had nowhere else to go. He refused to enter most, leaving directions to the local UPS distribution center in mailboxes.

“I wasn’t going to risk my life to deliver someone’s Spiegel package,” he said.

Nearly all apartment dwellers cleared out, but condominium owners were stuck. Some condo associations bickered and battled over their next move and took more than a year to form a strategy.

Not 4700 Natick. Within a week, its board deputized Si with full authority to be their lone agent to deal with insurers, contractors, the city and the federal government--and he went to work.

Even for Si, this was a tall order. He had run factories before but didn’t know a shear wall from a schmear on the wall.

Soon, however, he was discussing how much No. 3 and No. 9 rebar to tie into reinforcing columns in the garage and could convince his fellow pensioners to upgrade to double-paned windows (“only $90,000 extra!” he said.) He ran intensive background checks on every building contractor, haggled over the contract for three months, pored over every invoice, demanded crush tests on every load of cement and found that his most important task was persuading the building’s insurer of the need to cut its $4.5 million in checks promptly so he could rebuild fast.

Fellow condo owners “scattered like the four winds” during the reconstruction, Si says, but he returned to his beloved building from a tiny rental in Burbank to badger and rally the contractor 12 to 16 hours a day. On many days, 40-man crews hammered his dream into shape.

“He wouldn’t let go!” said his wife, Rose.

*

The rest of the street, at first, was not as fortunate.

Many of the apartment complexes, even before the quake, were rundown stucco boxes from the 1950s and ‘60s. Some were owned by mom-and-pop investors who had bought in during the real-estate boom of the late 1980s and were now sitting on what the industry calls “upside-down” mortgages: They owed more than the structures were worth.

Not long after the quake, a few farsighted entrepreneurs could see that this ghost town just had to be repopulated. It was too close to shopping on Ventura Boulevard, too close to the freeways, too central to the Valley to simply waste away.

One investment outfit, PCS Property Management of Culver City, bought 11 quake-damaged apartment houses in Sherman Oaks and is in the process of buying or building two more, according to a company official. Experts believe the firm bought the complexes from grateful banks at 50 cents on the dollar. A Los Angeles Housing Department official says PCS then took advantage of a city offer to provide $35,000 in rehabilitation loans per apartment unit in the “ghost towns” at interest rates from 0% to 3%.

By January of this year, PCS Vice President Keith Corneliuson said the firm had opened six apartment buildings on Willis and Natick alone and has already rented 90% of its units. Directly across from Si’s building, a gorgeous fountain and big pool welcome apartment-hunters; most of the units are fully up to date with the tastes of the ‘90s.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who helped lead the quake-recovery effort as a city councilman, said it was “a tribute to the vitality of Sherman Oaks” that the streets have risen from the ashes.

Si Greitzer, a staunch Republican, takes great pride in noting that his condo association needed no government handout. The job was finished ahead of schedule and so far under budget that everyone got their insurance deductible back. The UPS driver says his package deliveries are back to pre-quake levels.

So is Si happy as he strides the now-sparkling street?

Not entirely, he admits. The man lauded by an old friend, county Supervisor Michael Antonovich, as a “first-class citizen,” said he misses the work. “I’m looking for a new challenge,” he said. “That would be a lifesaver. I’m not ready to put my heels up and watch TV all day long. Tell Antonovich that Si’s getting itchy.

“That subway thing maybe--I don’t mind getting involved!”