RIOT AFTERMATH : Illusion of Sanctuary Goes Up in Flames : Barrier Separating ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’ Breached

Whether it was real or symbolic, the moat separating the rich from the poor in Los Angeles has been breached.

As soon as the rioting and arson first erupted in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney G. King verdicts, inner-city shop owners began pleading with vandals: Take your violence away from your own neighborhoods and into the affluent enclaves of the Westside.

“Don’t burn South-Central,” they cried and chanted. “Burn Beverly Hills!”

Some of the rioters listened, and gradually headed toward the beaches and hills. Television crews recorded the spread of anger, resentment, destruction and flames.

And the city’s wealthy watched and waited, transfixed in uncertainty and horror.

“There was a siege mentality out here--a sense of the have-nots coming after the haves,” said Rob Battle, a bookstore employee at the rustic Brentwood Country Mart.

“I’m very surprised they didn’t head right for us here in the three Bs,” said Battle, 29, referring to the communities of Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Bel-Air. “If the rioters had leadership and organization there would have been a big problem out here.”

In the end, compared to the battle zones to the south and east, the damage to the Westside was minimal.

But the psychic shock will linger. To the list of casualties of the days and nights of social upheaval, add one more: the notion that the Westside is a sanctuary from the urban ills that beset the rest of Los Angeles.

“We all live an illusion out here--we’re indestructible, invincible, somehow magically protected,” said West Los Angeles psychiatrist L. James Grold. “But all of a sudden, the illusions we live under get shattered when we get invaded and the barriers don’t work. That is what you’re seeing here.”

Last Thursday, as the fires burned ever closer, many who live and work on the Westside were in a panic. “Are they coming this way?” one frantic chiropractor’s receptionist in Beverly Hills whispered into her phone. “Are they close?”

They were, and getting closer. By Thursday night, restaurant worker Gia Gittleson remembers looking out her apartment windows just southeast of Beverly Hills and realizing the fires she was watching on TV were now just a few blocks away.

“Seeing that wall of black smoke encroach on the Westside was shocking,” said Gittleson, 29. “I was really scared, to the point where I started hyperventilating.”

When the Beverly Center closed for security reasons, shoe store manager Darcy Richardes became scared. “It really hit home,” said Richardes, 24. “I used to feel relatively safe. I thought this place would never be touched.”

That sentiment was echoed across the Westside. Long before the vandals headed their way, affluent Westsiders began cleaning out grocery and video stores. They waited in long lines at gas stations so they could be ready for a getaway, and many took off. Dogs went unwalked for fear of drive-by shootings, their owners spending restless days and nights peering out their windows. Police in Beverly Hills and elsewhere got dozens of suspicious-person calls for every genuine threat.

Some of the wealthy blocked off their streets to keep out the unknown. Amid the hillside estates in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, neighbors got together and established checkpoints, complete with a look-alike police motorcycle officer.

“He was one of us, but he wore a white helmet and leathers,” confided Christine O’Brien of the Hollywoodland Homeowners Assn. “We became vigilantes up here.”

Even when the troops came and the danger appeared to subside, the Westside retained a fearful and surreal atmosphere.

“When there is someone held up at gunpoint half a block from your house, or you go for brunch . . . and see the National Guard outside with guns, it’s unsettling,” said Ashley Quaine, who lives in West Hollywood. “There’s no way to digest all of that.”

To be sure, the Westside has never been immune to crime and violence. Gangs have become a fixture in parts of Santa Monica and Venice, where the wealthy live next to the tenements of Oakwood. And Westwood Village has been overrun at times by rioting inner-city youths.

But in Los Angeles, a rage directed specifically at the rich is new. It did not occur during the Watts riots in 1965, for example.

Throughout history, the rich have always been favored targets. They were quickly taken to the guillotines in the French Revolution, and their houses are usually the first to go in any Third World insurrection.

Mike Davis, author of “City of Quartz,” a 1990 book on Los Angeles and its ethnic and economic mix, said such resentment of the rich by the poor--and even by white progressives--has been simmering for decades.

“It’s an idea that’s been around since 1965--the next time around, stick it to the rich whites,” Davis said. “And very understandably. This city has an insufferable juxtaposition of selfish wealth and economic despair. It is shoved right in peoples’ faces.

“I don’t think the people on the Westside, deep in their hearts, ever thought all the security they had was needed; a lot of the fortification has been (for) status,” Davis said. “Now a lot of them are feeling, ‘My God, we really do need this stuff. Somebody is after us.’ ”

Nonetheless, Davis said, the “white fright” has been blown out of proportion, as evidenced by the fact that businesses, and not homes and individuals, were attacked.

To attribute the riot purely to racial tensions would be an oversimplification, Davis and others suggested. Residents of the wealthy enclaves are resented at least as much for their ostentatious wealth as for their race.

Dr. Richard Cohn, a family therapist, said the underclass is venting an anger and dissatisfaction pent up during years of struggle, in which they got poorer while the rich got richer and insulated themselves.

“There is a feeling that they have everything, we have nothing,” said Cohn, associate director of the Mental Health Referral Service of Southern California. “There is a lot of rage, and rightly so.”

Cohn, who lives in Santa Monica, said the wealthy liberals on the Westside are smart enough to perceive this rage, and that they are justified in being scared.

“I certainly did not go out and buy a gun,” Cohn said. “But I certainly was more cautious, and fearful there would be a problem.”

Even though the smoke has cleared, and a semblance of normalcy has returned, the so-called “invasion” has been the topic du jour throughout the Westside. It is brought up at the upscale shops and malls, on the streets and in homes.

Some, like Santa Monica resident Bob Hausenbauer, 28, said the riots were fueled by opportunism, and that they are not likely to return, particularly to the Westside. Others said that never again will they feel as removed from the urban crime and violence that just a week ago seemed worlds away.

“This has made me feel that you’re not safe no matter where you live,” said Kathy Fitzgerald, 32, of Pacific Palisades.

In Brentwood, at the Book Nook where Battle works, he engaged some customers in an impromptu debate over what the riots meant to, and for, the well-to-do.

The wealthy feel vulnerable “because they feel guilty,” he said. “You can picture them at $500-a-plate dinners talking about the poor. The contradiction is wasted on them.”

Writer and director Andrew McCullough, 67, described Los Angeles as “the most ghettoized city in America,” and said he hopes the riots have taught his neighbors a much-needed lesson.

“This has given them the realization that they’re unsafe, that they can’t do their own thing and let the rest of the city burn--they’ll burn too,” McCullough said.

Susan O’Donnell disagreed, and said she resented feeling vulnerable just because she lives in a nice area. “I hope this makes us all think about what is going on,” said O’Donnell, 48, a Santa Monica medical office employee. “In my house, we loaded our shotgun and kept it there.”

Psychiatrist Grold said there are many well-meaning and progressive Westsiders who will see the riots, and the anger aimed at the rich, as a sign that rifts in the city need mending.

But he warned that the rich have a dangerous tendency to “pretend that everything is fine.”

“Some will deny that it ever happened, and that if it did, it will never happen again,” Grold said. “And that’s a tragedy. If you put your head in the sand, you’re going to get shot in the butt.”