Reagans May Be In for Bit of a Culture Shock in L.A.

Welcome to Los Angeles, Mr. and Mrs. Reagan. “Welcome home” might sound nicer. But L.A. isn’t quite the home you left.

Los Angeles doesn’t live, eat, pray, cheat, talk, dance or even drive quite the same anymore. The city is both glitzier and grittier, more self-assured and more desperate, than the Los Angeles you might have imagined in the White House.

Why, when you were inaugurated eight years ago today, Elizabeth Taylor and Cher still wore other people’s perfume, you could still make it downtown from Santa Monica in 30 minutes flat, and half a million of today’s Los Angeles residents still lived in Central America.

Moonlighting was still a labor term back in those days. Starlight still meant something besides limousine service. And pizza, for heaven’s sake, still had to be red.

It’s been exactly eight years since you took your oath of office. Dickens was visionary when he wrote that it was the best of times and the worst of times. What he didn’t realize was that sometimes the quality of the times depends on one’s ZIP code.

Not to worry. Yours, of course, is the very best. According to the trendy new book, “Clustering of America,” Bel-Air is one of the “blueblood” neighborhoods--home to magnates, millionaires and, of course, movie stars.

Marketing studies show bluebloods are among the most avid users of Rolls-Royces, Irish whiskeys and foreign cruises. You might find it interesting to note that they are among the lowest consumers of American-made products like Tupperware, denture adhesives and Chevy Impalas.

There are those who will tell you that the gap between rich and poor in Los Angeles has widened eight lanes since you left.

On the other hand, unemployment is down since you took office. It was 4.4% this past November, down from 6.9% in 1981.

And demographic studies show that the average household income has jumped in different communities all around town since 1980, some by nearly 90%.

The 67.5% increase in Bel-Air means income there surged from $115,298 in 1979 to $193,113 this year. The 62.9% increase in Watts means income there rose from $9,476 to $15,441. That means the amount of new money going into Bel-Air homes was 15 times that going into Watts homes.

“Split-level economy” was the phrase used by a blue-ribbon City Hall committee last year when it was trying to describe the Los Angeles housing crunch. Hardest hit on housing are the very poor. Federal aid for low-income housing was cut 78% while you were in office.

More than 40,000 families are living in garages today. There’s no count of how many were living in garages before you took the reins of government because no one was counting. And back then, the 56,500-square-foot mansion in Holmby Hills was only a twinkle in Candy and Aaron Spelling’s eye.

If they just had signs the way they did in the good old days when you drove into town, today, it would say Los Angeles, Pop.: 3,315,400. When you left, it was about 2.9 million.

But what’s most different about Los Angeles today is its international flavor. We’re a dramatic new center of international trade now, a “solid No. 2 to New York City,” according to the Chamber of Commerce.

You might have trouble recognizing that old neighborhood around the Civic Center. The big holes are for a new subway system you fought against called Metro Rail. And the 73-story steel tower now rising will be the city’s tallest skyscraper, across from the sadly blackened grand old library.

Koreatown and Little Tokyo are booming cities of their own today. Japanese companies own close to half of all downtown office space. Arco Plaza, the Bonaventure Hotel and Union Bank are Japanese-owned. Your critics will claim that’s because of your huge deficit and your decision to let the dollar fall to improve the U.S. trade deficit.

There are whole new neighborhoods of Salvadorans and Guatemalans since you lived here last. Talk to the people who live there and you’ll find many of them give your foreign policies credit for bringing them here. They’ll also thank you for signing the immigration reform bill that gave some, but not all, of them amnesty.

Today, nearly 60% of all children in Los Angeles Public Unified School District schools are Latino. Only 94,032, or 15.8%, are Anglo.

Despite all the attention paid to gang violence, murders last year were at the lowest level in a decade. That doesn’t mean that people feel more secure. Far from it. Security alarm sales are booming in many parts of town while in other neighborhoods security grates are a hot item.

You’ll find more Los Angeles residents saying yes to drugs these days. Last year, the city officially beat out Miami as the drug seizure capital of the country. Narcotics officers seized 37,000 pounds of cocaine in 1988, compared to just 359 pounds in 1982.

You’ll find it tougher getting around without that Secret Service helicopter. “Rush hour” has become a contradiction in terms. (Officially, according to Caltrans, it now lasts 420 minutes a day.) Commuters develop strategies for how to get around. They exit the off-ramps and get back on. They whip down the shoulders, and wheedle their way back in. To many, a yellow light these days means floor it.

In 1980, vehicles traveled 22.8 billion miles on Los Angeles County freeways. By 1987, it was up to 30.4 billion. State officials admitted just the other day that nobody knows exactly what to do about this. If things keep up like this, by the year 2010, you’ll be averaging 11 m.p.h. on your way to work--20 m.p.h. slower than the official clock says you drive today.

Our whole culture is different nowadays. We’re a little less Beach Boys and a little more Ruben Blades. The East Coast is copying our cuisine.

Ask people to name a chef on “Family Feud” back in 1981, chances are that 86% would have said Boy-ar-dee. Today, with half the Westside on a first-name basis with the guys in the toques, you’re likely to hear “Wolfgang.”

You’ve always said that one of the things you missed in the White House was working with your hands. Well, there’s lots of opportunity now to pump your own gas. Remember, you have to pay first. But just try to park your car some night without a valet taking your keys.

If you’re looking for ways to spend your new leisure time, consider ordering up a movie. Whereas less than 5% of Los Angeles homes had VCRs in 1981, 67% do now. There’s a video rental store on every corner where there used to be a gas station. At least one enterprising video rental store will deliver--with pizza.

There are dozens of new movie theaters in town. But you’ll find many are subdivided into train-sized compartments.

Shopping centers and supermarkets, while withering away in the inner city, have blossomed on the Westside. Look at Melrose Avenue. Back at the turn of the decade, anyone looking for heavy metal there probably wanted a sledgehammer. But then, that was before hair--and trendy tortillas--turned blue.

When Harry S. Truman left the White House, he yearned just to walk down the aisle of one of those new supermarkets that had sprung up while he was waging a war and living in the White House.

You might visit a supermarket when you have a chance. Little vegetables (and big bills) are in. And, miraculously, while you were gone, people figured out a way to put fresh orange juice in stores in the Big Orange without sending them to Florida first for reconstitution.

Watch out, though. Stores are not always what they seem. What with merger mania, Safeway is now Vons (and sometimes Pavilions Place.) Bullock’s and I. Magnin are really Macy’s.

There are some things you won’t see around Los Angeles anymore. The original Brown Derby. Schwabs. A home in Santa Monica for under $400,000. The Rams. The urban wilderness of connecting trails that was supposed to be completed by now in the Santa Monica Mountains. After you slashed the budget for new federal parkland, what was to be the entrance to the park is now a cluster of townhouses.

But some things never change. Tom Bradley is still mayor. The Marlboro man still presides over Sunset Strip. And you can still get a hot dog at Pink’s.

Staff writer John H. Lee contributed to this article.