Searching for a Legacy

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

--T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

On a bright and beautiful Los Angeles morning, with the skies blown clear and early hints of spring in the air, I started south down Vermont Avenue on a walk across the midsection of the city. Mine would be the dawdling pace of a tourist. I’d put in only a mile or two each day, gradually working my way from the now hip Los Feliz district to the heart of South L.A., doubling back by bus at sundown.

Along the way I would stop often to talk with people, and I’d regularly retrace my steps from the day before to make sure I had not overlooked anything of significance. Just what I was looking for I could not say--scars and memories and signs of healing, I suppose, and also a revelation or two about cities, how they hold themselves together, how they sometimes fall apart.

This was a walk that would cover a distance, not only of 10 miles, but also 10 years. For five unnerving days in the spring of 1992, this same stretch of Vermont had been a linear battleground, the main corridor of the chaos that followed the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King. The trouble had extended to all corners of metropolitan Los Angeles, of course, from Long Beach to Pasadena, from Parker Center to Frederick’s of Hollywood, but Vermont, by far, got the worst of it.

At least 128 buildings were reported damaged or destroyed along this avenue, nearly twice as many as recorded on any other street. Vermont was where the first of the riot’s 54 victims fell--18-year-old Louis Watson, struck by a bullet that at least some witnesses believed ricocheted off a safe being pirated by looters. Vermont was where the large-scale looting first broke out, at a “ten-dollar store” near where the street intersects with Manchester.

“Looting in progress over Manchester and Vermont,” an LAPD helicopter crew reported by radio that Wednesday, April 29, 1992, at 6:29 p.m., 15 minutes before a gravel truck driver named Reginald Denny would be dragged from his rig at Florence and Normandie and beaten. “. . . Suspects running in all directions.”

A quarter century earlier, the Watts riots had been contained mainly within South Los Angeles--allowing Angelenos who lived beyond the burn zone to regard the damage as a self-inflicted wound, something they had done to themselves. This time it would be different.

Within 24 hours, the rioting had crossed under the Santa Monica Freeway, breaching a symbolic barrier, and spilled into mid-city neighborhoods. There the arsonists and looters seemed to be motivated by something other than outrage over police brutality and racial injustice. There the point appeared to be to take what could be taken--tires, Huggies, cleaning solvent, whatever--before this side door of unexpected opportunity slammed shut. “A postmodern bread riot,” social historian Mike Davis called this northern front of the outburst.

Vermont yielded some of the riot’s most arresting images: young Korean men crouched with pistols in firing positions as they peered out from embattled shops; looters filing into overrun stores; an entire block of commercial buildings aflame. Vermont also produced strange tales, anecdotes gleaned from the shadows that fall between the idea of Los Angeles--the next great world city, the shining capital of the Pacific Rim--and the crasser reality of what it is capable of becoming, if only for a few frenzied days and nights. Almost everybody I met on my walk had a story to tell. From Ji Y. Suh, the general manager of Vermont Chevrolet Buick, near 4th Street, came this one:

Suh and his workers had defended the auto lot for three nights until police established a staging operation behind its fence. They went without sleep, arming themselves with shotguns and pistols to hold back the throng of several hundred rioters. Deterred, the mob redirected its energy to opportunities across the street. An apartment house was set ablaze. A tire store was picked clean--”down to the last tire and screwdriver,” Suh recalled. A hole was kicked in the bottom of the Jack in the Box. It was what happened at the Jack in the Box that remains most vividly with Suh.

He saw whole families, elderly, couples, children, all queued up outside, patiently waiting for a chance to wiggle through the hole and into the fast-food franchise. These were not strangers, Suh said, but people he might see any day meandering up and down the sidewalk, waiting on a bus: “Plain Janes,” he said, “normal people.”

At first they emerged with restaurant equipment, and after that with food, hamburger patties, buns. With seemingly everything of value carried away, the people still kept pouring through the hole. And in the end, Suh said, “they were coming out with nothing but straws. Can you imagine? That was all there was left to take. They were coming out with handfuls of straws.”

My journey had been baptized in minor spectacle. Standing at the corner of Vermont and Hollywood, I heard a horn blare, tires screech and then a dull thud. I looked up to see a blue Ford van rocking on its tires, green fluid draining from its underbelly. A maroon Mistsubishi was planted in the van’s right side. This, it seemed clear, was another left turn gone bad--a not atypical misadventure on the surface streets of Los Angeles. In the days to follow, I would see left turns result in two collisions and a half dozen finger-flipping, profanity-laced standoffs.

As I headed away from this first collision--nobody appeared to be seriously hurt--I considered the theme of left turns as a kind of riot in miniature: Behind these commonplace impasses lurk frustration and self-defeating anger and an instinct for anarchy, the same fuel that, on a drastically larger scale, had fed the fires of a decade before.

I toyed with this admittedly over-stretched metaphor to Santa Monica Boulevard. At this corner a battle had been waged for control of a Korean- owned electronics store, leaving one trespasser shot dead. A check-cashing storefront had been overrun and destroyed. A Payless Shoe Source outlet had been torched.

Now there was scant evidence of any of this. Here was a corner engaged in the mundane, peaceful rituals of the everyday. Hair was being trimmed at the Beauty Hair Center. The electronics store was now a huge and bustling Staples. The Payless had been rebuilt.

Behind the shoe store register stood a short young man with brushed-back hair and soft eyes. An American flag was pinned to his blue work apron, along with a name tag that identified him as Isaac Castillo, the assistant manager. He knew nothing about the fire and the gunfight.

He had been 14 years old at the time; his mother, the protective type, had kept him inside their apartment between Vermont and Oxford. His only memories were fragmented images, strange men with shotguns passing by the window, looters ducking inside a doorway across the street, “and that’s about it.”

Before closing my notebook, I decided on one last boilerplate question: Do you think, I asked young Castillo, that Los Angeles was changed much by the rioting? Are things any better now? With this lame question, his face froze. He stared at me for a moment. “No,” he said, “it hasn’t changed at all. It’s still the same.”

Why do you say that?

There was another pause.

“My mother,” he said finally, “was killed last month.”

He said this in a whisper, and I could barely make it out.

“My mother was killed,” he repeated. “They shot her.”

Who shot her?

“Probably it was gangs. The police haven’t caught anybody yet. She was driving a vegetable truck in Elysian Park. Three people got murdered that same night. It was in the newspaper. They called her ‘the Vegetable Lady.’ ”

I offered apologies. He shrugged.

“You see,” he said, eyes burning through the tears.

“Things haven’t changed much, have they? It’s still crazy. They are still killing people.”

Along with a few pertinent books for coffee shop reading and a stack of newspaper clippings from the riot coverage, I carried with me down Vermont a list of addresses where rebuilding or significant repairs had been required. This turned out to be excess baggage. The new strip malls, gas stations, shoe and tire stores that had replaced the old were easy to spot: They were the structures with cleaner and, sometimes it seemed, thicker stucco walls. Many were outfitted with metal window coverings and imposing iron fences. At a few stores, I noticed waist-high barriers erected between the parking lot and building proper; whatever the actual design purpose, it was not difficult to imagine these walls providing cover for sentries wishing to repulse a mob. This fortress architecture can be subtle: steel posts, painted a soft green, arrayed in a tight picket line across a store at Vermont and 8th where, in 1992, looters had gained entrance by ramming a pickup truck through the wall: Not the next time, these posts declare.

On the southeast corner of Vermont and Beverly, I walked past a pawnshop, tripping an alarm that whooped like an ambulance siren. I crossed through two doors of iron bars and introduced myself to the owner, a Russian emigre named Vera Tenenbaum. A pleasant, albeit cautious, woman, she stood on the other side of a plexiglass shield that ran the length of the counter

. I shouted questions at her through the barrier, and she answered in a like manner. I imagine we caught about every other word.

“Was this shop hit in the riot?” I hollered.

“It was after the King trial, Rodney King” she answered.

“Yes, this business, though, did it get robbed?”

“Yes, they steal everything.”

“Did they take any guns?”

“Yes, everything gone. We had a flower shop next door, too. They take everything.”

“So they took guns and flowers?”

“What?”

Finally she slid open a little window. Communication improved. Tenenbaum and her husband had emigrated from Russia in 1974. They bought the pawnshop nine years later. The neighborhood, she said, had gone downhill. Business was off. There was not much stock on the shelves: used blue jeans, a few electric guitars, a tribal mask, a pair of shoulder pads, and, inside locked glass cases, watches and jewelry.

Some of the jewelry, she said, had been pawned 15 years ago by customers: “They are scared to come into this area,” she said, “because it was robbed in the riot. That is why we stay here. We cannot take property away and close the store. They sue us if we do. And they cannot come and take it out, because they are too scared.”

She locked herself back inside her wall of plexiglass. I gave a nod to the two security cameras and moved for the door. The alarm gave me one last whoop as I headed down the sidewalk.

To walk across Los Angeles can be an exhilarating experience.

What might seem a modest day hike in the woods becomes, when conducted on city sidewalks--cutting under freeways, crossing unmarked boundaries into unfamiliar neighborhoods--an excursion. The eye catches details missed from a car, graffiti sliced into the trunk of a palm tree, a well-manicured garden squeezed behind ramshackle houses. At one point, I passed under a ficus tree shimmering from the weight of unseen, but wildly shrieking, birds. At another I stopped to watch a little girl in a powder-blue sweatsuit and pigtails roll by on skates, licking an ice cream cone. Her sweatshirt identified her as “Angel.” Down the same sidewalk less than a minute later trudged a bearded wanderer, shoeless, skin burned by the sun, clothes plastered with grease and waste, leaving in his wake a trail of stench that turned up noses at 50 paces.

At a bus stop near Florence and Vermont, I was panhandled by a toothless woman in an American flag T-shirt. She unleashed for my benefit a wide-ranging discourse on abusive husbands, Beverly Hills housekeeping and gunplay. With each new theme she demanded another dollar, and she punctuated each demand with a stout punch to my shoulder.

As I moved through the middle passages of my route, bisecting the city’s most heavily mixed neighborhoods, I started taking note of the cacophony of signage: Filipino Chinese Delicatessan . . . Fiesta Grill . . . Tom’s Hamburgers . . . Horizon Church Ministries (Where Heaven and Earth Meet) . . . City of Stars Collision Center . . . In Sung Acupuncture . . . Rosa de Sharon Liberia Christiano . . . H.O.T. Thai . . . Koryo Bakery . . . Italle Optometric Center . . . Makkah Meats . . .

There was a poetry to these signs. They seemed so very much Los Angeles. Before the riot, it had been popular, especially among L.A.’s leaders, to celebrate this mix, to sing rhapsodies to the polyglot wonders on display across the metropolis. The riot stopped the singing. As a Times headline so neatly summarized at the time: “View of Model Multiethnic City Vanishes in Smoke.”

While the composition of looters and arsonists was certainly diverse, nobody found in this cause for celebration. There would be no fancy phrase-making about diversity of dissent. A web of racial and ethnic fault lines had been exposed. And in the aftermath came backlash. No great feat of political genius was required to connect the dots between the upheavals of 1992 and the subsequent campaigns to boot undocumented immigrants from public schools and hospitals, to strip away affirmative action, to reject bilingual education.

People I spoke with along Vermont tended to bring a certain bluntness to discussions of racial matters. “Can I tell you what I saw?” began a riot witness who identified himself as part Chinese, part Filipino. “Where I was it was mostly Hispanic people causing the trouble, people from Central America.”

A bank janitor, originally from Mexico, offered this: “Everything has changed for the worse. This used to be a nice and quiet neighborhood. Now so many people are coming here from everywhere, from all over the world; they don’t want to choose the American Way.” And an immigrant from the former Soviet Armenia complained: “The neighborhood has gotten worse since the riot. The population has changed. Before it was mostly white and Asian Pacific people. Now it is more Mexican and African American people.”

Ji Suh, the 49-year-old general manager of the car lot, described how the fury African Americans unleashed on Korean immigrants during the riot changed him: “I lived here for 30 years, and for a long time I don’t care what others like or do. I work and I survive. I achieve my goal. I thought that was enough. But that’s not how it is is done here. This is the United States of America. This is the melting pot. We have to reach out to other communities. We have got to accept each other.”

He told of disputes over parking with Muslims who frequent a neighboring Islamic center: “They have spit on my face. If it was before the riot, I probably would punch them out. Now I deal with it differently. I try to be more diplomatic.” Such is post-riot progress in the rainbow city.

Not everybody, it seems, received the news that the city’s multicultural magic vanished in the smoke of 1992. The stuff of myth can still be found, tucked away in the most common of storefronts and strip malls: At Vermont and 8th, one of the hardest-hit corners in the riots, I stuck my head inside a sliver of a shop, Lucky Shoes and Toys. Half the block had burned down in 1992. This store, luckily enough, was located in the part that survived. Seated on a tiny chair in the back was a Vietnamese woman dressed in a green blouse, blue, baggy slacks and red sandals.

Her name is Lien Trinh. She kept her arms folded across her chest as she spoke. On that first night, Trinh and her husband had seen TV shots of the fire and assumed all was lost. They drove by the next day and found the shop had been spared. They were back in business two weeks later.

She excused herself to negotiate with a customer, an immigrant from Central America.

“Doce?” the customer asked, holding up a white pump.

“Doce,” Trinh said firmly. Twelve dollars.

The other woman sighed.

“Numero siete?”

Trinh started digging through a pile of boxes on the floor for a size 7.

“When I started,” she said, “I don’t speak Spanish. But I’m learning from my customers.”

I asked her how she came to be selling shoes in Los Angeles.

“That’s a long story,” Trinh said, “long story.”

She and her husband worked at U.S. military bases during the Vietnam War. When Saigon fell, they found themselves routinely thrown to the end of rice lines. “Oooh,” she said. “Many headaches.” So they were smuggled out in a truck. They were locked into the cargo hold for two days and nights; Trinh medicated her two toddlers to keep them quiet at the checkpoints.

In Cambodia, smugglers counseled them to stash their gold inside the soles of their sandals, a precaution against bandits. The next morning the smugglers were gone. So were the sandals. The refugees set out for Thailand on their own.

“We walked,” she said. “Oooh, it was raining so hard. It’s a long story, you want to hear more?”

Now the customer was waving the white pump, size 7.

“Otro color?” she asked.

“No,” Trinh said, “todo blanco.”

Eventually, after many twists and turns, the family made it to the United States. She found a job in a hospital; he worked at a swap meet. Sixteen years ago they bought this little store on Vermont. The entire family, the daughter and son who came over from Vietnam and the little boy born in the States, worked selling shoes.

“At first it was very slow,” Trinh recalled. “Now it’s a little more better.”

I asked if her children still worked at the store. No, she said. Her daughter is now a schoolteacher, a product of UC Riverside.

Her oldest son will graduate this spring from UC Davis, in engineering.

And her youngest? He is to enter UC Berkeley in the fall.

“I told you,” she said, her smile exposing a gold tooth, “it’s a long story.”

It would be known by many names. to Spanish-speaking Angelenos, it was quemazones, the grand burning; to Korean immigrants, sa-i-ku, or April 29, in keeping with a Korean tradition of naming historic events by the dates they occur. And now, crossing under under the Santa Monica Freeway, I began to encounter people who considered the word “riot” offensive, or at least off the mark.

“It was not a riot,” insisted a community activist I met at the African American Community Unity Center on Vermont and 53rd. “It was civil unrest.”

Others made reference to the “uprising” or “rebellion.” The array of semantical variations suggests that what happened 10 years ago was more complicated than outrage over a single court case or a burst of wholesale opportunism. In “Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising,” an anthology of riot-inspired reflections I took along on my walk, scholar Cornel West argues that “what happened in Los Angeles . . . was neither a race riot nor a class rebellion.

“Rather, this monumental upheaval was a muti-racial, trans-class and largely male display of justified social rage. For all its ugly, xenophobic resentment, its air of adolescent carnival, and its downright barbaric behavior, it signified the sense of powerlessness in American society.”

From what I read, saw and remembered, I came to regard the rebellious grand burnings of that April 29 and beyond as not one monumental upheaval, but two. The twilight hours after the acquittals brought the eruption of anger and frustration that everybody but the LAPD seemed to know was inescapable.

There was a lull the next morning, a Thursday, but in the afternoon the burning and looting resumed. In this second round, as a compilation of LAPD incident reports later would demonstrate, hot spots increasingly flared up in sectors north of the Santa Monica Freeway: This would be the riot of equal opportunity looting. By Friday the military troops began moving into town, and the winding down was on.

On this southern leg of my journey I heard for the first time mention of “the Reginald Denny Four” and Latasha Harlins, the 15-year-old African American shoplifter who had been shot dead by a Korean merchant in 1991. The treatment of African Americans by the LAPD began to come up in every conversation.

“We need more police out walking around on the streets,” suggested 41-year-old Nicholas Bryant. “If all you see is a guy in a car shining a light in your face, you are not going to trust him. And he is not going to trust you.”

The more people I met along Vermont the more I became cognizant of a heretofore unnoticed phenomenon of the riot: Nobody seems to have taken part in it. I did not talk to a single person who had anything to do with any looting, burning or even spirited rabble-rousing. Yes, many of them could provide fantastic, richly detailed accounts of the action--looters frying themselves on jewelry store trip wires, shootouts between gang members and shop owners, limbs severed in the stampede through a plate glass window. As for themselves, well . . . .

They had watched from “across the street.”

Or they had been “out and around” the riot, but not in it.

Or they had been at home, “glued to the television.”

An uncommon number of Angelenos, judging by my informal survey, were down in Orange County--”OC,” as a panhandler at Vermont and 8th put it--on the days and nights in question.

Somebody, though, had been busy. Somebody, for instance, spirited away 132 pianos from Reed’s Music, a venerable Los Angeles establishment at Vermont and 46th. For Jerome Bleeker, 80 years old at the time, this was the second riot he would endure since buying the store after World War II. In the Watts riots, he and his staff pushed a piano against the front door to keep back the crowd; only one organ was lost.

In 1992 the mob was more determined. Iron gates were twisted off hinges, plate glass windows knocked out. Still, how so many pianos--uprights, baby grands, every single one in stock except a grand piano that apparently couldn’t be squeezed through the doors--remains a mystery of logistics.

Later stories circulated of pianos sailing along Vermont Avenue on dollies. Bleeker cannot confirm it: “I didn’t stay around long enough to see.” Early that first evening, police had informed him the crowd was moving north on Vermont: “We were warned they were pretty close, and we were advised to get out.”

He returned the next day. Sheets of music were scattered about the floor. The walls were covered with painted epithets. Strangers milled about the store, picking through the ruins. Bleeker didn’t attempt to shoo them away; he just stood and watched, bewildered by the scene.

His losses, however, were insured, and in time Bleeker was facing a difficult question: “Do we take the money and run?” He talked it over with his family and staff. They stayed. And now, a decade later, having reached the age of 90, Bleeker has decided he might take a whirl at the retirement life. The store is for sale, but attracting buyers has not been easy.

“They say, ‘Oh, your business is in South Los Angeles. I don’t want to come down there.’ ” He tries to reassure them, insisting that “it’s no worse here in terms of hold-ups and break-ins and that sort of thing.” Nevertheless, this native of New Jersey, who came to Los Angeles as a young man to play piano for the early cowboy movies, said he remains optimistic--not only about selling the store, but about the city as a whole. He has faith in the future. In the meantime, the iron gates that failed in 1992 have been replaced by solid-metal shields that roll down and lock tight.

Do these work better?

“Oh yeah,” he said without hesitation. “They’re the best.”

It was late in the afternoon when I left Bleeker. Long shadows stretched across Vermont. The bright skies at the advent of my walk had yielded to a smoggy haze. As I was making a note to myself, I heard, yet again, a squeal of tires. A car was spinning wildly in the street. In another neighborhood, my first guess would have been movie shoot. This seemed more ominous.

The small station wagon came to a sideways halt in the middle of the street, blocking another vehicle. All movement on the street stopped. Other pedestrians drifted slowly into doorways and behind walls. I followed their lead. At last a woman climbed out of the driver’s side. She was trembling. A passenger came around to console her.

It was then I noticed, about 100 yards away in the crosswalk, the body of a brown-and-white dog. What had happened seemed clear. This was no gangland showdown. Rather, the driver had swerved in an effort to miss the animal and lost control. Somewhat sheepishly, we all returned to our rounds.

The next morning I made my way to Beverly Blake’s tidy white bungalow on 53rd Street. I had gotten her name from newspaper clippings. In 1992 this single mother of three had joined neighbors to fight with garden hoses a fire at their community center, located on the corner in a century-old brick church.

She unlocked the front gate and let me in, pausing at the giant twin palm trees in the front yard, each surrounded by flowers and ferns. Every house in the neighborhood, she said, once had palms just like these--a developer’s touch from early 20th Century Los Angeles. Now only Blake still had her trees.

Inside, we sipped coffee and spoke of anarchy, fear and the racial divide: “People can get to a point,” Blake said, picking her words carefully, “where there is an overwhelming desire to show the outside community that we have been hurt far beyond any capacity we have to hold it in . . . .

“The European American has no idea of the psychological makeup of the African American. The African American has absolutely no idea of the psychological makeup of the European American. We relate to each other through fear, and primarily fear of the unknown. It’s like man and woman. We live together and we don’t know each other very well.”

I told her some of what I’d seen on my walk, the signboards, the collisions of people from so many countries.

“It is a polyglot city,” Blake said. “However, I just don’t think anybody knows what to do with it. There is no precedent for what we’ve become . . . . I think we have good intentions, but there is a difference between the vision and the reality. We really don’t know how to approach this, do we?

“Maybe,” she said after a pause, “maybe it will never be any different. Maybe what happens in life is that we simply continue to try and bring the different pieces together. We may never reach a bottom line. It may never be a resolved. Maybe it’s all a process.”

The city, never finished, exists in the striving?

“That’s what I think,” she said.

“And there will never be a perfect left-hand turn in Los Angeles?”

“Never.”

“Looking for an address or something?”

I had not seen this man, standing off the sidewalk, leaning against a cinder-block wall. He had seen me--walking through a part of the city where foot traffic in general, and 46-year-old white pedestrians in particular, tend to be sparse. His name was Michael Cocquia. He was 33 years old, a custodian at a nearby school. He was dressed in a khaki-colored shirt and trousers and black boots. His head was shaved. I explained what I was up to, and he began to tell me about the riot.

“It wasn’t just Rodney King,” he said. “There were a whole lot of brutality building up to it.” Pointing as he spoke, he ran through a list of neighborhood enterprises lost to fire, a swap meet, a market, a shopping mall, none of them yet to be replaced. It was, he said, “like you tore up where you live. And it didn’t really come to no solution, no conclusion.”

Indeed, just as there were two riots, a case can be made that there have been two recoveries as well, as post-riot studies have pointed out again and again. Early in my walk, new strip malls marked the battlegrounds. Once I crossed under the Santa Monica Freeway, however, I started to notice a surprising number of weed-covered lots--graveyards of structures lost in the riot.

One such lot was home to a broken-down motorboat. Perched on a trailer and plastered with graffiti, this forlorn vessel seemed a sardonic play on that popular political axiom of the ’92 presidential campaign, the one about a rising tide lifting all boats.

In the latter stretches, I would pass shopping centers guarded like small fortresses, motels with no windows facing the street and vacant fields where, right after the riot, plans for new supermarkets had been announced--promises that later would be rescinded with not quite so much fanfare as when they were made.

There has been some rebuilding, of course. New Auto Zone and Payless Shoes franchises sit on seemingly every other corner of Vermont. I noticed a new Ralphs not far from USC--and noticed, as well, the electronic security devices installed at every checkout counter.

All in all, though, these last blocks seemed to mock the sentiments of hope and resolve that gushed forth after the riot, grand talk about the trauma marking “the birth of L.A., as well as the death of its innocence,” about the need going forward to “transform burnt-out structures into the receptacles of our future.”

“There were a lot of promises made,” more than one resident of South Los Angeles reminded me. They tended to leave it at that.

It already was dark when I boarded the bus at Vermont and Manchester.

I was done walking. Now would come the ride back to the other end. The bus was crowded. Most of the passengers seemed weary. They rode in silence while I peered out in the night through a filmy window, looking for landmarks.

There was the red brick community center that Beverly Blake had saved and Bleeker’s music store, its metal shutters slammed down for the night, the sidewalks emptied. There was the shoe store where Lien Trinh, mother of three university students, was teaching herself Spanish, one zapato at a time.

There was the Jack in the Box, where looted paper straws had been carried out like trophies in the fists of small children. And there was the Payless where Isaac Castillo could be found most mornings behind the counter, quietly absorbing the loss of his mother, shot down in the streets where she peddled bananas and artichokes.

As the bus bounced along I remembered something Rodney King had said in the heat of the riot. Not the overworked, and instantly ignored, line about getting along. Something else: “We are all,” he had said, “stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”

Academicians and journalists and social critics talk glibly of this city advancing into a golden epoch, or that city staggering toward decline. They will convene at the anniversaries of colossal civic moments, of earthquakes, say, or riots, and measure “changes.”

The more difficult and less palatable truth is that cities don’t work that way. They gyrate in a million directions all at once, a collection of people more or less stuck together, trying to work it out as best they can.

How was Los Angeles changed by the riot?

My question to young Castillo had been as banal as they come, but I’m convinced he got the answer right: It hasn’t changed at all.

Take away a new grocery store here, a weedy field there, and as far as the city goes, the riot might as well not have happened at all--a depressing thought, given its heavy toll in lost lives and looted dreams.

seeking a brighter coda, i drove the next morning to a gaily painted storefront just north of Manchester. A visual flower in an otherwise bleak stretch of cityscape, this new deli was called Cafe Sweeties. It had been closed when I walked by the night before.

Inside I met Steven Brown, the 47-year-old owner. His riot story was not atypical, but it also was not of the kind that lingers long in a city’s memory. It was not a tale of twisted mob violence. Brown simply had helped his neighbors, Koreans who sold clothes from a small shop, load their merchandise in a van and escape the coming fires. “They were great people,” he said.

As Brown spoke, he sliced strawberries and honeydew melons and tossed them into plastic bowls, creating fruit salads for the lunch crowd. His theme was respect. This, he said, could be the riot’s finest legacy.

“I just hope we learned to respect each other is all,” he said. “It’s the one thing we all want.” Blacks, Koreans, police, everybody. “If we can learn to respect them, and if they can learn to respect us, we’ll be all right.”

I went outside. Rain had fallen the night before, cleansing the air. The midmorning sky was a deep blue, and the warm sun suggested not just a hint of spring, but spring itself. I decided it was too fine a day to waste. I left my car parked in front of Cafe Sweeties and started walking up Vermont.

*

Peter H. King last wrote for the magazine on people and places that characterize California.