10 Years After, Victories and Lingering Sorrows

Ten years is an arbitrary yardstick, a biological happenstance. If we had 12 fingers instead of 10, we wouldn’t be soul-searching for the Meaning of the Riots until the year 2004.

But here we are, one neat, round decade beyond the riots of 1992, trying to be suitably reflective. I say “riots” and not the tippy-toe euphemism “civil unrest” because riots they were, in the country’s muscular tradition of Shays’ Rebellion, draft riots and bread riots.

Recalling this riot is like recalling a death in the family--fragmented, vivid and smoke-smudged, all contradictions and tragicomedies:

The stupefying mayhem, then the horrifying sight of National Guardsmen ... black strangers saving white strangers’ lives, and the recorded rants of the “hate hotline,” referring callers to a Fullerton post office box for a $3 copy of “Racial Loyalties” ... watching Goldilocks looters, Papa Bear with the big screen, Mama Bear with the 17-inch, Baby Bear with the CD player ... driving on deserted Sunset Boulevard after curfew alongside policemen who hadn’t seen the inside of a patrol car in years, drafted for the duration and squeezed like sullen clowns into a black and white Crown Victoria.

It was the first riot I ever heard of that inspired ordinary people to write poetry.

How do I frame that now, especially for you who watched from Idaho or Missouri or Vermont like our misery was a National Geographic special--distant, exotic, horrible.

I chose the liquor store, the market whose profit margin is in drink--not Merlot or single-malt scotch but the drunkard’s booze, strong and quick and cheap. The corner crime-wave, where the sofa out front invites the loungers and scroungers, the crackheads and troublemakers.

The liquor store, where a black teenager named Latasha Harlins was shot by a Korean shop-owner she had slugged in a tug-of-war over orange juice, lighting a fuse to racial tensions more than a year before the riots.

The liquor store, where hilarity and misery come in a 40-ounce bottle--the first target of looters who danced and drank for the cameras, the blight and the livelihood of a lifetime, gone in an hour.

Other parts of town were torched and looted, but South-Central was the epicenter of the man-made earthquake, so there is where I spent anniversary day, April 29.

About 220 liquor stores were destroyed in the riots, leaving maybe 500; the people of South-Central still have twice as many liquor stores as all of Rhode Island.

Neighbors fought their return after the Watts riots and failed. They fought again in 1992, and kept 150 from rebuilding, which is why I call the ride that Karen Bass and Solomon Rivera took me on “the South-Central Victory Tour.”

Bass and Rivera are director and associate director of the Community Coalition, which has spent the years since 1992 in a paperwork battle of hearings and protests and code complaints, to break up the ghastly zoning trinity of church/liquor store/hot-sheet motel on South-Central’s main streets. Stores and services taken for granted in thriving ZIP Codes are a marvel here: Wow, a Home Depot. Look, a Starbucks.

Bass began this liquor store battle hoping for a thousand signatures on her petitions. She got 35,000. People were sick of it. You could buy a drink at every corner but coin laundries seemed as distant as Disneyland.

That many were run by Korean Americans made it vital that Bass say over and over that the problem was the business practices, not the business people, and “we just don’t think you should rebuild a problem.”

In the car, she consults her list: 38 liquor stores turned to shoe stores or coin laundries or hardware places. At Van Ness and Slauson, Alamo’s Liquor is now Alamo’s Market, with a soul-food restaurant next door. At Century and Western, the Arco AM/PM is now the Puente Learning Center, on ground donated by Arco after it gave up the fight to rebuild. At Manchester and Van Ness, the El Nido Family Center stands on the site of Mr. Woodley’s Liquors.

It is South-Central’s civic version of the medieval philosopher’s stone, the miraculous something that turns lead into gold.

As we roamed in Rivera’s VW, we kept encountering barricades and people in orange mesh vests telling us, “You can’t go there, President Bush is coming.”

Decade deja vu: 10 years ago, I trailed the first President Bush on a press bus from church to gutted shopping center. The East Coast reporters struggled for an image, and settled on the jacaranda trees, blooming Easter-purple against the veils of smoke, a metaphor for ruin and renewal, maybe. It’s the same image I would have used had I been writing about some city other than my own, but its glibness hurt.

Now it’s May. The jacarandas again blossom. And block by sad, screwed-up block, perhaps the city will one day too.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.