AMPLE PARKING? YOU CAN JUST KICK THAT CONCEPT TO THE CLUB.

Byline: Jillian O'Connor

L.A. is a city of cars, but if you're an apartment tenant, all I can say is, good luck finding a place to park.

And forget about any advice in finding parking since I may be needing your spot soon.

Since the city was created around the auto, you'd think they'd have thought ahead and built more parking spaces. Instead, valets thrive even at doctors' offices. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to see one at a commuter park and ride. Maybe I shouldn't mock, though, since I sure could use one outside my apartment house.

There is nothing more frustrating than traversing your own neighborhood 15 times just to get a spot 12 blocks away -- all the while dodging monster trucks and reckless Karmann Ghia drivers who can't figure out that on the West Coast the middle of the road is reserved only for Humvees.

New Yorkers think they have it bad, but they have no idea what bad is. When you give up trying to find a spot in Manhattan, you grit your teeth and drop $40 on a lot. But when you can't park here, there's not a garage in sight. You end up at Sav-On, perusing the health and beauty aids aisle for two hours until you work up the nerve to search for a space again -- calculating your departure, in my case, to come in between bars' closing times and the martini guzzlers' early-morning descent on Canter's and Damiano's in the Fairfax District.

Time it wrong and you're stuck waiting for spaces as the young drunks in love make out on top of their cars. (What happened to getting a room?)

In the past few months, vomit puddles and public displays of no class had risen sharply in my neighborhood, and I was determined to find out the cause.

The only obvious change was the shifting of one neighborhood bar from a low-key local hangout to a virtual Xanadu for wide-eyed hipsters with terrible taste in techno (yes, even techno can get worse).

The droves of young'uns kept streaming in, running us off the road in their semi-inebriated stupors to get to this inexplicable hot spot.

High-priced drinks, and lousy d(hrt)cor? (Oh, what a lure!)

Then I got the bad news: The fact that every aspiring ingenue was drawn to this place (and the endless hunt for a parking spot in a 2-mile radius of my apartment) was only the beginning.

See, Lindsay and Jessica, had, like, totally had a fight over some guy there.

Yep, that's Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Simpson, according to the Web site Defamer, who were allegedly slinging epithets over one Brett Ratner, now best-known as director of other people's prequels and sequels (e.g., ``Red Dragon,'' ``X-Men: The Last Stand.'')

Now, two young semi-notorious actress/singer/whatevers obviously pose a short-term threat to my ability to ever find a space in my 'hood after 10, but a director? Near Sunset? I'll just have to move.

Whether this celebrity tidbit is true or not, every wannabe actress/singer/whatever within a 150-mile radius will be making a beeline for my space -- er, that bar.

And I'll never park again.

Conventional remedies have brought little success. Rent a spot from the landlord? Nope, it's already contracted to a higher bidder. Apply for permit parking? Sure, but the first I heard from the powers that be, I'd have to wait for City Council to, in fact, write new legislation on the parking rules, which by my estimate would take, say, 81.57 years.

The reason my block has no permit parking to begin with, unlike many other stretches surrounding the area, is that there's a high percentage of renters, and therefore high turnover as people move out before organizing a protest -- likely to escape the lousy parking.

Add to this the invasion of the megamall.

The Grove swung into town a few years ago with precious little space for its shoppers' cars -- let alone the recent influx of traffic from American Girl acolytes -- creating an unmitigated parking catastrophe.

Word on the street has it that the swanky Grove has sent its workers to fend for themselves, parking in -- you've got it -- my little renters' neighborhood, conveniently without the benefit of permit parking.

When the city approved that project, they must have been counting on us small-time renters to support this multimillion-dollar showpiece so the developers wouldn't have to, say, build a large enough lot for their own damned moneymaking machine. (Who better to lend big business a helping hand than us, those prosperous legions of pre-1997 car owners?)

Of course, movie location scouts seem to have no problem finding spaces when they invade local blocks. They get their special little signs from the city, while those actually paying rent have nowhere to park for three days (and that's not counting the street-sweeping hours).

Meanwhile, my only solace is using that illegal hydrant spot outside my building (as the cat stands guard for the parking authority).

And when that scheme fails, I intend to start sandpapering off the red paint on my neighborhood's curbs.

After all, I'll have plenty of time to shop for supplies at the drugstore.

Jillian O'Connor, [phone]

jillian.oconnor(at)dailynews.com

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