AN OPEN LETTER TO L.A. :...

Dear Friends:

Happy Holidays and amen!!!

Can you believe how much we’ve accomplished this year? We held three really big trials, made an international celebrity out of an alleged madam, gave President Clinton the best haircut he’ll ever see--on the airport Tarmac, no less--installed a new mayor for the first time in 20 years, elected an openly gay City Council member for the first time and snuffed out apocalyptic fires (with the help of firefighters from across the Western states. Thanks guys and gals!)

The Dodgers really stunk up the place (at least until season’s end, when they played spoiler to the hated San Francisco Giants); in fact, the biggest story out of Dodger Stadium involved a New York Met who threw a firecracker at a little kid. But how about those Kings! They advanced to the Stanley Cup championships for the first time after 909 losses in 26 years. (That’s right, the same Los Angeles Kings who are now, only months later, stinking up the place.)

It really has been quite a busy year for us, what with running back and forth between courtrooms--the second Rodney G. King beating trial, the Reginald O. Denny beating trial and those Menendez boys! Shotgun murders, confessions to a psychiatrist, emotional abuse at a tennis match--so many mysteries to unravel. But what we’re really wondering is, where did Lyle get that toupee? We’re not sure if they’re guilty or innocent, but we thought we could spot a rug a mile off. Who knows what to believe anymore?

The jury is still sorting that case out. But we closed the book on the King beating trial. The jury rendered its verdicts--two police officers convicted and two acquitted--and the city took the news in stride as ex-officers Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell headed to prison.

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The Denny beating trial also came to a close. The case of that trucker pulled from his rig at the outset of the 1992 riots became a symbol of that scary time of unrest. The whole episode left us with lasting memories. It turned out that one of the defense attorneys listed on his resume a trip to Mars. (Fortunately for his client, he was replaced before the trial got started.) But what a moment it was when Denny leaned across a courtroom pew and hugged the mother of the man accused of beating him.

Who says we’re all trying to kill each other out here? Of course, the sequestered jurors almost did kill each other before convicting Damian Williams and Henry Keith Watson. (The other two defendants pleaded guilty.) One juror was dismissed when the forewoman decided she was in “the Twilight Zone” and another ran down the corridor screaming for the boyfriend she hadn’t seen in days. Somehow, we all knew how she felt.

Outside the courtroom, the city was infested with several uninvited pests, including Medflies and more mayoral candidates than Baskin-Robbins has flavors.

Tom Bradley bowed out after five terms as mayor of Los Angeles and 52 people lined up to take his place, including frizzy-haired street corner dancer Melrose Larry Green and a lawyer so desperate for publicity that he held an underwater news conference and nearly drowned.

It was a dizzying campaign but in the end, mega-rich attorney/businessman Richard Riordan bested them all. In his scant six months in office, he is clearly heading in the right direction, particularly when it comes to LAX, where he envisions Starbucks-style coffee and a public address system that features Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly With Me.”

Hizzoner, an avid cyclist, is really not in bad shape for 63, although he tried jogging with President Clinton in Washington and pooped out before the first mile. It might have been embarrassing had he not hopped a Secret Service van and caught up with the commander-in-chief just in time to have his picture taken.

There were plenty of other beginnings and endings around L.A.

The beloved Central Library reopened, more glorious than ever, seven years after a disastrous fire nearly destroyed it. We threw a weeklong block party to celebrate!

We got our first subway--the Red Line--and probably our last freeway--the Century. A Museum of Tolerance opened along with the renovated Venice Canals and the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena. But in a league of its own is our newly expanded Convention Center--with 24-foot-high doors big enough for tractor-trailers to drive right onto the floor!

But alas, we also lost an Art Deco retail landmark, the Bullocks Wilshire department store (the one where William Randolph Hearst used to buy his swimwear). Across the street, the Sheraton-Town House also closed (the one where Howard Hughes and Elizabeth Taylor used to stay--not together, though. Liz was there with Nicky Hilton.)

And the chandelier fell for the last time on “Phantom of the Opera,” our most commercially successful theatrical presentation ever. It closed after 1,772 shows. (Almost as many games as the Dodgers lost! Just kidding.)

Oh, and the drought also ended. Did it ever! We got 27 inches of rain--double the usual amount.

But not even the rain could clean up Hollywood, which had quite a year what with deaths, lawsuits and a couple of sex scandals. The year began badly enough when the glamour capital of the world lost its landmark neon Coke sign.

It was an off year for Pepsi, too. (And we don’t mean those wild claims of needles in the cans.) No doubt you’ve heard--who hasn’t?--that the company’s celebrity spokesman, Michael Jackson, has been caught up in a child molestation investigation that has turned into an international incident. The Jackson family remains as close as ever--OK, his sister and his ex-maid seem to have turned on him. But the inquiry continues. Stay tuned for next year’s letter.

Meanwhile, a jury soaked Kim Basinger for $8.9 million after she reneged on an oral agreement to appear in the film “Boxing Helena.” (Who could blame her? The movie was about a woman injured in a car accident who is rescued by a surgeon who amputates her arms and legs and puts her in a box hoping she will fall in love with him.)

Another jury put an end to that nine-year tiff between Elke Sommer and Zsa Zsa Gabor. It started when Zsa Zsa suggested that Elke was a bald-headed Hollywood has-been who hangs out in seedy bars and has to sell hand-knitted sweaters to eke out a living. Elke countered that Zsa Zsa’s derriere was so fat that it would take three or four strong men to lift her onto a horse. The jury sided with Elke, awarding her $3.2 million. Guess she won’t need to be knitting any sweaters for awhile!

Hey, you gotta love this town. Where else could a 115-pound alleged madam to the stars get arrested for pandering while taking out the trash and wind up with her own line of lingerie? In between, Heidi Fleiss had gazillion-dollar-a-year studio executives quaking in their BMWs over whether or not their names were in her little black book (which, by the way, was not a black book at all but a collection of Gucci day planners).

We don’t want to brag, but there were other momentous developments around town.

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Practically the whole town of Venice turned out to keep the state from killing a bunch of poor diseased ducks. They lost the crusade, unfortunately for the ducks.

But we have more ducks to take their place. Disney hatched a new hockey team, the Mighty Ducks (home arena: The Pond in Anaheim), and L.A. County Supervisor Ed Edelman retired after five terms, rendering himself a lame duck. Ha-ha!

So, as ’93 comes to a close, we are all breathing a little easier. Turns out we met the federal standard for nitrogen dioxide for the first time! Or was it carbon monoxide? Or was it ozone? Oh well. Our City Council also cleaned up the air by banning smoking in restaurants!

And we can all be thankful that the killer bees have not arrived. Yet.

Hope the holidays find you and yours out of debt and out of jail . . . we’re out of news!

Until next year,

Your pals in the City of the Angels

Metro’s Year in Review was reported and written by Faye Fiore, Richard Simon and Carla Hall.