Destination: Discovery : Traditional tours show you all that glitters. But new sightseeing ventures let you see--and taste--other parts of L.A. in hopes of erasing borders and easing fears.

Los Angeles is a city of borders, of hard-drawn boundaries. It is a city whose expanse both daunts and amazes longtime residents and first-time visitors alike.

Although one of the most photographed, discussed and eagerly glimpsed destinations, L.A. is probably one of the most misunderstood.

It’s just part of why, at the twilight of summer vacation, Jan Lebow has assembled a couple dozen students and curious others in an alley behind UCLA’s International Student Center on Galey Avenue.

Reading off a roll call studded with names from distant, disparate places--Israel, Spain, Iran, Japan, Thailand--Lebow then shepherds her crew away from the familiar Westwood campus. They pile into a bus painted Bruin blue and gold, and head off toward the concrete mesh of freeways.

“Our first stop,” Lebow shouts over the roar of the engine, “is First A.M.E. . . . Now read your notes.” She waves the red-and-green photocopied handouts above her head for illustration.

Lebow’s project, Discover L.A.! is just one strategy the International Student Center uses to help acclimate students to their new environs by alleviating deeply entrenched fears, often the product of myth and misinformation.

Although glitz-and-glamour city tours abound, disgruntled Angelenos who have grown weary of over-the-top media depictions of their neighborhoods have taken to explicating the city on their own terms. Lebow and others see tours as a way to create bridges and blur borders.

As the bus pushes southward, Lebow jumps up from her seat, her body swaying in rhythm with the pitching vehicle. Without the aid of a microphone, her strong voice shades the picture.

“OK, you guys, this is Western Avenue. . . . It reflects the diversity of Los Angeles. It’s a stopping-off point for newly arriving immigrants to Los Angeles. So it changes every year.”

“Is this the heart?” asks one student taking in the stretch of beauty shops, storefront churches and boarded-up facades.

But before Lebow can answer, the bus takes the curve of Harvard Boulevard. The street opens up onto sprays of flowers, strips of green, rambling California Craftsman homes, trees, birds--no danger, no nightmare.

What they will learn by tour’s end, Lebow hopes, is that what people call “South-Central” is made up of many hearts, many essential organs, all interconnected and alive.

Lebow, the center’s community relations director, says she was inspired to launch the project last year after reviewing concerns voiced by newly arrived students during focus groups.

“I was upset by the stereotypes. Particularly those about Latinos and African Americans,” Lebow says. “They were not based on personal experience, but what they saw in the media. Particularly after the (1992) uprising.”

The all-too-familiar media image loop of L.A.’s violent, drug-dealing youth has cast a long, menacing shadow.

“Not every black and/or Latino teen-ager is a gang-banger, not everyone is a drug abuser,” says Lebow, who endeavors to project a more complete picture. “It would be really nice to have a firsthand experience.”

Not your typical air-conditioned coach tour gliding along the strand or looping around the wooded cul-de-sacs of the city’s tonier foothills. Instead, these tours are the center’s attempt to reveal the substance of a city that to outsiders is often mostly mirage.

Bypassed segments of the city--neighborhoods too often thought to be blemishes--are the focus of Lebow’s journey. She throws some sunlight on the “secrets” of East L.A., breaks down the mythic monolith of South-Central and, for an eye-opening look at the quickly altering terrain, takes a leisurely sweep down the entire length of Sunset Boulevard--from the sea to the red-tiled spire of Downtown’s Union Station.

The hope is to move students out of Westwood and Westside environs and into awareness. Sometimes there is resistance, Lebow admits: “People accusing us of social engineering.” But in these still-tense and awkward times of polarization, sometimes only the non-organic approach can truly break down the barriers.

For every step forward, however, something seems to happen to set the efforts two steps back. The recent murders of two Japanese students in a supermarket parking lot in San Pedro ignited fiery headlines across Japan, fanning already acute fears about the United States, and Los Angeles in particular.

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Of late, touring L.A. to glimpse not just its much-touted surface glamour but its rich cultural mix has become a way to break through negative perceptions about communities of color.

In June, the economic-development group Operation HOPE hosted its second annual Banker’s Bus Tour of the Compton, Crenshaw, Lynwood and Watts-Willowbrook areas to encourage investment in these neglected neighborhoods.

During the World Cup soccer tournament, the L.A. Tourism Industry Development Council sponsored tours of South-Central, East L.A., Koreatown/Pico-Union and the easterly reaches of Hollywood for international journalists, consulate officials and even curious locals.

“They were a big success,” says project coordinator Billi Romain, noting that 103 people took part. “One of the things we didn’t want to say is that these communities were great and had no problems. But we wanted to introduce them to people in those communities who are organized to empower themselves and improve their lives.”

Not to stray too far from its main mission of developing an equitable citywide tourism policy, the Development Council is encouraging residents to create their own community tours. Among the potential benefits: tourist dollars for the host neighborhoods and increased understanding for those who come.

These non-traditional tours are a constructive way to rebut the intense media magnification of L.A.’s problems over the past few years. They are less trend than long-awaited antidote.

UCLA’s International Student Center, which has served the student body for 40 years, sees the tours as just another way to stitch together the vibrant swatches that represent this city.

More than 150 volunteers--students, families and “international advisers”--share everything from their homes to conversational English skills. The only prerequisite, center director Larry Gower says: “Just an interest in the world.”

More important than seeing the sights is face-to-face interaction. And the larger goal, Gower says, is to inspire twofold enrichment. “The students saying: ‘I really do have a good feel for Leimert Park’ or Glendale or wherever it happens to be. And participants saying: ‘I really understand India in a way that I would have never understood.’ ”

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At First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Rev. Leonard Jackson welcomes the assembly underneath a vibrant mural that depicts a timeline of the African American experience in L.A.

“It’s fine to quote Scripture,” says Jackson, explaining the role of the modern black church, “but you have to be able to put flesh on that word.”

From First A.M.E., Lebow moves her brood through black Los Angeles’ residential and business districts. After the stucco homes painted in pastels pass by in a blur, one student admits: “When we were driving through South-Central, I thought, ‘Wow, this looks like anywhere.’ ”

There is a stop at the Los Angeles Sentinel, the largest black-owned newspaper in the West, and lunch of shared histories over fried chicken, collard greens, candied yams and corn bread at Dulan’s Restaurant. The afternoon segment begins with a stop at the Community Youth Sports & Arts Foundation.

“It’s a small little place,” explains its director, Chilton Alphonse, as he takes them through the classrooms, living quarters and weight-training space out back. “So we can’t help the world.” Still, neighborhood kids come here to sit in on parenting classes, learn entrepreneurial skills and work toward high school equivalency degrees.

And the day concludes with a pause at Leimert Park--to stroll around the galleries and gift shops, and to learn, from shop owner Brian Breye and his Museum in Black, a little bit about the African and then the African’s American experience.

The pause over lunch provides the space for discussion, comparison. A Thai woman picks up a bottle of Southern pepper sauce and smiles at the familiarity.

“I feel very fortunate to be able to be here for this,” says Nava Sornenschein, a therapist from Israel, cutting through her fried chicken with a fork and knife. “We knew about the violence. Before I got here I thought we would have to be more careful. When we saw this movie, ‘Boyz N the Hood,’ you get the impression that (the black community) was just slums. We expected to see horrible slums,” she recalls, “but when I got here I was surprised.”

Sornenschein believes there is a desperate need for many more tours like this. “Not just for students . . . but for people who live right here. People should have more encounters. It is something that you can’t get from reading.”

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It’s Lebow’s way of taking a chisel to walls. She was lucky, because her borders dissolved quite early. A native, Lebow, 34, spent her formative years in public schools, taking advantage of L.A.’s mix.

“I’ve been involved with the black community since junior high,” says Lebow, who is white, with glinting green eyes and curly close-cropped hair. “And I’ve always felt comfortable.”

In seventh grade, Lebow made a friend named Kim. “She came over my house and I had on KHJ (radio)--what all the white kids were listening to. So she changed the station to KGFJ,” Lebow recalls with a raspy laugh, “what the black kids were listening to.”

From there her circle shifted. “She introduced me to her friends, the parties. Pretty soon,” she recalls, “it was all KGFJ after awhile. It was a complete immersion.”

Lebow is a realist. She knows it isn’t that easy for everyone. Nor can you dismiss the fears. She uses an example of a young South Korean man who sat silent and trembling as the group made its way to last year’s African Marketplace street festival. But by trip’s end, Lebow remembers, “His head was bobbing to the rhythms and he was smiling.”

Direct contact is the antidote for fear. Says Lebow: “Fears are not based on reality, (but) based on not knowing.” But she also knows that one trip will not eclipse years of potent media images or vivid rumor. “One day is not going to do it. It is a starting point.”

Although there has been talk of including other excursions through other cultures, “I’m most interested in the black and Latino communities,” Lebow says. “That’s what we are fighting tooth and nail. . . . These are the communities that are maligned and libeled and slandered--mostly, and I’m sick of it. It’s kind of a personal crusade.”

The International Student Center’s Gower sees the program as a way to do some twofold good.

“Last year in Italy, the most-watched program was a soap called the ‘Bold and the Beautiful.’ And students came expecting that,” he explains.

“So you get it on both ends--you get unreal projections (causing) students . . . to overestimate the affluent areas and to be overly fearful of the economically less advantaged communities. Across the board, you simply need to say that there is decency in every community and then look for it.”

Sightseeing Black L.A.

1. FIRST AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH

2270 S. Harvard Blvd.

Part of the oldest black denomination in the United States, First A.M.E. was founded in 1872 by former slave Biddy Mason. It was moved from Downtown to this location in 1969. Visitors are welcome at services each Sunday at 8 a.m., 10 and noon.

2. LOS ANGELES SENTINEL

3800 Crenshaw Blvd.

One of the nation’s largest African American-owned newspapers, the Sentinal was founded in 1933 by Leon H. Washington.

3. DULAN’S RESTAURANT

4859 Crenshaw Blvd.

Southern-style soul food and a faithful clientele makes this a community power center. Owner Greg Dulan is the son of the owner of Aunt Kizzy’s, a popular restaurant in Marina del Rey.

4. COMMUNITY YOUTH SPORTS & ARTS FOUNDATION

4828 Crenshaw Blvd.

This nonprofit center, founded in 1983 by Clinton Alphonse, works to steer teen-agers away from drugs and gangs.

5. LEIMERT PARK

Degnan Boulevard, one block east of Crenshaw.

This is the heart of black Los Angeles’ artistic community, with jazz clubs, art galleries, coffeehouses, photography studios, dance workshops and poetry readings. The Museum in Black, owned by Brian Breye holds an extensive collection of African and African American art objects and memorabilia.