15 years later

THE SMELL OF SMOKE hung in the air long after the riots erupted across Los Angeles 15 years ago today. Markets that had served minority communities were suddenly and permanently gone; shoe stores and stereo shops stood looted and bare.

Yet the damage was much more than physical. The police brutality that spurred the anger, and the political dysfunction that allowed it to spread, gave the impression of an ungovernable metropolis. It was a shattered and confused city that stumbled into May of 1992. Some people fled, and even among those who stayed there was a prevailing sense of desperation, of worry that perhaps L.A. simply could not be saved.

The riots -- and, please, may we at last dispense with “uprising” to describe those calamitous days? -- exposed the ethnic fault lines that lay beneath the surface of Los Angeles. There was the justifiable outrage that many African Americans felt toward the L.A. Police Department, then a largely white and hidebound institution with a long history of injurious racism. The tape of LAPD officers gang-stomping Rodney King, then the April 29 mirror-image of young black men dragging Reginald Denny from his truck and bashing his head with a chunk of concrete, became the iconic images of white versus black.

As the violence spread through the city that evening and in the days afterward, it revealed other fissures. Koreans took up armed defense of their businesses against black rioters. Marauding looters, many of them Latino, swept across the Eastside and through Hollywood. The headquarters of this newspaper came under attack, and its newsroom was rattled by recriminations, some with racial overtones.

The riots represented the nadir of a long, unhappy slide. Even before the crowds began to gather and the bricks began to fly on that spring afternoon, Newsweek had pronounced Los Angeles “a city racked by chaos and self-doubt.” By the time a thousand fires had burned a hole in L.A.’s core, that assessment was cemented. The climb out from the abyss was long and arduous.

Fifteen years later, happily, there is much progress to celebrate. The LAPD is a far more diverse and open place than it was a decade and a half ago. Relations between the city’s black and Korean populations, so tense in the 1990s, are less brittle today. The region’s economy, once tethered to the collapsing fortunes of defense and aerospace, is far more diverse and supple.

That is not to say we’ve fully healed. Tension between blacks and Latinos, though sometimes overstated, is real and flares into gang violence all too often. Housing is in short supply. The communities most torn by the riots remain gripped by unemployment and crime, with services that conspicuously trail those in the rest of the city. Most alarming, the region continues to suffer staggering stratification. The drive from Brentwood to South-Central remains a tragic trip down the socioeconomic ladder. Those conditions were antecedent to the riots; it is distressing to see so many of them still so ingrained.

Yet Los Angeles 15 years later has the feel of economic and political momentum. What a stark contrast indeed from the sense of political collapse that then hung like a pall over the city. Mayor Tom Bradley and Police Chief Daryl F. Gates were historic enemies who hadn’t spoken to each other for a year on the night of April 29. Gates was missing in action for part of that afternoon, off at a fundraiser to defeat a police reform measure that Bradley supported.

Today, city leadership has its own issues, but its dignity has long since been restored. Richard Riordan, who ran on the slogan “Tough enough to turn L.A. around,” largely delivered on that promise, leaving to his successors a stabilized and recovering city. The political heir to that progress, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, is doubly significant for representing the ascent of Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans, to the top positions of L.A. influence. The rise of Latino power is disturbing to some -- it has come partly at the expense of black political power and is rapidly making inroads on white authority as well. But the identity being forged is uniquely Angeleno.

As the riots recede into history, it’s possible to see a new city emerging from their debris. It is imperfect, to be sure, but it bears an uncanny resemblance to L.A.’s original character -- industrious, international, complicated and thrilling.