COLUMN ONE : Unlikely Flash Point for Riots : First acts of violence did not occur in L.A.’s poorest neighborhoods, but in areas of modest comforts where many own their homes. Inside well-kept dwellings, there is anger.

In years to come, when historians examine the roots of the Los Angeles riots of 1992, they will be led not to the city’s most desperate housing projects, but to neighborhoods of manicured lawns, weekend barbecues and unbarred windows.

And when they sift through police records for the first documented act of violence, they will find not the armed hand of a gangster, but the raised fist of a 19-year-old store clerk who was so enraged at the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial that he uncharacteristically hurled a rock at a white motorist.

Police records, census data and community interviews indicate that the first outbursts of mayhem after the not guilty verdicts occurred not in the poorest parts of black Los Angeles, but in some of its most stable neighborhoods.

While the riots quickly spread to other sections of Los Angeles, spurred on by darkness, television coverage and the caravans of looters who sped through the city, the initial burst of outrage in the spots that erupted spontaneously after the verdicts transcended mere economic despair.

From Hyde Park, where the first stone was cast, to the now infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, the flash points stand apart from the largely bleak statistics of South Los Angeles.

The median household income in Hyde Park is about on par with Catalina Island’s balmy Avalon, the unemployment rate is lower than Venice’s and the crime rate is far lower than the city as a whole. In the neighborhood around Florence and Normandie, a higher percentage of families own their homes than in Pasadena and more than a dozen households boast incomes above $150,000 a year.

But, despite the trappings of material comfort, there is a painful sense among black residents that they are still second-class citizens who have been consigned to live on the margins of the American Dream.

“It seems like no matter what you try to do, it’s just in vain,” said Carolyn Horn, a 47-year-old aerospace worker who lives near Florence and Normandie. “Your color is your calling card. Out there, I’m just black.”

Although many residents in the neighborhoods condemn the violence of the riots, they add that after a lifetime of bitterness and racial injustice they understand the outrage that launched the city into three days of chaos.

From inside tidy living rooms, during scores of interviews in the weeks since the riots, they tell of police gang operations that over the years have affected grandmothers to infants. They talk about the suspicious stares that dog them in the tony shops of the Westside. They rail against a system that exonerated the police officers who beat King.

“We eat, we sleep, we have clothes. We don’t want for anything except being treated fairly,” said one resident near Florence and Normandie who did not want her name used. “To some, you’re still just a nigger.”

From the corner of West 67th Street and 11th Avenue in Hyde Park, the neighborhood that spreads over the table-flat landscape could be any number of undistinguished spots in the Los Angeles sprawl.

On one side of 11th, boxlike, modern, two-story apartments stretch down the street in a swath of pastels. On the other side, there are rows of older stucco homes that show few of the typical signs of decay in the city--chain-link fences, abandoned cars, barred windows.

It was from here, on April 29 at 3:43 p.m., that police received the first emergency call of the riots. Within half an hour of the King verdicts, a young man hurled a brick at a passing pickup truck. A white man was later pummeled on the street by a group of youths and thrown into a dumpster.

Soon afterward, a crowd moved toward the shops and markets a few blocks away.

The rioting in Hyde Park did not start with the Rollin’ 60s gang members who roam the neighborhood, but with a lanky 19-year-old shoe salesman. In a neighborhood of tough gang monikers, he is known as “E.T.”--the extra-terrestrial.

The young man, who grew up in one of the stucco homes a few blocks from where the riots’ first stone was cast, would not let his real name be used out of fear of arrest and refused to discuss the riots except to say that he has come to regret his outburst.

“I was just mad,” he said as he stopped briefly to talk with a reporter.

E.T.’s friends describe him as one of the “cooler heads” in the neighborhood, someone who always cautioned others about the dangers of gangbanging and counseled friends to prepare for the future.

“He’s my good angel,” said Ray Peoples, as he stood on the sidewalk decked out in the dark blue regalia of the Crips. “If he saw me now, he’d say: ‘There you go, you’re back in that stuff again.’ He’d tell me to go home and change my clothes.”

The neighborhood, too, was miscast. Few of its residents, said Khalid Muhammed, 19, have experienced the destitution that outsiders perceive as the rule in South Los Angeles.

“We didn’t grow up poor here,” Muhammed said. “We’re not tip-top, but we’re an all right neighborhood.”

The 1990 census bears him out. The median annual household income in the tracts surrounding the intersection of West 67th Street and 11th Avenue was $24,886, well above the $18,979 average in the rest of South Los Angeles, although still below the $30,925 average for Los Angeles as a whole.

The unemployment rate was 6.4%, well below the 8.4% rate for the city at large.

Hyde Park also has been virtually untouched by the migration of Latino immigrants, who now make up the majority of residents in South Los Angeles. The neighborhood has remained overwhelmingly black since the late 1960s.

In many ways, it is an anachronism in frenetic Los Angeles, a throwback to the days when families settled in a neighborhood, stayed to raise their families and retired in the same house. Two-thirds of the area’s families own their homes, and nearly half of those have lived in the same house for more than 20 years.

The neighborhood has not been immune to some of the most destructive problems that beset urban areas--drug dealers, gangs and the development of cheap apartments and industrial plants spaced inside the blocks of single-family homes.

But it still remains a tight-knit community that exudes, at times, a Southern civility that traces back to the great migration of blacks from the South during and after World War II.

“We do have our problems,” said Thelma Loud, 53, who has lived in the same house on West 68th Street for 27 years and raised two children there. “But I think people get along pretty well here. Not many bars on windows on this block.”

The second flash point of the riots--Florence and Normandie--erupted half an hour after the first stone was thrown in Hyde Park. In virtually every way--income, home ownership, population, poverty rate--the portrait is the same.

The rioting in the two neighborhoods also followed a similar trajectory. At Florence and Normandie, cars were pounded with stones and pieces of sidewalk. As in Hyde Park, whites caught in the crowd were set upon with a vengeance.

“We got ‘em,” said one man who watched from the corner as Reginald O. Denny was beaten nearly to death. “We got ‘em good.”

And, as in Hyde Park, the people there would later find it remarkable that the rioting began in their neighborhood.

“I would have expected something like this in Watts or Compton, but not here,” said E.J., a local 20-year-old, on the night the rioting began.

“This neighborhood,” he said as buildings were being set afire, “is pretty nice.”

The rioting began in areas that, on the face of it, had the most to lose from looting and violence. Police maps of 911 calls for April 29 show that the poorest areas of the city had few emergency calls until later in the evening. The maps show only a handful of hot spots in the first 1 1/2 hours after the verdicts, followed by a mushrooming of violence as televised coverage of the Denny beating was aired and darkness set in.

Troy Duster, head of the UC Berkeley Institute for Social Change, hypothesized that the King beating verdicts struck hardest at black working people who had a stake in the system and who felt most keenly let down.

“If you’re part of a group that is unemployed and out of work, you aren’t holding out any hope--you’ve always thought the system was unjust,” Duster said. “But if you’re a hard-working person who spends 8, 10, 12 hours a day, working and saving, working and saving, you can imagine their fury if something in the system were to reveal that it was all really corrupt.”

Urban theorist Mike Davis said that longstanding conflicts between black Angelinos and police may also have fueled a black working-class rage that was ignited by the King verdicts. “I think anger at the courts and police is almost transcendent of social class in the black community,” he said.

Throughout the city, black residents have complained that the Los Angeles Police Department has been unable to distinguish friend from foe--they say officers typically assume that any young black man is a gang member with criminal intent.

Vehicle stops and street-side questionings by the police have left a generation bitter, especially among middle-class blacks, who feel that they are still treated with suspicion despite their material gains.

The informal rules of behavior that have evolved for children in South Los Angeles seem at times, they say, like living under martial law: Never drive with more than three in a car, never talk on the street in a group, never drive through a white neighborhood after dark.

“This has nothing to do with money,” said Barbara Knox, a 36-year-old resident of the neighborhood near Florence and Normandie. “It’s about being treated with dignity.”

The emotions that residents express over the riots span an enormous spectrum. Many side with the 58% of black people citywide who told pollsters the violence that engulfed the city was without any justification. They particularly condemn the beating of Denny, which was broadcast on live television.

“We were all upset with the verdict,” said Hyde Park resident May Golden. “But for someone to get beat like that, that I can’t understand.”

Others speak openly of a bitter satisfaction at the brutality that erupted. “They just did him like the white man has done the black man,” said Ron Rankins, an unemployed truck driver who lives near Florence and Normandie. “I say he didn’t get beat good enough.”

The range of emotions draws from the vastly different experiences of the three generations that have made these neighborhoods their homes.

The first black settlers of these neighborhoods, such as Thelma Loud, were part of the great migration of Southern blacks who came to Los Angeles in the years during and after World War II.

Loud moved to Hyde Park in 1965 as a young newlywed. She had grown up in a Mississippi town of 300 people, and despite the stereotypes of the South, is hard-pressed to remember any racial hatred in her youth.

“We were sheltered,” said the 53-year-old mother of two. “It was such a small town. We were totally separate with black teachers, black schools. I grew up totally proud of me. I felt good about myself.”

She left Mississippi after high school and began working as a clerk in a garment factory in Los Angeles. She met her husband, a truck driver for the Los Angeles Water and Power Department, and moved to Hyde Park just after the Watts riots.

Five years earlier, the neighborhood was almost completely white. Soon after she moved in, the neighborhood was almost completely black.

“There were about three white families left and they were on the run,” she said. “This house, they almost gave it to us.”

Her neighbors were like her, young and just beginning a family. “Everyone owned their homes,” she said “The families here were super close.”

Maybe it was how she was raised, maybe it was the harder times in which she grew up, but Loud said she has never felt the same anger over her experiences in Los Angeles, even when her son was stopped by police the first time he violated the family rule of driving with more than three friends in a car.

“I’m not angry,” she said, “but I’m not surprised at the riots. I can see the anger and frustration.”

Her children--a daughter who works as a teacher’s assistant and a son who is in the Air Force--are far less accepting of the insults and slights that she has endured.

“They see prejudice quicker than I do,” Loud said. “I think maybe they’re angry for us.”

Among the younger generation, even those who do not condone the violence say that they at least understand the well of emotion it sprang from.

“You know, this neighborhood isn’t a violent place,” said Deborah Smith, a 36-year-old woman who lives in the Hyde Park bungalow where she grew up. “There are more car accidents here than drive-by shootings.

“But you know, the verdict I feel was very wrong. They should have got some justice.”

On Smith’s front porch, her 19-year-old neighbor, Zelda Slaton, nodded slowly.

“People here don’t really condone (the violence), but something had to be done to show people that something is wrong here,” Slaton said.

After the outbreak of violence in Hyde Park and Florence and Normandie, the riots began spreading along major thoroughfares to poorer sections of the city. At 4:20 p.m., just minutes after the first emergency phone call from Florence and Normandie, cars full of whooping, shooting, bottle-lobbing young men began careening through Mildred Jones’ neighborhood.

Jones, 87, was perched as usual on the upstairs porch of her whitewashed apartment house at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Normandie. Downstairs, her cousin’s grandson, Eric Jones, 21, rushed out to the front steps in time to see “a whole bunch of police cars flying past.”

“The streets were flooded,” Eric Jones said. “People were walking past in groups, old people, young people. Cars were running the lights, going toward Florence and Normandie.”

Mildred Jones hobbled inside to turn on the TV. When she came back out again, she “saw a car stop and a gang of young men get out and start to bash in the taco place.”

King and Normandie, the third area in the city to erupt, had been another bastion of the black working class until recent years. But unlike the first two flash points, it has been touched by the past decade’s influx of immigrants and the exodus of middle-class blacks.

Once predominantly black, the neighborhood has become 45% Latino. The poverty rate in 1990 was 23.4%--higher than either Hyde Park or Florence and Normandie, although less than the 33% for South Los Angeles as a whole. Less than a third of families owned their homes.

In a generation, residents said, their block has gone from being a family sort of place to a community that was “about two steps below middle class.”

In 1969, when the King-Normandie area was nearly 80% black, the average worker in that neighborhood was making about 65 cents for every dollar earned by the average Angelino. The disparity was substantial, but as the years passed, the gap widened. By 1979, the King-Normandie worker was making only 52 cents for every dollar earned by the average Angelino, and by 1989, the figure had dropped to 49 cents.

Likewise, as the years passed, fewer and fewer residents owned property. Home ownership dropped from 45% in 1969 to about 33% in 1979, where it has stayed.

“The minute they said that verdict, well, it was like people was just stationed, waitin’ for something,” Mildred Jones said.

By word of mouth, then by radio and television, news spread across the flats of South Los Angeles that the streets were in chaos. By dusk, Mildred Jones said, she could peer past the railing of her upstairs porch and see the plumes of smoke rising to the south and east.

It was not until after dark--and in some cases, until the next day--that the violence gained a foothold in the poorer neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Around Watts’ Nickerson Gardens housing project, where the memory of the 1965 riots is still strong, the burning of the few markets nearby did not begin until after dark. In Pico-Union, where the population approaches 90% Central American and Mexican-Americans, little happened until the second day of the riots.

“We’re more careful,” said Ray, a 35-year-old Watts resident who recalls looting a grocery store in the 1965 riots and hauling the booty away in his red wagon. “This is rock bottom. You don’t want to lose what you got.”

Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow with the Center for the New West and an international fellow at Pepperdine University, noted that uprisings historically have been led not by the poorest members of an oppressed class but by those who are better off and more aware of the gap between what they have and what they feel they deserve.

Kotkin added that whatever political motives sparked the riots quickly gave way to a chaotic mix of intents: greed, excitement, opportunism, vengeance.

But in the aftermath of the riots, the memory of the outrage that flared in the opening moments of mayhem remains strong in the neighborhoods.

Although many rioters have expressed regret over their actions, particularly for destroying parts of their neighborhoods, they say that the conditions that spawned the riots remain. The bitterness lingers. The frustrations still exist.

Carolyn Horn, whose neat stucco home is just a few blocks from the corner of Florence and Normandie, said that in many ways she feels angrier today than she did after the King verdicts were announced.

So much anger poured into the streets during the riots, but nothing has really changed. Politicians talk about rebuilding the city and returning to life as it was before. Outsiders crucify South Los Angeles for its lack of family values and violent ways.

She and her friends, however, talk as if the riots have not really ended--they’re only in a holding pattern waiting to see what will happen next. They focus on the fates of the four residents of Florence and Normandie who were arrested for the attack on Denny--a case that, in their minds, mirrors the police beating of King.

“Everyone here has taken so much and they’ve reached the breaking point,” Horn said softly. “If there is another riot, it’s going to be an eye for an eye. White people better watch out.”

How the Riots Spread

The riots began not in poorest parts of South-Central Los Angeles, but in some of its most stable neighborhoods. At 3:43 p.m., a half-hour after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial were announced, a black youth in Hyde Park throws the first documented stone of the riots. At 4:17 p.m., violence erupts at Florence and Normandie avenues, where white truck driver Reginald Denny was later beaten on live television. Four minutes later, at 4:21 p.m., a third incident erupts at King Boulevard and Normandie Avenue. The dots on each map represent the location of emergency phone calls to the Police Department.

3 to 7 p.m.--Violence stays largely confined to areas near the original three flashpoints, but police begin to receive reports of disturbances along major thoroughfares.

7 to 8 p.m.--Shortly after 6:45 p.m., television begins a live broadcast of Denny’s beating at Florence and Normandie. The number of locations reporting emergencies explodes.

8 to 9 p.m.--With darkness, most of the major streets in South-Central are engulfed in violence. Rioting spreads north of the Santa Monica Freeway.

9 to 10 p.m.--Rioting intensifies in other parts of the city. Demonstrators besiege Police headquarters downtown; rioting and looting breaks out in the Civic Center area.

Close-Up of 3 Neighborhoods

Here’s a look at the first three flash points of the riots--where violence erupted spontaneously after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case. The Hyde Park and Florence and Normandie areas, both havens of the working class, stand apart from the largely bleak statistics of South Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES CITYWIDE Total Population: 3,485,398 % Black: 13.9 % Latino: 39.3 % Anglo: 37.5 Median Household Income: $30,925 % on Public Assistance: 4.5 % Unemployed: 8.4 % Owner-Occupied Housing: 9.4 Selected Crimes Per 1,000 people*: 101.9 SOUTH LOS ANGELES Total Population: 672,373 % Black: 43.9 % Latino: 51 % Anglo: 2.7 Median Household Income: $18,979 % on Public Assistance: 24.9 % Unemployed: 14.7 % Owner-Occupied Housing: 35.8 Selected Crimes Per 1,000 people*: 127.4 HYDE PARK AREA Total Population: 5,707 % Black: 84.8 % Latino: 12.8 % Anglo: 2.3 Median Household Income: $24,886 % on Public Assistance: 8.7 % Unemployed: 6.4 % Owner-Occupied Housing: 63.7 Selected Crimes Per 1,000 people*: 86.21 FLORENCE AND NORMANDIE AREA Total Population: 10,093 % Black: 75.6 % Latino: 23.5 % Anglo: 1.9 Median Household Income: $23,615 % on Public Assistance: 8.6 % Unemployed: 11.9 % Owner-Occupied Housing: 61.4 Selected Crimes Per 1,000 people*: 104.6 MLK JR. BLVD. / NORMANDIE AREA Total Population: 6,389 % Black: 53.8 % Latino: 45.2 % Anglo: 0.3 Median Household Income: $20,248 % on Public Assistance: 8.2 % Unemployed: 16.3 % Owner-Occupied Housing: 32.4 Selected Crimes Per 1,000 people*: 128.5 * Consisting of 17 crime categories Sources: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Los Angeles Police Department