When the Smoke Clears

You remember Watts. It’s the place that burned in the heat of riots back in 1965, after which we hugged and cried and promised that everything would be different.

And you remember South-Central. It’s the place that burned in the heat of riots back in 1992, after which we hugged and cried and promised that everything would be different.

Both times we began recovery programs to rebuild the areas and to assure the people in those downtrodden sections that we understood their anguish. I remember walking the streets of South-Central after the last riot, the worst in American history, and seeing celebrities and locals working side by side to remove the debris of chaos.

I remember ladies from Beverly Hills and retirees from Woodland Hills who whistled as they swept the riot-littered streets. I remember a racially mixed prayer service where even God seemed to promise to pitch in and help rebuild.

It was a time of healing. It always is when the acrid smoke of disaster is still in the air, when embers of fire still glow in the night.

But once the smoke clears and the embers cool, it’s a different story. Like promises that lovers make in the heat of passion, promises that altruists make in the heat of disaster are sometimes forgotten when morning comes.

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What brings this to mind is the troubling juxtaposition of two stories on The Times’ Metro Section Monday. The page glistened with irony.

On the left-hand side, a story told about promises to South-Central never kept. Plans for a $10-million industrial development made after the riots of ’92 are sinking like so many other pledges into a swamp of despair.

On the right-hand side of the page, a story told about L.A. County’s booming real estate market, climbing out of the recession of the early 1990s to new heights of prosperity, especially in affluent places like Beverly Hills.

In both stories, the term revitalization was used. In the story on the left, it alluded to a revitalization that never occurred. In the story on the right, it came from the happy mouth of County Assessor Kenneth P. Hahn.

“We’re in revitalization here,” he said. “Homeowners can feel that the value is back for their most expensive purchases.”

The story on the left talked about failure: funding that never came, factories that were never built, jobs that never materialized. High hopes degenerated into excuses and accusations.

Deputy City Atty. Chris Westoff summed it up: “There’s plenty of blame to go around on this one,” he said.

The story on the right sang of an expanding economy, of a $30-billion increase in real estate assessments, of $70 million poured into the county’s cash till.

The story on the left quoted a Watts preacher, the Rev. Reginald Pope, in observing the distance between promise and fulfillment.

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We are two different worlds in L.A. We’re the world Hahn talks about, glowing with optimism, fat with billionaires. And we’re the world Pope lives in, with a 40% poverty rate and unemployment up to three times the regional and national averages.

What we came up with after the riots of ’92 was something called Rebuild L.A., a name later changed to simply RLA out of sheer embarrassment. It was a joke, peopled with big names that eventually bailed out, singing of commitments never kept. RLA shut down after five years, its work undone.

It became a metaphor for the promises without substance made during those smoky nights of chaos. What it symbolized to me, and continues to symbolize, is that we are a culture at odds with our dream of equality, a division of haves and have-nots, a city at war with itself.

I realize that not everyone has forgotten the vows made in the tearful aftermath of upheaval. Not everyone has walked away, and some progress has been made. But where millions have been offered, billions are needed. And the pain of those promises that were made and broken continues to stab through a community that still needs help.

L.A. is fat city, able to muster truckloads of cash for sports arenas and amusement parks, slapping up malls and luxury housing units quicker than you can say dickriordan. More money is paid an actor for one movie or a baseball player for one season than most of us make in a lifetime.

But where wealth reigns, hunger exists, and those two stories on Monday’s Metro page said it best. There’s a distance between us that desperately needs closing. If it isn’t, the fires of discontent are likely to burn again.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.