BOTTLE VILLAGE REPAIR FUNDING IN JEOPARDY : FEMA DISBURSEMENTS.

Byline: Patricia Leigh Brown The New York Times

Tressa Prisbrey had a simple explanation for why she spent 26 years trucking back and forth to the garbage dump in her Studebaker pickup to create a luminescent village made of one and a half million discarded bottles.

``Anyone can do anything with a million dollars - look at Disney,'' the late folk artist once wrote. ``But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing, and look at the fun I have doing it.''

Still, not even the redoubtable Grandma, as she was known, could have dreamt up the Battle of Bottle Village now being played out in Washington, D.C., and in Simi Valley, where Prisbrey lovingly concocted her architectural fantasy village from 1955 to 1983.

Just as so-called outsider art is gaining widespread legitimacy, the Bottle Village that Grandma began building at age 60 - one of only nine folk environments listed on the National Register of Historic Places - has become the focus of a dispute over the allocation of $436,000 in federal disaster relief to repair damages it sustained three years ago in the Northridge earthquake.

The controversy over Grandma's fragile 13-structure shrine has pitted a band of preservationists against local politicians, most notably Rep. Elton Gallegly, a Simi Valley Republican, who has introduced a bill to block Federal Emergency Management Agency funds from going to Bottle Village.

In response, the agency announced last week it would withhold the money until a ``thorough review of eligible damages can be completed,'' said Vallee Bunting, a spokeswoman. A major issue is how much damage to Grandma Prisbrey's assemblages of bottles and mortar was a result of the quake.

``Grandma was an OK builder, said Bud Goldstone, a retired aerospace engineer who has spent 38 years refurbishing Watts Towers in Los Angeles, the country's most famous folk environment. ``But she didn't build well enough to withstand a 6.7 earthquake.''

In 1984, worried about the safety of the structures, the city of Simi Valley restricted public access, and since the earthquake in January 1994, Bottle Village has been officially closed. Goldstone estimates that about 15 percent of the village was damaged by the quake, and it is these walls and structures that would be repaired with federal funds.

To those who cherish such handmade offbeat places, the battle over Grandma Prisbrey's village is both cause for alarm and an occasion to wish for a refill for one of her 2,500 milk of magnesia bottles. They note that the Watts Towers, which received about $900,000 from FEMA for earthquake repair, was threatened with demolition in the 1950s but now attracts an estimated 25,000 visitors a year.

``Bottle Village is one of the woman-made wonders of the world,'' said Richard Posner, a Los Angeles glass artist who is writing a book on what he calls ``no-deposit, no-return architecture.''

``It's an example right beneath our noses of mid-20th-century alchemy, of a woman with no formal training or education who created this magical garden out of discarded flotsam and jetsam.''

The one-third acre site is now overgrown, many of its shrines and grottoes caked with dirt. It is owned and operated by Preserve Bottle Village, a nonprofit troop of volunteers. As Janice Wilson, the group's president, observed, ``There are feelings embedded in every inch of this place.''

(For the record, its ornamental sidewalks are embedded with tools, license plates, guns, crockery, trumpets, hood ornaments and a plaque with a recipe for French dressing.)

Gallegly, a former mayor of Simi Valley, calls Bottle Village ``an eyesore 25 or 30 years ago that has gone downhill dramatically ever since.'' He added: ``When we have senior citizens worried about money for Medicare, and children worried about whether they can get an education, how in the world can we spend half a million dollars on something no one wants?''

Simi Valley City Councilwoman Sandi Webb has drafted a petition that says that it is better to ``bulldoze Bottle Village'' than to spend taxpayers' money rebuilding it. Last week, the City Council wrote a letter supporting the congressman's bill.

Prisbrey was born Thresie Luella Schafter in 1896 in Easton, Minn. A blacksmith's daughter, she moved to Simi Valley in the 1950s as a widow with seven children, and later married Al Prisbrey, a construction worker.

Tired of moving around, the ever-prickly Mrs. Prisbrey removed the wheels of her house trailer in 1955. ``I hid them,'' she once explained, ``so we had to stay put.''

The prismatic world she created out of bottles - their necks facing outward to achieve a glistening, stained-glass effect inside, including a Doll House for her 550 dolls, a Round House with round furniture and a jingly fireplace made out of intravenous feeding tubes.

Paradoxically, the brouhaha over Bottle Village comes just as outsider art is attracting critical attention. At the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M., the current show, ``Recycled, Re/Seen: Folk Art From the Global Scrap Heap,'' celebrates Prisbrey-esque derring-do worldwide, from Mexican toys made from flip-flop sandals to Zulu baskets woven from telephone wire.

Museums dedicated to outsider art have opened in Baltimore and the Netherlands. Two weeks ago, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York announced a new center dedicated to scholarly research on contemporary self-taught artists.

Much more than bottles are at stake, said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, a senior curator at the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Works like Bottle Village and the Smithsonian's ``Throne of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly'' made by the late James Hampton out of recycled furniture, light bulbs and foil, represent ``people trying to make physical meaning out of the stuff of daily life,'' she said.

``In a country that's founded on principles of individuality and independence,'' she continued, ``it's ironic that expressions of such fierce independence come under such fire.''

Bottle Village's status as a landmark and museum artifact made it eligible for FEMA funding, said Leland Wilson, the agency's senior official for Northridge Earthquake Recovery, though he hastened to add that relief funds can be used only for earthquake-related damages, not deferred maintenance.

Goldstone, the engineer who developed the load test that proved Watts Towers were safe after the City of Los Angeles ordered it demolished, said that Bottle Village was repairable.

But updating Grandma's to meet current historic preservation and safety standards, especially California earthquake and wind regulations, would take a full-time conservator, a curator of collections, architectural draftspeople and photographers and a new technical system to secure her beloved beams and bottles (bonding them to metal frames with acrylic is one idea).

Bottle Villages just aren't what they used to be.

``As an engineer,'' Goldstone said, sounding distinctly Mother Goose-ish, ``I couldn't think of a more difficult task than putting a bottle village together again.''

Bottle Village was not the only beneficiary of Federal Emergency Management Agency earthquake repair funds. A FEMA fund set up for the repair of public facilities has paid out more than $50.7 million in Ventura County. The grant to Bottle Village ranks 12 on a list of 45, representing less than 1 percent of the total. Here are the top 12 recipients:

Mercy Healthcare of Ventura County: $10,489,765

City of Simi Valley $10,315,883

Simi Valley School District: $6,490,856

Conejo Valley Unified School District: $4,928,137

Brandeis Bardin Institute: $4,861,149

Ventura County Sheriffs Department: $1,339,120

Calleguas Municipal Water District: $850,221

Simi Valley Hospital and Healthcare Services: $832,019

Clinicas Del Camino Real: $782,430

City of Thousand Oaks: $701,347

Ventura Community College District: $594,317

Bottle Village: $466,519 Source: Federal Emergency Management Agency

CAPTION(S):

Photo, Box

Photo: (Ran in Conejo and Simi) Janice Wilson, president of Preserve Bottle Village, tends to the art exhibit.

Daily News

Box: (Ran in Conejo and Simi) FEMA DISBURSEMENTS (see text)