KING CASE AFTERMATH: A CITY IN CRISIS : Anger Smolders Along Vermont Avenue : Aftermath: The street is lined with wrecked reminders of dreams that were wiped away by violence. The devastation cuts across racial lines.

If there is a street that defines this week’s destruction of Los Angeles, Vermont Avenue is it. If a thoroughfare could take on a life of its own, personifying a city’s broken spirit, it would be Vermont Avenue.

For 10 miles between Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and Manchester Boulevard in South-Central Los Angeles, this stretch of asphalt was, by Friday, a holocaust of fire-gutted buildings and shattered glass.

Block after devastated block, people’s lives were ripped apart on Vermont.

A 71-year-old man was burned out of his apartment and is now homeless. In the midst of Thursday night’s chaos, three Los Angeles police officers were shot, although none of them were seriously injured. Uninsured store owners, many of them immigrants who had come to this country in search of promise and dreams, lost everything. Employees showed up for work and found out their jobs had gone up in smoke.

The story on Vermont is, of course, the story of what happened all across the city in the wake of Wednesday’s stunning series of verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial. Rage, broken windows, looting, flames. Graffiti with a new twist: F--- the LAPD.

Angry young men with guns tucked in their belts, cruising four and five to a car. Bewildered citizens, watching their neighborhoods burn. Soot falling like black paper raindrops. And everywhere, the acrid smell of smoke.

Perhaps no street in the city has suffered so much as Vermont. Its devastation cut through racial lines. A Filipino-owned camera shop, a Korean-owned furniture store, a Latino-owned restaurant, a black-owned telephone pager business--all were gone. By Friday, after two riotous nights, a trip along the street from north to south was depressing indeed.

At Santa Monica Boulevard, the hulking, twisted wreckage of what had been a Payless shoe store stood testimony to the nights of anarchy that had gone before. But a hundred yards away, there was an attempt at order: An armed group stood guard at the Hollytron electronics and appliance store, fending off any would-be intruders.

No, it was not the National Guard. It was the store owner and a cadre of employees, most of them Korean-born immigrants who are members of the same Presbyterian church. With rifles and binoculars, they had been there since the rioting began. Early Friday morning, before they took up their posts in the parking lot and on the roof, they prayed for peace.

Later, four LAPD officers dropped in. They were detectives, pressed by the crush of events into dragging their old blue patrol uniforms out of their closets. As for the shotguns on the rooftop, these cops didn’t mind.

“The way things are now,” said Detective Joe Berumen, who usually investigates burglaries and homicides, “I’m not going to disarm these people in any way. They have a right to protect their property.”

Inside the store, computers, televisions, VCRs and stereo systems were all intact, making Hollytron perhaps the only high-tech emporium on Vermont not to be ransacked and torched by the looters. Employee Jay Rhee volunteered how, the day before, he had helped capture the arsonists who set fire to the shoe store.

“We captured two of them,” he said. “One of them died.”

Rhee was asked if he killed the man. “Off the record?” he replied, pausing, but then he thought better of it. “I won’t tell you now,” he said.

South along the avenue, Simon Ong studied the charred remains of the camera shop he has owned for 17 years. He could barely speak. He estimated that he suffered $1 million in losses from the blaze, set Thursday evening after Ong left to get some heavy chains that he thought he would use to secure the building.

“When I got back. it was burning, burning,” he said. “Nobody here. No fire trucks, no police cars.”

His employees did not find out about the fire until they arrived for work Friday. Half a dozen of them milled about in the parking lot in a daze. Edwin Castro, 25, sifted through the rubble to see what he could recover. There was precious little. Finally, Castro wrung his blackened hands and moaned: “Man, I just want my job.”

Moving south, plywood is in big demand. Vermont and Rosewood Avenue: Windows at the California Highway Patrol headquarters are boarded up. Vermont and Beverly Boulevard: More plywood, resting against an office building that is waiting for repairs. Vermont and Council Street: Two men nailing boards to the Lifetime Furniture store.

In the Mid-Wilshire District, hardly a block along Vermont went unscathed, from 1st Street to Olympic Boulevard. If there was a bright spot, it was that cleanup crews were in full gear, many from local churches. They walked the streets with brooms, shovels, trash bags and heavy-duty gloves, a sign of hope amid the decay.

At the Goldilocks Bakeshop and Restaurant, in a mini-mall of Filipino-owned shops at 3rd Street and Vermont, manager Raul Maguddayao counted his blessings. Before him, a beautiful display case of the bakery’s specialties was in shambles. Tiny plastic adornments--flowers, Easter bunnies, colored flags--were littered about. Shelves of white sheet cakes had collapsed.

“We were not hurt as much as the others,” Maguddayao said optimistically, as workers scraped bits of glass from the window pane. “I’m glad we’re not burned. I’m thankful for that.”

Then, there was an ominous sound. A fire engine, its sirens screaming, hurtled down the street. The store owners and the cleanup crews and the passersby stopped to catch a collective breath. Another fire. Another dagger in their hopes that it was over.

Five blocks and countless gutted stores away, Tim Trieu and his business partner used green garden hoses to wet down the smoldering ruins of what had once been a neighborhood pharmacy. The brick building had burned two nights before, but the blaze flared up again Friday. The Fire Department was nowhere in sight.

“We tried to call them this morning,” Trieu said. “They didn’t want to come.”

Trieu owns a furniture store on the same block as the pharmacy, as well as four other businesses elsewhere in Los Angeles. “We own five stores,” he said. “Two are burned and three are looted.

At 26th Street, 71-year-old Felix Sosa was an odd picture. His face shielded from the sun by a straw hat, he sat in a second-story window of a burned-out apartment building, having climbed there by ladder. Sosa lived here for 10 years. But the building in this Latino district caught fire and partly collapsed Thursday night when the hardware store next door was set ablaze.

Now Sosa is homeless. He says he will camp out in an open storage area in back.

Ten blocks farther south, the signs are evident that this has become war. Ten rifle-toting National Guardsmen, dressed in camouflage riot gear, arrive at the corner of 36th Street and Vermont to stand guard at a post office where hundreds are waiting to get their government assistance checks. This is the beginning of South Los Angeles, the black community that has been hardest hit by the rioting.

The line is peaceful. Two at a time, residents slip their driver’s licenses through wrought-iron gates to postal service employees, who use bullhorns to announce the names of those whose checks are in. It looks like some kind of outdoor prison. Across the street, a building that once was a liquor store is a pile of rubble.

Moving south, more of the same. An AM/PM Mini Mart on 38th Street is gone. A swap meet at 41st Street is gone. A block of stores at the intersection of Vernon Avenue and Vermont is gone.

At 51st Street, an abandoned hair salon is on fire. A volunteer firefighter who usually works as a federal fire inspector is struggling to extinguish it with a hose he carries in his truck. A Red Cross volunteer who got lost on the way back from his command post has stopped to direct traffic. By the time the Fire Department arrives, the building is fully engulfed. A palm tree behind it is also ablaze.

Tricia Jyles grew up in this neighborhood. Clutching her two young sons, she watches with dismay as the building burns. “Everybody talks about our future,” she said. “How are we supposed to make our future when we are tearing down our present?”

South again, more of the same. Vermont at 60th Street--a whole block gutted. Vermont at 61st Street--half a block gone. Florence Avenue, 75th, 81st, 83rd. 84th. Not much left to burn.

Last stop, Manchester Boulevard. The LAPD and the National Guard are stationed at the corner, directing traffic in a surreal scene as buildings smolder all around.

Tony Meeks is angry. He and his boss had guarded their business, the Commercial Skypager, since the riots began. They left at 4 a.m. Friday after the National Guard had arrived, thinking the store would be safe. It was not.

It burned down, despite the huge brown spray-painted letters that said: “BLACK OWNED.”

Meeks’ boss, Norman Simples, was quieter in his rage. A big burly man in blue jeans and a bulletproof vest, Simples did not attempt to wipe away the tear that rolled down his cheek. His lament was as much for his community as for his business.

“We guarded this . . . for two . . . days and then they burned this . . . ,” Meeks hollered, his sentence peppered with expletives. “We thought the . . . National Guard could do something but they couldn’t do nothing! This’ll work!” he added, pointing to a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun sticking out from his waistband. “They said they’re coming, they’re coming,” he said, referring to the troops. “All it is is building up our hopes for something. Always building up our hopes for something, to let us down.”