Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : NEW YORK : A side of L.A. rarely seen.

So there it was--the other end of the rainbow. Instead of brilliance and sunshine, there was ugliness, violence, even death.

From 2,500 miles away, the images were so powerful that even a city like New York, which prides itself on its toughness, panicked.

People here had rarely seen this side of Los Angeles. They were used to palms and white boulevards. Not this. Maybe Hollywood had given some advance warning in movies like “Boyz N the Hood” and “Grand Canyon,” but who would have thought L.A. would actually blow?

“I feel stupid for having been so naive,” said Kate Nelly, 38, a white Manhattan real estate broker. “I always thought L.A. was a place with ethnic mixture and ethnic vitality rather than ethnic anger. Stupid me.”

Qadr King, a black teen-ager from one of the worst housing projects in Queens, knew L.A. had gangs, but he thought they were like New York gangs--dangerous and fearless. But shooting a guy point-blank just because he’s white?

“I guess they’re just crazier out there,” Qadr said. “I’ve never seen so many fires. . . .”

The lotus burned and burned on our television sets. Now the palms and the white boulevards are badly soiled, and L.A. looks just like the TV images we saw a year ago from Kuwait city. In fact, from this coast it looks like L.A. might be in the final stage of becoming another biblical city: drought, rain, earthquake--and now fire and devastation.

“A week after an earthquake, they had this--so what’s next?” asked Clinton Makel, who is 31, black and works for a Manhattan textile company. “Out there they keep waiting for ‘the Big One,’ but who says the Big One is going to be in the Earth? Maybe it happened when they burned the city down.”

Makel had long put aside the glamorous Hollywood image of L.A. To him and many others, L.A. is just another American city with huge, angry, alienated populations living not far from the rich. Haves and have-nots, divided just as they are in this metropolis by gross inequalities; violence and terror barely contained in neighborhoods with an intensity unknown to the nearby middle class.

“It finally erupted in a way that forced the rest of the country to see it, but it’s always been in L.A. just the way it is New York or Chicago or Atlanta,” said Mark Naison, a white college professor who lives in Brooklyn.

If Naison’s perception of Los Angeles was changed at all, it had to do with the “sheer incompetence of the cops. I had no idea the political system there was so staggeringly insensitive. The police chief and mayor don’t even talk. Can you imagine that?”

The contrast between the fires of L.A. and the spring calm in New York was so moving that Kate Nelly actually got misty-eyed walking through Times Square on a day when demonstrations against the Rodney G. King beating case verdicts were breaking out here. Hundreds of police officers were mingling with protesters, kibitzing with the crowd, hanging with the angry instead of confronting them.

“Maybe they go home and rape their wives and beat their kids, but at least our cops are used to being out on the street with the people” Nelly said. “I was proud of them. They weren’t running around being Hollywood cops like those guys in L.A. with their big guns and dark sunglasses.”

But New York also gets ugly. Bensonhurst, Crown Heights, Howard Beach--all are neighborhoods where black versus white got out of hand in recent years. Kids were shot; cops went unpunished; marauding crowds looted; bones were crushed. But the city has managed to keep the lid on, prompting people to ask, why here and not out there? “You’re pressed up against black people all the time in New York, on the subways, on the streets, so you have more empathy than they do in L.A.,” said Rebecca Johnson, a 27-year-old white writer who commutes daily by subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. “In L.A., they get in their Jaguars and the only time they see a black person is when they encounter one at valet parking.”

Of course, there are realists like Blanche Southerland, 30, a black secretary who lived in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the Bronx when she first came to the city from Georgia.

“Please. The cops here do the same bad stuff,” said Southerland. But we’re always talking about our problems here, she says. Every day you get the big headlines in the tabloids. It’s in the churches. It’s in your face, just like New York, every day.

“It’s like we’re all collectively going to some shrink on 5th Avenue, talking about how baaaaad we are,” said Southerland, laughing.

Even Jimmy Breslin gets beat up in Crown Heights and financier Felix Rohatyn’s wife gets her purse snatched on the street, Johnson notes.

“Even a white, self-righteous columnist gets his ass kicked,” she explained. “I never thought of it but, you know, in L.A. they’re just not all in it together. Not the way we are here.”