Unhealed Wounds

) For decades Los Angeles was America's dreamland, glistening with promise and expectation. It was the city of tomorrow, a constant experiment that seemed to produce a life-style without trade-offs. A garden in the desert. A melting pot that was seldom stirred up. An economy that moved in only one direction. Most things new and fresh in America seemed to start there: everything from car loans to health clubs to Chino-Latino cuisine. For a while there were no limits: on growth, on space, on creativity, on wealth, on tolerance of the new and the foreign. Never mind the earthquakes, the smog, the religious cults. Those were just the shadows around an otherwise Utopian vision. And the new arrivals to the City of Angels and its palmy suburbs just kept on coming.

Many people began to sense that America's second largest city was growing but not maturing. The formal notification arrived a year ago this month, when the city exploded in the worst riots in modern American history. Since then the city's features have been held up to a far different light. Much of what seemed modern and alluring about Los Angeles now seems terribly shortsighted and ugly. The ethnic patchwork appears to be a map of bunkered enclaves. Its center cannot hold because the city doesn't have one. The land without limits keeps running into dead ends: not enough money for schools, housing for newcomers, jobs for the working class, room to move. The laboratory of change produces the latest in urban ills: crack cocaine, gang culture, police brutality, civic indifference, a spectacular gap between rich and poor. Increasingly, the rest of America hopes the latest in L.A. trends will stay right where they started.

If the picture looks bleak from afar, it is even worse from the pavement in the scarred city. In the immediate aftermath of last year's riots, which left 53 dead and $500 million in property damage, the city rallied together for a moment of giddy anticipation that the trauma would lead to a massive refurbishment. Not just of the charred buildings but of the city's values, political leadership and sense of shared responsibility. It didn't last long. L.A.'s wealthy classes quickly fobbed off the burden of reconstruction to small volunteer organizations and an overstretched investment drive; the lame- duck mayor receded into city hall; the Federal Government turned its back; minority groups fumed about the patronizing attitude of their would-be helpers; police remained mostly unrepentant about the Rodney King beating; and gangs declared a truce but kept on selling drugs and robbing people.

What has aggravated the city's racial divisiveness is the lack of a strong economy to rebuild on. Los Angeles remains mired in a three-year recession, with a countywide 10.4% unemployment rate, 3 1/2 points higher than the U.S. average. In poor black neighborhoods, the rate is as high as 50%. The peace dividend of the post-cold war era has landed like a bomb in the Los Angeles area, wiping out 110,000 defense-industry jobs so far and possibly another 50,000 more by the end of next year. Many manufacturing jobs, which supported the city's working class, have evaporated because of corporate cutbacks. L.A.'s South Central district lost more than 70,000 jobs in the 1970s and '80s; the poverty rate for area families now is higher than it was at the time of the Watts riots in 1965.