Do We Want to Stay in L.A.? : Options: Many Angelenos are trying to decide what to do in the wake of the riots. Some are already packing, but others have recommitted themselves to a city they love.

Hours after the riots began, Kathleen was packing her possessions. Her parents had called from Texas, she said, and offered to pay her moving costs. Just get out of L.A., they told her--now.

The 32-year-old jeweler promptly made plans to give up her apartment at Normandie and Melrose avenues and move to rural Virginia.

“I loved Los Angeles when I came here, almost six years ago,” said Kathleen, who asked that her real name not be used. “But at this point, L.A. takes more than it gives.”

The upheaval that followed the verdicts in the Rodney King trial has caused many people in Los Angeles to reassess: Would they remain in a city that trumpets diversity and exudes a glorious--if sometimes delusional--aura of possibility? Or would they leave a metropolis where racial disharmony, economic decline, disintegrating schools and deteriorating air have now been joined by an overriding sense of distrust of government and the city’s institutions?

In conversations throughout Los Angeles, no single answer prevailed. Some vowed to dig in, to recommit themselves to a city whose advantages they had come to take for granted. Others said they would leave immediately--if only they could afford to do so.

Strangely, there were some Angelenos who said they were unaffected by the unrest. Life, said these largely upper- and middle-class whites, would go on with little change. Others were so distraught that they brought their anxieties into sessions with their therapists.

Some Angelenos spoke of the sadness they saw around them. Some raged about how Los Angeles had let its own residents down. Many struggled with ambivalence.

Arts advocate Carolyn M. Campbell said that for a moment after the King verdicts came in, “my run-for-the-woods-Carolyn side kicked in.” But just as quickly, “I turned around and said, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t want to live anywhere else, and I don’t want to miss a beat.’

“I just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could be a mirror for the rest of the country?’ ” Campbell said. “ ‘If we could show how a massive town facing huge problems could actually get better?’ ”

Michael Yapko, a San Diego family therapist who has studied crisis response, said individuals interpret threatening situations such as the riots in Los Angeles on the basis of “optimism versus pessimism.”

“It’s a question of whether a person is hopeful or hopeless, and whether that person views conditions as stable or unstable.”

In the case of the Los Angeles riots, Yapko said, the person who might choose to leave the area would be “someone who says, ‘Life has always been terrible in L.A., now it’s worse, and it’s not going to get any better.’ ”

By contrast, “the person who recovers shifts his attention from how rotten things have been to how good they might become.” In either instance, said Yapko, “the image of the future is based on assumptions about the present and the past.”

Thelma Nolan, who has sold real estate in the Glendale and La Canada Flintridge areas since 1953, said she “rather expects an exodus” from the city she has lived in since 1925. “I can’t say to what extent, but I have a feeling that we’ll see some of that,” Nolan said.

At her home in Koreatown, near the intersection of Western Avenue and Olympic Boulevard, 33-year-old LaDonna Spears said her view of her neighborhood had grown so sour since the riots that “I don’t even want to pay my rent today.”

Spears, who works in a Santa Monica health center, said she and her boyfriend want to move out of her neighborhood as soon as possible. She is even hesitant about visiting her own grandmother in South Los Angeles, were she grew up.

“It’s your community, and you want to do something,” Spears said. “But you just don’t feel safe.”

Eight blocks from the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues, where the riots broke out, Raymond Bruce said he and his girlfriend wasted little time in deciding to move out of their neighborhood. Bruce, who lost his job when the grocery store where he worked burned down, said it was the sight of “30 people in the middle of the street, trying to bang a safe open” that made him start looking elsewhere.

Bruce shook his head when asked if he was sad to be leaving the area where he has lived and worked. “I’m relieved,” he replied.

Constance M. Ahrons, a University of Southern California psychology professor, said the image of the riots as the last straw in a series of disappointments is a recurring theme for many patients.

“I’ve heard a number of people say this is the final nail in the coffin,” said Ahrons, who also has a private psychotherapy practice in Santa Monica. “What they’re saying is, ‘I was thinking about leaving anyway, and now I’m definitely going to leave.’ ”

Primarily, Ahrons said, she has heard this line of thinking from people with young children who tend to weigh a sense of despair about the difficulties of urban life against an idyllic--and often unrealistic--view of a more pastoral existence.

“People are not saying, ‘Instead of living here I’m going to New York,’ ” Ahrons said. “What they’re saying is that they work too hard for too little in a place like Los Angeles. They’re talking wistfully about Idaho or Wyoming.”

But very few people have “the structure--the time and the money” that allows them to leave a job and a home in a time of recession, Ahrons said. Far more Angelenos, she predicted, “are likely to say, ‘OK, I like this city, and how can we make it better? How can we be participants instead of just spectators?’ ”

One eager new participant is Lulu Kamatoy. The Chicago resident had the surreal experience of being trapped in the Beverly Hills branch of Saks Fifth Avenue for two hours when the riots broke out. The next day, she bought a condominium in Encino.

“The riot doesn’t really change anything for us,” Kamatoy, an artists’ representative, said by phone from Chicago. “Things like that happen. It could have happened anywhere.”

At Beyond Baroque, a literary/arts center not far from where rioting broke out in Venice, program director Erica Bornstein voiced similar feelings.

“It’s obvious that no matter where you move in this country, this is going to follow you,” said Bornstein, who settled in Echo Park when she moved here three years ago.

Bornstein said she dismisses entreaties from friends who have called her from out of state in recent days, urging her to leave, because “on any given day there are lots of reasons to leave L.A.--and, if anything, I think this is going to be a real interesting time to be here. It’s as if all the euphemisms have been pulled off and people have to look at who we really are.”

Meanwhile, at a gallery on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Harvard Street, painter Tom Rose was putting the finishing touches on a show that was postponed after rioting destroyed the building next door. Even though one of his major works, a 10-by-17-foot painting with the ironic title of “Big Mind on Fire,” was singed in the blaze, Rose, a third-generation Angeleno, said, “I was incredibly lucky. I cheated the demons of destruction.”

For years, Rose said, he had had “a funny feeling, shall we say a minor apocalyptic feeling” that his first big show would have calamitous consequences. “I figured it would be some natural disaster,” he said.

Rose said his art is about transfiguration--and that he saw the eruptions in Los Angeles as a call for change as well.

“The dark winds are blowing right now,” Rose said. “This is real transformation stuff. It’s just got to change.”

Times staff writers Beth Ann Krier and Jeannine Stein contributed to this story.