Ill Wind Blowing in Long Beach : Shipyard: Report that the Navy facility is targeted for closure is the latest blow to the city. Crime is rising and the aerospace industry is ailing, but officials are trying to look on the bright side.

When word came down Friday that the Long Beach Naval Shipyard is back on the government’s hit list for closure, city officials and many among the facility’s 4,300 workers took the report like a sock in the gut. It came as a raw, sinking feeling all too familiar of late.

The Navy’s threatened departure is the most recent in a series of blows that have rocked the state’s fifth-largest city. From its troubled Police Department to its ailing aerospace industry and bankrupt hometown department store, Long Beach has been left reeling.

“Sometimes you look around and say, ‘What’s happening?’ ” said Councilman Evan Braude, trying to put the best face on the city’s latest woe. “Sure, we’re frustrated and unhappy, but most cities our size and larger have worse problems.”

Still, even the most loyal residents concede their city is at a crossroads. The town once known as Iowa by the Sea--a placid haven of retirees and the cheapest beachfront property in the county--is today an international port city. And with that evolution have come big-city problems.

The shipyard’s threatened closure--announced as a possibility Friday by the federal Base Closure and Realignment Commission--means Long Beach is now in danger of losing all three of its military facilities--the naval station, the naval hospital and the 48-year-old shipyard.

A military exodus could mean a loss of more than $3 billion to the local economy at a time when the city is already facing a $26-million deficit. It could also mean a loss of prestige to a town proud to have grown up with and to have provided a home for the Navy.

The latest news came as a “big shock” to city officials who recently thought they had won the fight to keep the shipyard. In January, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had proposed closing it. But after extensive lobbying, letter-writing and picketing by city officials and shipyard workers, the yard seemed to have been spared.

In March, the secretary of the Navy awarded the yard a meritorious commendation for efficiency and innovative management. The yard has been lauded for saving the federal government more than $80 million in the past four years by completing work under cost and under schedule. The facility is known for routinely outbidding private yards and returning the unused money to federal coffers, officials said.

“That award for meritorious service is comparable to the Bronze Star. Everybody said we were out of the woods because we had proved ourselves,” said Louis Rodriguez, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 174, one of the largest of the shipyard’s 15 unions.

“This is creating chaos with these employees. They are saying the hell with everything,” Rodriguez said angrily. “What else do we have to do, give them blood? The office has been busy all day with people crying, saying ‘What’s next?’ ”

The threat to the shipyard comes soon after McDonnell Douglas, the biggest employer in Long Beach, has all but decided to put a major new plant in another state to build the firm’s next generation of commercial jetliners. The decision could cost the city several thousand new jobs. The troubled aircraft company has already transferred substantial amounts of production work, diverting more than 3,200 jobs from Long Beach.

Buffums department store, founded in Long Beach and a major contributor to the city’s meager retail sales tax base, also went bankrupt this year, leaving two tired area malls in even worse condition.

Crime has surged so dramatically in Long Beach that the community of 430,000 recorded a larger increase in reported violent crimes in 1989 than any other major California city, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. At the same time, the Long Beach Police Department had the worst record among the 10 largest California cities for solving serious and violent crimes.

So beleaguered is the city’s police force that 43 Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies had to be called in to patrol the north end of town, an embarrassing assist for a police department that was once extolled as one of the best run in the country.

Miffed by the Police Department’s alleged failure to deal with an increase in reported rapes, the National Organization for Women took Long Beach’s name out of the running to host the organization’s 1992 national convention.

The Don Jackson police brutality trial brought more bad headlines. Two officers, charged with falsifying a police report and pushing the head of the black activist through a plate glass window, were acquitted last month after a trial. But the videotape of the incident, played on national television over two years, still haunts city officials.

A recent war between Latino and Cambodian gang members has claimed 10 lives and injured more than 50 people in the past 18 months. As a result of the feud, some Cambodian business owners who helped revive a once-drab section of the city are threatening to move out.

“So your question is, why are we so unlucky, right?” Assistant City Manager John Shirey said Friday. “Hey, we’re also the first city to get a Blue Line. The great return to transit in the Los Angeles Basin has its origin and destination in Long Beach. And the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach combined are the biggest in the country.”

Indeed, even as the shipyard’s possible closing sent shudders through municipal corridors, city officials stressed the positive, talking up the Walt Disney Co. proposal to build a $2.8-billion theme park that could turn the city into a world tourist destination. And Japanese money, officials and boosters said, is beginning to flow from the city’s new World Trade Center and the port.

“The old-timers are gone. This is a new Long beach with a new image,” real estate agent and developer Lloyd Ikerd said hopefully. “Growing up means taking a few knocks. Hey, that’s life.”