COLUMN ONE : Ill Feeling Prevails in Riot Wake : Although there are some optimists, the sense of anger and despair is more prevalent. Cynicism is pervasive.

Where a ribbon of fire once reached across the city night in Los Angeles, Vermont Avenue now is a place of sharp contrasts: Charred buildings and empty lots. New stores with hopeful owners and colorful flags. Stretches of drab window fronts, struggling for the attention of passing motorists.

Where Koreatown buckled under the onslaught of window smashers, looters and arsonists, merchants now watch the world with grim stoicism, wary of outsiders; overhead, a billboard touts nonstop flights to Seoul. By several accounts, many Koreans who once made a home here have taken advantage of the one-way fares.

Where frenzied mobs seized truck driver Reginald O. Denny and nearly beat him to death in the street, a Korean-owned liquor mart does a brisk business. Teen-agers loiter outside a chili-dog stand; beauty salon owner Goldie Bell keeps a security door locked all day long, just in case.

All over Los Angeles--where a bloody paroxysm of rioting began six months ago today, leaving 51 people dead and 1,100 buildings destroyed or badly damaged--there are signs that life is returning to normal.

That is both the good news and the bad.

The smoke has cleared to reveal a city still splintered by race and class, battered by street crime and record homicide totals, stretched taut by the rival forces of recession and affluence, both buoyed by civic spirit and paralyzed by inertia. It is a city confused and in pain, teetering on the fulcrum of an uncertain future.

The mood of an embattled populace runs from staunch optimism to anger and bitter despair--tilted significantly toward the latter.

To be sure, many residents and community leaders see Los Angeles as a place on the mend. They say the signs of healing are evident in a changing of the guard--Police Chief Daryl F. Gates gone, Mayor Tom Bradley on the way out. New alliances have been formed. A tenuous truce exists between two of the city’s most bloodthirsty street gangs. Churches and community groups are reaching out. The riots, many say, have laid bare the worst of the city’s ills, and now, finally, those maladies are being treated.

But a cynicism pervades the streets--where, the talk is, it could all happen again. The initial enthusiasm to clean and repair, to build a gleaming new inner city out of the ashes, is giving way to impatience and frustration. Reconstruction dawdles. Critics say time and opportunity are being squandered--that government leaders so far have failed to marshal the currents of civic pride and good will to deal with the core problems of urban Los Angeles: unemployment, eroding schools, dilapidated housing, distrust of police and the judicial system. And crime.

“It’s worse than ever,” says Luis Menjivar, 38, standing on a cluttered sidewalk in Pico-Union, a predominantly Latino enclave where rioting gutted buildings on corner after corner. A mini-mall is being rebuilt a few doors down, while sidewalk vendors sell pomegranates and T-shirts next to vacant lots.

Laid off a year ago from his job in a warehouse, Menjivar now lives on savings while trying--in vain, mostly--to buy and sell used cars. “Leaders,” he says with disdain, “just talk and talk and talk.”

Roy Graves is more bitter. At a lot in South Los Angeles where he and other workmen are hauling away wreckage, Graves rails against factory closures and jobs gone overseas, against banks and big companies that bleed money out of the inner city without offering loans or jobs to blacks.

No one, he says, is doing anything about it.

“The government has ------ this city up and ------ this country up, and sooner or later it’s going to explode and be much worse than it was,” Graves, 45, asserts. He complains most loudly about the dichotomy of Los Angeles--a city where so many blacks are jobless and poor while the rich are glorified on television, with their Rolls-Royces and gold telephones.

“That’s the kind of ---- that makes people mad,” he says. “They tell another group of people, ‘You can’t have this. . . .’ That’s ridiculous. It’s like eating a big piece of meat in front of a dog: The first thing he’s going to do is bite your ass! People are either going to have, or they’re going to tear it up!”

Sharing similarly bleak visions, others look to the future with fear and talk of escaping the city.

Dorla Ellis, 26, a single mother raising two young children in South Los Angeles, works nights in a fast-food restaurant to afford a cramped apartment next to a razed liquor store. She dreads going out after dark. The riots made her ill with headaches. Ever since, she has been trying to save the money to return to the Virgin Islands.

“I’m scared,” she concedes. “You can’t even take your kids to the park because you don’t know when a bullet will come.”

Although the fires, in the main, ravaged inner-city communities populated mostly by blacks, Korean-Americans and Latinos, the searing emotional scars of the violence extend to all corners of the sprawling metropolis. James Donnelly, 30, a public-relations man who lives in Santa Monica, is one of the few who is able to smile and say, “It hasn’t hit me. I haven’t felt any effect.”

Playing with her infant son at Sherman Oaks Fashion Square, Margaret Carlton, 39, concedes that she now avoids the city, preferring an insular life in the San Fernando Valley. “Instead of going over the hill to Hollywood for dinner,” she says, “we’re now exploring Encino.”

On the whole, the riots have left residents more edgy, more acutely attuned to chronic violence, more fearful of straying beyond familiar neighborhoods and social circles. Isolation has added torque to the ever-whirring machinery of racism. Everyday problems--high rents, poor city services, traffic--are now illuminated by the torch glare of what happened, a city over the brink, utterly out of control.

“It’s becoming more difficult each day to persuade stable citizens to stay here,” says Councilwoman Patricia Moore of Compton, a city hard hit by the three days of destruction. “No one’s pouring money into urban America. It’s like our leadership has given up on urban America. It’s expected to fail, it’s expected to have problems, so people have written it off.”

Tension in the streets is easily visible. At a take-out food stand at Vermont and Slauson avenues, Richard Johnson, 15, stands among a restive crowd of teen-agers. One throws rocks at two white men passing by. Johnson predicts another riot. “They ain’t treating black people right,” he says.

Dephone Moore, 15, complains about the lack of parks and recreation programs. As he speaks, two teen-age girls in the crowd begin fighting, throwing furious fists as the throng pushes to get closer, each teen-ager straining for a look.

The unruly group surges like a storm into the street, briefly stopping traffic.

“See,” Moore says, as the combatants tear at each other for reasons that never become clear. “If some of us had someplace to go, this wouldn’t be happening.”

Dr. Claudewell S. Thomas, chairman of the psychiatry department at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Watts, sees the city’s Angst in the faces of people afflicted with depression, alcoholism and drug abuse. Often those problems go hand in hand with unemployment and “a tremendous feeling of powerlessness,” he says. The hospital’s caseload this year is “just incredible,” he says.

A prescient man, Thomas had sat down a year before the riots and assessed the troubled psyche of urban Los Angeles. “We are creating a bomb,” he warned at the time.

Now, feeling the pulse of the city based on what he sees and hears from other health professionals, Thomas says there are alarming signs once more--rampant racism, economic frustration, distrust of authority.

“The disquietude seems to be increasing . . . a terrible feeling that something is desperately wrong,” he says. “And even the search for a remedy is not being adequately addressed. . . . We’re building the time bomb again, and it’s only a matter of time before it goes off again.”

Not everyone agrees.

USC Prof. H. Eric Schockman, a specialist in urban issues, says the strife in Los Angeles has “bottomed out” and predicts that the city will profit greatly from interracial and inter-ethnic alliances formed since the riots. In addition, he notes, a new cadre of leadership has emerged; in the year ahead, there will be not just a new police chief, but also a new mayor, a new superintendent of schools and a new district attorney.

“We’ve kind of opened up the crack in the monolith,” Schockman says.

On streets still littered with rubble, the signs of hope are like flickers in the darkness.

Workmen and bulldozers continue to clear away the charred hulks of buildings. A coalition of companies working under city contract has been hiring mostly blacks and Latinos for the $23-million cleanup effort, financed by federal disaster funds. The organization, the Los Angeles Community Partnership, has created about 100 full-time jobs, says Chairman George Pla, and later hopes to contract with Rebuild L.A. to work on new construction as well.

LeVell Patton, 40, is one of those newly employed through the program. Jobless for five years, Patton is busy on a recent afternoon hosing away ash and debris from a fire-gutted mini-mall at Normandie Avenue and Manchester Boulevard. It is the fifth job site since August for the father of two young children.

“It a blessing--a blessing!” he says, smiling. “We can go to the show . . . we can go out to eat sometimes. I think we’re going to have something for Christmas. I see some hope. I feel like a man.”

Breathing economic life into the inner city is seen by many as vital to easing tensions and stabilizing Los Angeles as a whole. Yet the task is daunting. Consultants say 75,000 to 93,000 new jobs are needed--at a time when even middle-class communities are suffering from factory closures and layoffs.

Curtis Tucker Jr. (D-Inglewood), chairman of the state Assembly Special Committee on the Los Angeles Crisis, is trying to foster new enterprise in the inner city by drafting legislation to end redlining by banks and insurance companies. Many African-Americans have found it impossible, he says, to open businesses because they could not obtain loans or affordable insurance.

In the meantime, Tucker expresses frustration over the lagging pace of reconstruction and the failure of Washington to allocate money for the task. The “window of opportunity” created by post-riot activism is closing more each day, he says, as Los Angeles settles back into an orbit of despair.

“I’m optimistic because, being in the position I am, I cannot afford to say it’s hopeless,” says Tucker. “(But) it’s not going to be fixed overnight. The state and federal government will not come riding in like the 7th Cavalry to save us.”

Difficult economic equations are further complicated by issues of race and class. Many Korean-American shop owners suffered enormous riot damage. Now, many are reopening in neighborhoods where they feel dread and resentment. Others are moving to other cities or returning to South Korea, leaving empty lots behind.

Jay Lee, 39, who owned a downtown indoor swap meet that was destroyed, estimates that he lost $100,000 in uninsured merchandise. Bitterly, he talks of starting over in Orange County or Palmdale--anywhere but Los Angeles. “I did good to them, but once the riots started . . . they stole my stuff, burned my stuff,” Lee says. “I hate the customers I had before.”

Thomas Chang, 28, an employee at an optometrist shop in Koreatown, saw the looting and destruction firsthand and now lives in fear and suspicion. “I see a Hispanic and he looks like a thief,” Chang says. “I see a black and he looks like a criminal.”

Other racial and ethnic groups harbor similar grudges, born of past hardships and steeled by the violence of the spring.

“Many of the Hispanics don’t get along with black people,” says Luiz Gustavo, 21, a construction worker in Pico-Union who is puzzled by that hostility. “I don’t know . . . if Hispanic people are racist, or black people are racist.”

Gustavo complains about joblessness and street gangs--concerns echoed by black merchant Ed Cox, 46, busy selling T-shirts and framed prints on the street at Vermont and Manchester avenues--perhaps the hardest-hit intersection in Los Angeles.

“You’ve got kids 16, 17, they’ll blow your head off and not think a thing about it,” Cox says. “We need change and we need it quick, or the next riot is going to be even bigger.”

To some, the riots only underscored the unrestrained violence that seems at times to turn Los Angeles into a vigilante town, with citizens on their own. Those like Bessie Allen, 63, of Watts long for days when the police were tougher.

“You can hardly ride the RTD bus--there’s fighting on there and shooting on there,” Allen says. “But you’ve got to ride, you’ve got to go places. I just look up to the Lord and keep on going.”

Goldie Bell, 65, who runs a beauty salon near the site of the Denny beating, makes sure she’s indoors after dark. “I’m a praying woman, but I’m scared,” she says. “I have some very bad vibes about our city. It’s going down, down, down.”

At the same time, others remain keenly aware that the beating of black motorist Rodney G. King by white police officers was the seed incident of the riots. They watch relentlessly for further signs of police injustice.

Veteran street cops say the scrutiny, and the long hours trying to keep up with one incident after another, are wearing them thin.

“We’ve become like rags--we get holes in ourselves,” says Officer Joe Onorato, a 21-year veteran with the Los Angeles Police Department, who complains that inner-city divisions are operating with less than half the manpower they once put on the streets.

Even with a new police chief, Onorato says, “we’re just running from call to call. We try to do the best job we can with what we have, but we just get no help from anybody--the Police Commission, the City Council. Nobody listens.”

For all of the town meetings, all of the political rhetoric, not much is getting done, agrees “Sweet” Alice Harris, 57, founder of the Parents of Watts community center.

“I don’t think they’ve got the message yet,” she says of the powers that be. “If they got the message, they wouldn’t wait this long to help the people that’s hurting.”

But in the troubled aftermath of a firestorm of death and chaos that will haunt the city and its residents for years--maybe decades--many in Los Angeles are clinging to hope, with tired and trembling fingers.

“When people lose hope, they walk around like they’re dead, like zombies,” Harris says. “We need to see something . . . something tangible . . . something to make (people) feel hope is on the way.

“And that’s what we’re not seeing.”