A Skid Row Stroll With an Ex-President : Philanthropy: Mayor Tom Bradley accompanies Jimmy Carter, here to gain support for inner-city projects. Rebuild L.A. is one topic of conversation.

Strolling past honky-tonks and honking trucks, sizzling chorizo stands and endless stacks of plastic toys, former President Jimmy Carter took an impromptu walk through Skid Row with Mayor Tom Bradley on Monday afternoon.

In town for two days to generate philanthropic support for inner-city projects, Carter spurned his waiting car, turned away from the city’s gleaming towers of finance and law, and headed eastward into a bustling community of mostly poor people who cheered and shouted “Jimmy! Jimmy!”

Carter, who has spent much of the last 12 years since he left the White House helping poor, homeless and repressed people of other countries, is in Los Angeles in connection with a program he started last year to rejuvenate inner cities around the United States. Called the Atlanta Project, it is designed to “change the entire system that affects the lives of the underserved,” according to a Carter aide.

There are obvious similarities between the Atlanta Project and Rebuild L.A., the broad-based Los Angeles organization set up by Bradley after last spring’s riots. Though this trip to Los Angeles has been scheduled since January, Carter said he plans to meet today with Peter V. Ueberroth, co-chairman of Rebuild L.A.

“It’s presumptuous of me to give suggestions,” Carter said calmly as he walked through the tumult. “We’ll obviously be sharing a lot of ideas with each other. We hope to learn from L.A.’s successes and also from the failures here, and from our successes and failures.”

After touring the Union Rescue Mission, a large Skid Row project celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, Carter turned down Main Street for a six-block stroll to the Los Angeles Mission near 5th and Wall streets.

While taking care to speak tactfully about Rebuild L.A.--which only last week came under fire after The Times reported that 19 of 68 companies that Ueberroth announced were planning on investing in Los Angeles said they had no such plans--Carter unwittingly criticized a move made by the man walking at his side: Bradley.

Last week, Bradley canceled a $23,000 trial program that would have put 33 toilets on Skid Row for the homeless. Then, after a social worker placed nine portable toilets on the streets, the mayor’s office issued a press release saying that the toilets had been placed there without permits and amounted to a public obstruction. The toilets were removed.

Asked about public latrines, Carter said: “I don’t know the situation in Los Angeles, but I have publicly called for latrines for our homeless people in Atlanta. Not too long ago, just 200 or 300 yards from the Carter Center, they arrested a guy who was 50 feet off the road out in a kudzu field, and they arrested him for urinating, ostensibly in public. They were just trying to harass him to move him out of a so-called ‘nice’ neighborhood into a worse neighborhood. I resent this very much. So I think whatever we can do to help the people . . . .”

His voice wandered off as yet another autograph seeker accosted him. It was not clear that Bradley heard Carter’s remarks. Trapped in a throng of press, merchants and passersby, Bradley also responded for the first time to last week’s report that Rebuild L.A. had overstated the commitment of corporations to invest in Los Angeles.

Bradley said he had spoken to Ueberroth about the report in The Times and subsequent reports by other media, and Ueberroth had assured him that such reports were “slanted.”

Did that mean that 68 companies originally named by Rebuild L.A. as intending to invest heavily in Los Angeles’ inner city were, in fact, planning on doing so?

“I did not talk with the companies,” Bradley said.

Did Ueberroth reassure you that the companies were planning to do so?

“Yes--no,” he said, adding: “It’s not that cut and dried.”

Bradley was also asked to respond to a statement by City Councilman Michael Woo that if the media reports about Rebuild L.A.’s corporate support were correct, “there ought to be firings.”

Bradley said: “That’s a presumptuous statement to make, certainly. Without any background information, for a politician to make (that statement), I think, is uncalled for.” Asked if he still supported Ueberroth, whom he named to the committee, he said: “Absolutely.”

The scene, rare in its apparent spontaneity, brought hundreds of people to the streets. Homeless people waved and called out to Carter and the mayor. Immigrant Latinos stopped bartering for baby strollers and toys with Asian merchants. A merchant stopped talking on a cellular phone outside a store whose roof was covered with barbed wire, and yelled out to Carter.

A Nicaraguan man brought out a photo of Carter taken during a peace delegation to that country several years ago. A homeless man, who apparently got his years mixed up, shouted out that he voted for Carter in 1978.

“Yeah, man!” shouted backed Carter. “Thank you!”

Calm and silver-haired, he turned to Bradley and asked: “Tom, are we going the right direction?”

“Turn left,” said Bradley, who strode through the commotion tall and taciturn.

Meanwhile, Carter seemed to have hit his stride. Asked if he felt more powerful in some ways as a civilian than as President, he answered:

“I have the prestige and the fame, the recognition of having been President,” he said. “The other thing is that I deal with what I want to. I don’t have to worry about budgets and arguing with members of Congress and having to fight with the press. I pick out a few things that really interest me.”

That did not mean that he could not avoid at least one question about a fellow Southerner who is headed to the White House. Will Bill Clinton have a better chance than he did at two terms?

“That’s not saying very much, is it?” he quipped. “I think he has a better chance of being a two-term President than George Bush.”