It is easier to appraise a piece of property than a community.

Tonight at last, the Los Angeles Public Libraries Commission will select a new home for the Echo Park Branch Library.

The decision has been 19 years in the making. And still it will leave many disappointed.

The original branch building was damaged in the 1971 earthquake and condemned. The branch was moved temporarily into a stucco office building on Laveta Terrace. It was cramped, ill-suited to be a library and, worst, was tucked inconveniently at the dead end of a street cut off by the Hollywood Freeway.

From the beginning the libraries department planned to rebuild. But Echo Park was only one of dozens of branches on the capital improvement list. So it waited. Proposition 13, passed by the voters in 1978, extended the wait.

In April the voters relented, at least concerning libraries, and approved Proposition 1, the library bond issue. About $5 million was set aside for Echo Park, enough in theory to buy land and build from scratch.

After so long a wait, it would be nice to report a happy resolution. But, instead, tonight’s meeting is sure to be a cat fight.

The point of contention is where the new library should to be built. The library staff has searched up and down the streets of Echo Park and concluded that there is only one suitable site, the southwest corner of Temple and Douglas streets.

The Friends of the Echo Park Library--the volunteer group that helps around the library, recruits patrons and raises money--detests the choice. Many of the Friends think the corner isn’t in Echo Park at all.

They have chosen their own site. Like the library staff, they believe it is the only acceptable one. Their choice is the old Fire Station 6, on Edgeware Road, taken out of service in 1987. They think the 1929 historic landmark can be expanded and brought up to seismic code for considerably less than it would cost to build new. They think it would mean something to the community.

The reasons for the disagreement don’t show on the map. The two sites are within walking distance of each other. Both are also on the western edge of downtown Los Angeles, making them closer to the Central Library, when it reopens, than to the next nearest branch library to the north. Both are remote from the geographical and social center of the Echo Park community, the busy intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Echo Park Avenue.

What divides them is the Hollywood Freeway, which also divides the community.

Temple Street, to its south, is a heavy commuter route, lined by a mix of crusty old buildings and newer storefronts. Most of its cross streets lead only south, the north being cut off by the freeway. And on many of those streets, block after block is now vacant, having been bought by developers and razed in preparation for a planned community called Central City West.

The Friends contend that the new branch is being handed to the developers as an amenity for new neighborhoods of white-collar downtown workers.

On the other hand, the fire station stands in fairly pleasant surroundings a couple of blocks from the famous Victorian houses of Carroll Avenue and just around the corner from the lake that gives the community its name.

A couple of years ago, the Friends produced 1,000 signatures on a petition promoting its conversion to a library. The politics leading up to tonight’s meeting have grown quite bitter. Leaders of the Friends have accused the city bureaucracy of scheming to promote a private development. Library staff and the area’s councilwoman, Gloria Molina, have intimated that the Friends are meddlesome and unrealistic.

The commission convened last month at the current library, expecting to reach a decision. When the meeting exploded into disputes, the commissioners asked the library staff for more information. They asked for a re-evaluation of the fire station, an examination of other possible sites and a study of where the library’s patrons live, all in a month.

On re-examination, the fire station failed again, for the same reasons as before: The Fire Department wants to keep it for its disaster preparedness program and the cost of adaptation is an unknown. The most central of the 14 sites investigated--at Echo Park Avenue and Sunset Boulevard--came back with the notation “Cost is prohibitive.”

Every site, it turned out, was defective in some similar way except the one at Temple and Patton. The main considerations were cost, square footage and access to cars.

Nothing was said about tone, beauty or symbolic meaning to the community. Those values may simply be too intangible for the libraries department to handle. It is easier to appraise a piece of property than a community. As it was, the department was unable to determine where the patrons of the Echo Park Branch are concentrated.

They tried to count cardholders by ZIP code area, but it turned out that the service area is almost all in a single area, said spokesman Robert Reagan.

Tonight the commissioners have decided to meet at Plasencia Elementary School, which is right beside the site they seem destined to select.