YEAR IN REVIEW

The year now passing is the 215th since the pobladores--that’s “founders” to all you immigrants--trudged wearily north from Mexico and hopefully placed their dusty little pueblo under the protection of Our Lady Queen of the Angels.

Optimistic Angelenos, who in recent years have seemed in unusually short supply, might want to conclude 1996 by lighting candles before her shrine. This was, as the conventional wisdom in such circles goes, the year in which Los Angeles--prototypal postwar Sunbelt boomtown--pulled back at last from the brink of decline, and began the forward-looking work of transforming itself into the world’s premier new high-tech, postindustrial, content-providing, multicultural metropolis.

Slowly but steadily, economic recovery stole across the basin: The real estate market firmed,; new jobs, albeit many of them with decidedly low wages, were created; one of the region’s flagship industries--entertainment--boomed, while the other--aerospace--pulled out of its nose dive and continued a potentially promising round of consolidation, particularly in the battered defense sector. Plans for the physical symbols of this brave new era sprouted on drawing boards from downtown to the sea--a new Roman Catholic cathedral, a new concert hall, a new arena for basketball and hockey, and a new stadium for football, mostly within walking distance of the Civic Center; a vast new film and television production facility--DreamWorks--on the edge of the Ballona Wetlands.

Skeptics might take another view, since all of these projects--not to mention the subway, the proposed expansion of Los Angeles International Airport and the now nearly legendary Alameda Corridor, the planned rail link between the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and downtown’s warehouse district--remain mired in the sort of civic discord and controversy that have turned Los Angeles into the La Brea Tar Pits of local politics.

Supporters of the new concert hall are desperately trying to raise at least $50-million--the next increment required to put up what would be not only a new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but also the first major public building in the city designed by its most distinguished living architect, Frank Gehry.

The City Council, meanwhile, still must approve whatever financial arrangements ultimately are struck over the proposed new downtown sports facilities. Odds on the outcome do not suggest a sure thing. Farther west, the vagaries of the private real estate and capital markets suggest that, despite a lucrative package of public incentives, the Ballona Wetlands may yet see DreamWorks deferred.

To the skeptics, 1996 was a year of impending federal and state health and welfare cuts, all of which seem to fall hardest on Los Angeles.

It was 12 months of dithering-as-usual at City Hall and the County Hall of Administration, of popular dissatisfaction that finally has hardened into concrete proposals to break up not only the Los Angeles Unified School District, but also the city itself. It was the year of divisive exercises in direct democracy, like the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, and of continued legal wrangling over Proposition 187 with its unprecedented restrictions on illegal immigrants.

It also was a year of embittering exercises in insider politics over the future of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams.

There’s something, of course, to both the optimistic and the skeptical views. For example, prodded by threats of secession from the city--particularly in the San Fernando Valley--the reform of the city’s charter became a topic for discussion in City Hall. However, the City Council came up with one plan and Mayor Richard Riordan resolved upon another. The courts were called upon to arbitrate, and Riordan’s plan will go on the April ballot.

Score one for the mayor.

The outcome of the struggle over whether Williams will serve another term as chief may be another matter.

Riordan’s frustrations with the chief’s management of his department are clear. But Williams, the first African American to lead the LAPD, has a reservoir of support in both the council and various parts of the community. If the Police Commission, whose members are appointed by the mayor, decides not to renew Williams’ contract, a bitter fight with racial overtones seems unavoidable.

But perhaps no public agency typified the continued muddle in local politics quite like the MTA. Its year of turmoil included the resignation this month of Joseph E. Drew, the second MTA chief to leave in a year. On his way out, Drew cited what he called “public hypercriticism” of the agency as one cause of his departure.

Indeed, there was plenty of criticism. A subway tunneling machine got stuck in the Santa Monica Mountains--twice in six months. The MTA came under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee and the agency’s own inspector general. Congress slashed funding for subway construction, contributing to a projected $1-billion shortfall in the county’s long-range plan, causing a number of transit leaders, including Riordan, to reevaluate their support for the subway.

Even a mural at MTA headquarters was covered up because of employee complaints about its depiction of a naked man--reproductions of a photographic series taken more than a century ago by pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

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On the other hand, there was some good news for the majority of transit users: An out-of-court settlement was reached in a two-year legal fight that requires the MTA to put more buses on the streets and provide cheaper and safer rides. The consent decree preserved the popular monthly pass, reduced its price from $49 to $42 and required that at least 152 more buses be put into service in the next two years.

The settlement, reached in September, came in response to a lawsuit accusing the MTA of neglecting poor and minority bus riders to build rail lines for more affluent commuters.

Of the major new construction projects proposed over the last year, none so neatly captured the typically Angeleno paradox of peril and promise quite like the plans to replace the Roman Catholic cathedral with a headquarters more befitting the nation’s most populous archdiocese. The public controversy over the existing cathedral, St. Vibiana’s, erupted in full force June 1, when giant cranes began to take down the cupola of the 120-year-old landmark.

That action enraged and energized preservationists, who won a temporary restraining order against the demolition.

In the following months, the Los Angeles Conservancy repeatedly won in its court actions seeking to save the earthquake-damaged church at 2nd and Main streets. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony was equally busy--denouncing the conservancy for what he called an infringement on religious freedom and rallying strong political support not only from most of his own flock, but also from the City Council and the mayor.

Meanwhile, an international search for an architect led to the selection of Jose Rafael Moneo of Spain. As the court battles continued, the archdiocese found itself unable to negotiate an acceptable price for the adjacent parcels of land it required. So the can-do cardinal and his advisors selected an alternate site, a county-owned parking lot between Temple Street and the Hollywood Freeway, just across from the county administration building.

On Dec. 23, the archdiocese formally acquired the site for $10.85 million, and a preliminary model of Rafael Moneo’s plan was unveiled. The fate of St. Vibiana’s remains uncertain.

The city and archdiocese have begun a study for possible demolition, and Mahony hopes to sell the land to help finance the new project. But the conservancy and the USC School of Architecture are studying ways to seismically strengthen the church and convert it to secular use.

This also was the year that such events as the O.J. Simpson civil trial and the sudden unemployment of Michael Ovitz confirmed the status of Los Angeles news as a kind of strange new cultural export to the world.

Today, matters that in previous years would have been of essentially local interest are transformed into highly charged symbolic dramas into which the burgeoning print and electronic chat industries can project whatever the agitation or anger du jour may be out there in the ever-expanding electronic village.

By now the never-ending legal struggles involving the former football star turned TV pitchman and minor comic actor have become a never-ending national shouting match over topics ranging from the alleged failures of the criminal and civil justice systems to the problem of spousal abuse to the equities of the child custody laws.

The departure from Disney of Ovitz, the former super agent turned unhappy and unwanted entertainment conglomerate executive, has provoked a similar public soul-searching over the size of his severance package, which may reach $90 million.

Existential questions about the relative worth of various forms of human labor and economic worries over the unintentional absurdities of capitalism notwithstanding, the Ovitz saga does prove that not fitting in at Disney is better than winning the lottery.

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1996 was a year in which the retirement of Ernest Fleischmann after 27 years as managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra signaled the end of a cultural era in the city. Fleischmann, a unique hybrid of serious artist and canny impresario, was the longest-lived and, in many ways, most successful of a generation of men and women who transformed Los Angeles’ essentially parochial cultural institutions into major players on the world stage.

Similarly, the death at age 90 of former Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Sr. brought a political epoch to a close. No chief executive since Hiram Johnson had placed so forceful a stamp on daily life in California.

Just as the great Progressive Johnson reshaped the state’s politics, so Brown was responsible for the great public universities, freeways and water systems that changed life and work in the state forever. And, unlike Johnson, who died an embittered anti-Semite and isolationist, Brown remained a tireless and unshaken advocate for the kind of activist governmental agenda historian Arthur Schlesinger once labeled “the politics of remedy.”

Other losses were less somber, and at least some of the news was tinged with wonder.

In 1996, Angelenos’ sense of place was shaken by a city-enacted ban on the use near residences of gardeners’ gas-powered leaf blowers--devices that have long been not only an essential part of our daily soundtrack, but also an aural symbol of our particular notion of the good life.

What, for example, could be more like Los Angeles than the idea that mechanization and cheap labor would make it possible to have a garden in which you never had to pull a weed or rake a leaf yourself?

Finally, the fundamental relationship of Angelenos to the cosmos was challenged by two stunning events: the retirement of Tommy Lasorda as manager of the Dodgers and the discovery that a rock from Mars may contain fossils of ancient life.

Even now, both things seem equally improbable.