Some Northridge Quake Wounds Are Yet to Heal

Ten years ago today, the 13-story Panorama Towers shook and rocked and cracked along with the rest of Los Angeles, damaged but not destroyed by the Northridge earthquake.

Though the Panorama City building was salvageable, repairs stalled and the tenants all moved on.

Today the building remains almost as it was then, an empty space behind a mosaic of plywood sheathing. A simple sign announces: “For sale/lease/Build to Suit.”

It bears silent testimony to a little-noticed facet of the Northridge earthquake, the buildings left behind in what was otherwise a remarkably swift recovery.

Rebuilding after the state’s most costly natural disaster required $25 billion in insurance payouts and government assistance and $15 billion more spent by victims.

At its peak, in the three years following the quake, the recovery process turned the San Fernando Valley into a vast construction zone with portable toilets and a haze of plaster dust visible on nearly every street.

Great public works projects were accomplished with extraordinary energy.

The once-soaring intersection of the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways was rebuilt; the collapsed Santa Monica Freeway was reopened within five months. The Coliseum and Los Angeles City Hall were rehabilitated at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Large portions of the Northridge Fashion Center mall were demolished and rebuilt. High-rise buildings across the region were peeled open to have their girders re-welded.

Today, tens of thousands of damaged structures have been repaired or rebuilt.

All but one of the nearly 1,200 notorious red-tagged buildings -- judged too dangerous to occupy -- have been brought up to standard or demolished. The only holdout is the city’s abandoned St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, where work is expected to begin next month to turn the building into a performing arts center.

Los Angeles city building officials processed nearly 69,000 permits to repair offices, apartments, houses and other buildings and 20,000 to rebuild from scratch.

According to an analysis of electronic records, the speed of the recovery can be read in the slope of those permits: 59,000 the year of the quake, 22,000 the year after, 6,000 in 1996 and 1,000 in 1997.

Other cities logged thousands of permits as well. In the best examples of government and private-sector collaboration, some neighborhoods look better today than they did 10 years ago.

But, the fact that a building is no longer red-tagged does not always mean it has been repaired or rebuilt. Many buildings have either been demolished, their lots left fallow, or, like the Panorama Towers, sealed.

The state office building at First Street and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles is one example, declared unsafe and standing empty to this day.

A UCLA study released this month found that the lapses in rebuilding have been more prevalent in poorer areas, especially in Latino neighborhoods, where property owners were less likely to be eligible for loan-based government assistance and more likely to face obstacles of language and expertise. The report also concluded that government assistance was better able to help revive single-family homes than apartment buildings.

There’s no definitive record of how many earthquake-damaged structures have not been replaced. City officials stopped tracking the rebuilding process a few years ago. The UCLA researchers estimated that as many as 10% of the red-tagged buildings were not rebuilt.

These physical reminders of the Northridge earthquake have receded into L.A.’s pockmarked landscape, largely indistinguishable now except to those whose memories or fortunes are attached to them.

A vacant lot on Alvarado Street, just around the corner from Sunset Boulevard, used to be a four-plex.

Its owner, a Dutch investor named Davoud Ermia, was in Holland on Jan. 17, 1994. He had intended to build a medical building on the site, but said he was rattled by his tenants’ narrow escape in the quake.

“I was very afraid something [might] happen to our people that live there,” he said.

He had the red-tagged building demolished and sold the lot at a loss.

Still vacant, it sold again last year. The new owner, Yong W. Juhn, looked into a government subsidy, but concluded it would take too long. Now he’s applying to the city to build low-income housing for senior citizens.

Even in some of the city’s most well-to-do neighborhoods, high in the Santa Monica Mountains, the rebuilding is incomplete.

One vacant lot remains on Beverly Ridge Drive, a street that had five red-tagged houses. Another is on Java Drive, a two-block spur off Mulholland Drive.

The reasons the former houses were not rebuilt are diverse and often elusive.

The owners of the Java lot, commanding panoramic views of the San Fernando Valley and L.A.’s Westside, started to rebuild their house exactly as it was, city records show. A geology report found cracks in the top 30 feet of soil. The condition was not unusual or prohibitive, it said, but officials demanded extensive foundation work to compensate for it.

The property has now been sold to Mark and Shelley Hellman, who are planning to build their dream house there. But the going has been slow.

Their builder, Jeff Ficks, said he has put more than a year into negotiations with city officials to overcome the problems brought out in the 1995 soils report.

“Once a house was red-tagged, they looked at it much more carefully,” said Ficks, who has rebuilt several hillside homes.

The decision of whether to rebuild went deep into one homeowner’s psyche.

When the earthquake struck, Manny Davis, a World War II and Korean War veteran, had recently remarried after losing his wife of 46 years to cancer.

“You’ve been living in Sylvia’s shadow,” he told his new wife, Renee, who had just moved into the house on Sherwood Place that he and his first wife bought in 1966. “Now you are out from the shadow.”

Davis was well-insured and recovered the $250,000 cost of sinking caissons 60 feet deep and erecting a steel-frame platform for the replacement house.

He and Renee designed a modern floor plan, taking full advantage of a spectacular Valley view.

Others on the block moved on, unable to make peace with its memories, he said.

“Some people have a tendency to bounce back from crises more easily than others do,” Davis said.

Though predominantly in the Valley, earthquake damage had a stealth effect in some of the region’s poorest areas, especially along the Santa Monica Freeway.

Though a crash building program got the broken freeway back in operation two months early, earning its contractor a $15-million bonus, many nearby buildings languished for years because the owners could not qualify for government loans.

Today, despite $108 million in federal assistance, “recovery is still not complete in the Crenshaw and West Adams neighborhoods,” UCLA researcher Nabil Kamel and urban planning department Chairwoman Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris wrote in their report this month.

But overall, the researchers found, recovery efforts were largely successful.

“The region’s population has continued to expand,” they wrote. “Housing units have increased and still the vacancy rate is low, all indications that L.A.’s image was not permanently diminished by the earthquake.”

They also found that “federal programs worked as intended, mainly putting back or replacing what was in place before the earthquake.”

But in a closer look, the researchers found that rebuilding took longer, and still lags behind, in areas where economic malaise created conditions that excluded many property owners from some government programs.

This effect is evident on a depressed portion of West Adams Boulevard, where more than a dozen buildings were red-tagged and at least three remain vacant lots. Others, still in poor repair, are shuttered or used for light industry.

In contrast, many of the residential streets intersecting West Adams today display the successful meshing of government and market forces.

Dozens of newly built homes are spotted across this pre-World War II neighborhood that was profiled in a 1995 Times article as an area teetering on “ghost town” status.

Since then, federal funds marshaled by the Los Angeles Housing Department leveraged the replacement of properties that had been denied the Small Business Administration loans that funded most of the recovery.

“I feel that our neighborhoods have improved around us,” said Noel Sweitzer, president of a nonprofit group that owns eight subsidized apartment buildings damaged in the quake.

When Sweitzer’s company, Housing Development Services Inc., bought the drab buildings in 1991, they were in poor condition and she said she was having a hard time getting them into shape.

“On one street, we were firebombed before we took management,” she said. “Drug deals were going on.”

Then the quake hit. Sweitzer got a $7.8-million loan from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The two most heavily damaged buildings on West Boulevard were torn down and rebuilt with an art deco flair that won an American Institute of Architects award.

“When you rehab them like we have done, you sometimes get the neighbors cleaning up their garbage and painting their front porch,” Sweitzer said.

The L.A. Housing Department brokered the financing for more than 300 projects in this area, said Sally Richman, manager of policy and planning. Overall, it arranged more than $300 million in loans to restore more than 13,000 housing units.

Conversely, the abandoned Panorama City high-rise shows how a vulnerable neighborhood can spiral downward when the city and an owner can’t work together.

“It just sits there like an ugly big toe,” said Bob Scott of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley. “It’s like a giant signpost that screams, ‘Failure.’ ”

Scott said the building hinders economic revitalization in a hard-knocks area trying to make a comeback.

The owner, Taghi Shoraka, bought it in a 1994 foreclosure sale. Although the building received a yellow, not red, tag, the previous owner had no insurance. He could not make the repairs city officials estimated would take $750,000.

Shoraka said he wants to turn it around, but three potential deals have fallen through. The Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County both backed out of negotiations for space there, despite nudging from the Community Redevelopment Agency.

To help cover his costs, Shoraka has leased the roof to Adelphia Communications as a satellite ground station and even held carnivals in the parking lot.

Now he faces possible prosecution for maintaining a nuisance. The city can make him clean his property or even make him take down the telecommunications equipment, said Department of Building and Safety senior inspector Mark Morrow. But, Morrow concedes, it can’t make Shoraka get new tenants or sell.

“We’re not going to make the community happy regardless of what we do,” Morrow said.

Like the residents and city officials who criticize him, Shoraka said he wants to rehabilitate the property. “People rightfully want this property to be developed,” he said. “We want this property to be developed too.”

But finding major tenants, Shoraka said, has remained difficult. He said he’s talking to developers in hopes of converting the building into housing. He hopes it will happen this year.

One earthquake-damaged property, in particular, may remain unchanged for many years to come, frozen in a tableau of personal loss and gain intertwined.

Three lots away from the new house of Manny Davis, a tile porch stands atop a steep slope leading to nothing but an exposed foundation. It’s all that remains of the house that collapsed Jan. 17, 1994, killing Marc Yobs and Karen Osterholt.

Public records show the lot now belongs to Noriko Takeshita, who lives across the street. Neighbors said she bought it to prevent a new house from blocking her Valley view.

Takeshita could not be reached for comment.

This morning, Yobs’ mother, Margaret, will visit the lot as she has each of the last nine earthquake anniversaries. Into the chain-link fence surrounding the site she will slip in two red roses, one for her son and one for his fiancee.

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Times researcher John Jackson contributed to this report.