WHITTIER >> The head of a group that owns the iconic car wash at Five Points is frustrated by the roadblocks he’s facing with his plan to build townhouses on the site.

“We’re losing money every day,” said Serge Gharibian, a Glendale real estate investor who owns the property. Gharibian regularly appears at City Council meetings to plead his case that he should be allowed to move ahead with his development plan.

One of Gharibian’s problems may be cleared up when the Historic Resources Commission meets March 12 to determine the site’s historic relevance.

The property and its Googie architecture style are considered a historic resource by the Los Angeles Conservancy and the Whittier Conservancy. Both groups are working to preserve the building.

The car wash also lies within the city’s Workplace District, where the city has imposed a moratorium on residential development.

“We have fallen into a trap,” Gharibian said in a telephone interview. “We want to get out of it.

“It boggles my mind that a car wash would be considered historic,” said Gharibian, principal of the real estate firm that owns the car wash.

But Aldo Schindler, the city’s director of community development, said Gharibian knew the historic background of the Five Points car wash when the investors acquired the property three years ago.

Schindler said he sympathizes with Gharibian because the site currently is an underperforming property, and he would like to see the site developed.

But there’s a legal process that must be followed, he said.

“When Serge first contacted us, we were very up front about the status” of the property, said Schindler.

“Serge has known from the beginning,” he said. “It’s a long process.”

Mary Sullens, former president of the Whittier Conservancy, said in a 2010 Daily News story about the site that the conservancy intended to fight to have the car wash declared a historical landmark.

“It’s a classic example of post-World War II architecture that exemplifies the futuristic look of the space age,” Sullens said in 2010.

That commitment continues today, according to Helen Rahder, a spokeswoman for the conservancy.

“Googie was the exaggerated Modern architecture seen in the coffee shops and bowling alleys of the 1950s and 1960s,” says the website Googie Architecture Online. “Googie began in Southern California, and although it spread (in numerous forms) across the nation, its heart always remained in its birthplace.”

Some examples are the signs for Norms restaurants, numerous car washes, the Theme Building at LAX, the oldest McDonald’s, built in 1953, in Downey, and the West Hollywood coffee shop Googies, where the style originated. The coffee shop was designed by architect John Lautner in 1949.

Googie also is known as Populuxe, Doo-Wop, Coffee Shop Modern, Jet Age, Space Age and Chinese Modern, according to Google.

“It’s already a designated historic resource,” Rahder said of the car wash. “According to our code, a historic resource can never be demolished unless an approved plan is ready to go.”

She said the architecture is significant because it represents what Southern California became after World War II, the center of the U.S. aerospace industry and the “new place to be.”

“That’s why Five Points is important and can’t be demolished,” she said.

The Historic Resources Commission is expected to reach a conclusion on the historic relevance of the Five Points car wash at its meeting March 12. The meeting is set for 7 p.m. in City Council chambers in City Hall.

Schindler said he’d “like to see everybody happy at the end of the day in terms of what’s built,” and that the Five Points site presents an opportunity for a new uses, such as commercial, residential or a combination.

“But now we have some elements of that site that need to be dealt with or incorporated, and we just need to figure that out,” he said.