AFTER THE RIOTS: TAKING STOCK OF THE CITY : Down but Not Out : Business: Some owners fought in vain, others watched from afar. The multicultural roster includes some who may barely be able to make ends meet.

Beneath the charred beams, twisted steel girders and sour-smelling ashes of destroyed shops, fast-food outlets and other casualties of the Los Angeles riots, the land remains.

Its ownership records are a mosaic of riot victims--and Los Angeles history--ranging from a French-controlled corporation founded near the L.A. rail yards more than a century ago to the hundreds of individual landowners who contribute to the city’s multicultural makeup.

The roster extends from an Orange County retirement community to the hills beyond reach of the fires--Beverly Hills, Rolling Hills Estates, Baldwin Hills, Hidden Hills and Hacienda Heights.

There are wealthy landowners whose destroyed property was simply another, fully insured, investment. And there are uninsured landowners who were powerless to halt the vandals who looted and burned their buildings.

In between, there are landowners desperately seeking federal and state financial assistance. Insurance will pay off outstanding mortgages, but with their sources of income gone, they are seeking special loans to clear away the ashes and start anew.

Hardest hit were the owners whose businesses provided just enough income to support themselves and their families week to week. Even a brief interruption in income could send some of these families onto welfare.

On Saturday, Los Angeles officials released final building damage estimates for the city. A total of 1,044 buildings within the city were damaged by fire or vandalism, officials said. There were 490 described as a total loss, 143 partially usable and the rest were damaged but usable.

In the days after the rioting, The Times reviewed property records for more than 400 landowners who seemed most severely affected by the violence and interviewed more than 50 of the property owners throughout the riot zone. The result is a series of economic, geographic and personal snapshots capturing what the violence meant to landowners--and by extension, their tenants, employees, customers and families.

There is the Latino owner of a second-generation, family-run electronics store on South Broadway. With his wife at his side, he defended his land frontier-style from marauders until driven out by his own wounds and lack of ammunition. The looters then burned his store to the ground.

A big shopping center development company, which has donated thousands of dollars to politicians of all political persuasions, lost the Crenshaw Town Center to vandalism and fire. President Bush toured the gutted shopping center last week.

And a black pharmacist who a year ago built his own mini-mall, found himself trapped between vandals who were trying to burn him out and police who repeatedly forced him to prove he was not a looter.

And a white businessman in South-Central, the first to rebuild after the Watts riots, once again saw his building turn to ashes. Initially, he indicated that he was too old and downcast to try again. But by week’s end, Leonard Rhodes said if he can get a government loan, it might be worth one more try.

In the weeks and months ahead, government officials, insurance adjusters, loan officers and real estate appraisers will sift through thousands of land ownership records, financial-aid applications, insurance forms and police and hospital reports. They will try to reconstruct what happened, who was responsible and who deserves assistance in the wake of devastating rioting, looting and fires.

One major question that city planners must answer is what standards will be used for rebuilding. Will owners of older buildings be required to meet parking space and other standards that could reduce the size of new strip malls--or bar some from reopening?

In many cases, the property records reviewed by The Times illustrate the unbroken chain that links different ethnic, cultural and racial groups in this diverse region. For example, some wealthy property owners of Armenian, Korean, northern European or Jewish descent were found to have rented retail space to shopkeepers of Ethiopian, Chinese, Indian or Salvadoran heritage whose customers included blacks, Japanese-Americans, Filipino-Americans and Russian immigrants.

Some landowners could not be reached, such as the Las Vegas-based owner of an ill-fated burger stand near the intersection of Avalon Boulevard and East Florence Avenue where residents are predominantly Latino and black. The tiny stand--Lucky Tom’s--was gutted by fire. Workers at nearby businesses said neither the Asian woman who ran it nor the Caucasian owner had been back since the fire. Here are some of the landowners’ stories:

70th and Broadway

Shortly after 7 on the night the rioting started, vandals began pounding on the locked metal doors of Edward and Sandra Contreras’ electronics store. Inside, Edward prepared his defenses.

For more than 25 years, members of the Contreras family operated businesses from two adjacent stores they owned near this intersection. Behind the stores is the house where the seven Contreras children, including Edward, were raised. Now, it is the home where Edward and Sandra live.

When the looters arrived, Edward took his gun and, accompanied by a friend, climbed a ladder to the roof.

Sandra recalled hearing a boom as the vandals rammed a car into the closed metal gate.

“I could hear my husband yelling ‘Get out of here! Get away from the gate!’ Then I heard shooting like crazy,” she said.

Seconds later, Edward Contreras hurried down the ladder, bleeding from a bullet that struck his ribs and ricocheted through his left arm.

Meanwhile, looters had gotten inside the store from the rear and were making off with VCRs, TVs and amplifiers. More were trying to breach the store’s front entrance.

In the mad gun battle that ensued, Edward Contreras fired only to frighten the looters away, not to hit anyone, said his wife. Outside, the vandals returned fire.

“I was loading his gun because he could only shoot with one hand,” said Sandra Contreras. “We were running out of bullets. They kept coming. They were determined to come in.”

In the end, Edward Contreras’ wounds and a shortage of ammunition forced him and his wife to pull back to the safety of their car and head for a hospital. The looters finished ransacking the store and then burned it. Their home was untouched.

But the Contrerases had no insurance on their business or property. Their future is uncertain.

Florence and Van Ness

Olice Arnold Jr. is a pharmacist, a successful black professional who owns a home in Baldwin Hills and last year completed construction of his own mini-mall that houses his drugstore as well as a laundry and three other shops. Arnold’s three tenants are Asians--the operators of the cleaners, the video store and the shoe repair shop. He calls them “exceptionally nice people.”

Sometime after midnight on the first night of rioting, a fire started in the cleaners. Within 12 minutes, Arnold and several volunteers were on the scene and doused the blaze with a garden hose.

The rest of Wednesday and again Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights Arnold spent inside his drugstore. Across Florence, a fried-chicken franchise operated by Asians went up in flames. A market, also Asian-run, was burned.

Police suggested to Arnold that he put up signs advising vandals that his mall was black-owned. He plastered the plate-glass windows with them. Still the vandals came. Whenever Arnold relaxed his vigilance, there was damage.

When National Guard troops arrived Thursday, Arnold sought help. But government agencies were unable to supply troops to protect his neighborhood.

“I saw the National Guard down the street guarding ashes,” Arnold said. “I never could understand why they could have a number of guardsmen at buildings that already burned and we could never get any help here.”

Electricity was out to the entire neighborhood around Arnold’s mall. He borrowed a gasoline generator so that lights could be kept on at night. But police patrols seeing Arnold and a friend unloading the generator and a gasoline can pointed a gun at Arnold’s head and ordered the pair to the ground.

“I kept hollering: ‘I’m the owner! I’m the owner!’ ” Arnold said. “They said: ‘Shut up.’ ” Eventually, when Arnold was able to prove his identity, officers told him they thought he and his friend were about to burn down the mall. “I could understand (their viewpoint),” Arnold said.

But similar incidents were repeated several times during the next few days. It was “guns drawn. Don’t move. Hands up. Why are you here?”

Arnold and his Asian tenants plan to stay.

Florence and Normandie

Back in 1929, a Los Angeles businessman started selling janitorial supplies geared to the problems faced by schools. Along with the pails, mops, brooms and sponges, there were cleansers designed for the tough scuff marks kids’ shoes leave on linoleum, special waxes for areas of heavy snow, other waxes for the desert, where kids track in sand.

In the mid-1950s, the company was purchased by a young couple, Evelyn and William Horwitz.

“It was a good business,” said Evelyn Horwitz. “It put three kids through college and all the rest of it.”

The 1971 earthquake severely damaged the company’s downtown offices and the firm moved south to a small warehouse complex at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues. Nearby businesses included a liquor store, gas station, chili-dog stand, beauty parlor, furniture store and auto repair garage. The janitorial supply company was one of the intersection’s largest employers, providing jobs for 12 to 15 workers of all races, although only a few were black. The Horwitzes are white. A number of other area landowners are Asian but some of the small businesses near the intersection are run by blacks.

Three years ago the Horwitzes moved from Torrance to a retirement community in Mission Viejo and sold the business--but not the buildings or the land--to their Latino manager and his wife.

The rents from the property were supposed to provide for the Horwitzes’ retirement.

On April 30, Evelyn Horwitz turned on her television and watched as the cameras panned the smoldering intersection of Florence and Normandie, where the rioting began.

“I knew our building was gone,” said Evelyn Horwitz.

What will they do?

“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “If we rebuild, are we going to have tenants?”

Compton Boulevard, Compton

Jung Sam Back left Korea nearly 15 years ago at the urging of his sister, a nurse who was working in the United States. “I was thinking, U.S.A.--a lot of opportunity,” recalled Back. “I didn’t know anything about America, U.S.A., but I had a lot of hope. I was young.”

Over the years he married, had two children, bought a home in Cerritos and a two-store complex on East Compton Boulevard in Compton. In one of the stores, Back and his wife sold wigs to black customers. He rented the adjacent store to a Chinese tenant who sold children’s clothes.

With a bank mortgage, insurance and a steady income, the future seemed secure.

On April 30, all that changed. The riot area was expanding and Back feared that his store stood in the path of violence.

“I cannot defend that store myself,” he said.

Back closed the door and left. Later that day the two stores burned. “Just three walls are left. Nothing else. No ceiling.”

Insurance will pay off the bank mortgage and Back said he hoped to qualify for aid to rebuild.

“It’s still OK, this country. Not all Americans are like that (vandals). You know, any kind of population--Korean, black, white--most people are good. A few people are not good.

“I want to rebuild . . . My problem is I don’t have money.”

South Vermont and North Western avenues

The corporate division that handles real estate is based in Santa Barbara. The corporate headquarters of the majority stockholder is outside Lyon, France. But the history of the Smart & Final Co. began near the Los Angeles rail yards in 1871 with the creation of a wholesale grocery company.

With 118 stores in California, Nevada and Arizona and 40 more planned in the next few years, Smart & Final had one, 12,000-square-foot store on South Vermont Avenue gutted by fire and two others severely looted. The two looted stores quickly reopened. Officials have decided to rebuild the gutted store.

But four other businesses--a discount furniture store, a cleaners, a pizza parlor and a beauty salon--that rented space from Smart & Final on North Western Avenue in Koreatown were destroyed.

“We would like very much to rebuild those businesses depending on the policy of the city to rebuild,” said corporate spokeswoman Leanne Reynolds.

Times researcher Dorothy Ingebretsen contributed to this story.