A CITY IN CRISIS: HOPE AND PRAYER AMID THE ASHES : Close-Up and Personal : Thousands Come to See--and Record for Themselves--Reality of Destruction

Wearing a camera around his neck and a sheepish look on his face, Perry Danni stood next to the riot-ravaged Department of Motor Vehicles building Sunday near his home in Long Beach.

“I feel kind of ridiculous carrying this,” the 41-year-old probation officer acknowledged as he aimed the camera at the twisted, blackened rubble. “I don’t want to seem like a tourist. But I don’t ever want to ever forget this day either.”

Neither did thousands of other Southern Californians who poured into ash-strewn communities between Hollywood and the harbor. They had watched three days of rioting and looting take place on television. Now they wanted to see the reality for themselves.

Most were left speechless by destruction that stretched for blocks in some neighborhoods. All seemed numbed by the sight of helmeted soldiers guarding grocery stores and street corners, their automatic M-16 rifles held at the ready.

At Vernon and Vermont avenues troops crouched atop a supermarket roof. Others stood behind armored vehicles lined up in a defensive row in the shopping center’s parking lot. Nathaniel Welch compared the setting to a banana republic.

“These are our streets. This is so strange,” said Welch, 25, a record album illustrator who lives near the Mid-Wilshire area and was snapping pictures of the scene.

“Quite frankly, I don’t think you can take any picture that describes what has happened here,” Welch said. “But this is history, as ugly as it may be.”

In a destroyed eight-shop mini-mall at Crenshaw Boulevard and 29th Street, Santa Barbara resident Suejee Quon, 42, focused her camera on the walk-up window at a check-cashing store. A gaping hole had been smashed through the thick, bulletproof glass. A telephone book and other papers rustled in the breeze.

“I think it’s vital that we remember what has happened here,” Quon said quietly. “I relate this to the Holocaust. We cannot afford to forget. This is a holocaust.”

Miles away, at Vermont Avenue and 56th Street, actor Frank McRae pulled his Rolls-Royce to a stop in front of what remained of the Bi-Right Furniture Co. A stolen U-Haul truck, which had been used to ram through a security gate, was wedged in the crumpled grating hanging in front of the store. Inside, fire had destroyed everything that looters hadn’t carried off.

McRae, 48, had come with his 27-year-old lawyer son, Marcellus McRae, to see the destruction and to take snapshots.

“For a black kid, my son lived the privileged life growing up in Beverly Hills,” the elder McRae explained. “I want people to see firsthand some of the tragic things that have happened in other neighborhoods. We’re trying to record as much as we can for his children, my grandchildren.”

Marcellus McRae said it was important to remember that the riot was a multiethnic uprising and that poverty was a major factor. “In 10 years from now or a generation from now, people will be coming in and giving their own perspective of what happened,” he warned.

A few miles to the west, Irvine resident Terry Blocher was standing outside a destroyed Thrifty drugstore. His auto-focus camera was loaded and five extra rolls of film were in his car.

“Ten years from now, people won’t believe what has happened this past week,” said Blocher, 48, a corporate executive. “There has to be a way for people to understand this. There has to be.”

Some of Sunday’s sightseers seemed determined to make a record of the destruction in their own words.

A dark-haired woman about 25 years old stood through the sunroof of a BMW and trained a video camcorder at ravaged storefronts along Western Avenue. She was giving a running commentary into the camera’s built-in microphone.

At 7th and Union streets, where an Art Deco office building was ravaged by flames, a man riding in the back of a pickup truck was pointing his camcorder at the blackened hulk.

A young Latina leaned out a car window to take a snapshot of soldiers who rolled huge steel refuse containers onto Rosecrans Avenue to form a roadblock at Harris Avenue in Compton. Troops were inside, their rifles sticking out over the sides.

On Pacific Avenue in Long Beach, Clara Madrid-Guerrero, 37, of Downey walked back and forth along the sidewalk in front of the fire-gutted Foodland grocery store. After staring silently at the ruins, she also snapped a photo.

“I’ll save these pictures for my son and later on, hopefully, he’ll show them to his family. I grew up shopping in this store. I’ve been in this store a million times. I want to remember this,” she said.

So did Rikki Madrigal.

Back in Los Angeles on Crenshaw Boulevard, she was leaning out of a station wagon window to snap pictures. There would be no time Sunday to get out for a closer look as she focused on a wall where the words black owned had been scrawled. The store behind the wall was burned out.

“I’m leaving Monday for a new job in Manhattan,” said Madrigal, a 26-year-old record company accountant from Hollywood.

“I wanted to have some memories of my city to take with me.”