COLUMN ONE : Through the Eyes of His City : From a subway station to a Skid Row street and a Brentwood cafe, Angelenos look back on Tom Bradley’s legacy. As for the mayor, after 20 years, he says he has no regrets.

For two decades, Tom Bradley has stood at the center of Los Angeles’ civic stage, his name almost synonymous with the sprawling metropolis he has served.

Now 75, Bradley seems to have changed little through the years. He still cuts an imposing figure, and his understated manner has not wavered, giving him a certain timeless quality. Although many have found this comforting, others say it has only heightened the contrast between the man and his city.

For as much as the mayor has remained the same, Los Angeles has undergone dramatic changes that even some of his oldest friends privately concede he failed to fully address or recognize in recent years.

For his part, the mayor says he has no regrets. He observes that under his stewardship, Los Angeles became a “world-class city,” where trade boomed, a shining downtown skyline blossomed, a subway was built, and minorities and women remade the city’s work force. And, of course, there was that splendid party in 1984: the Summer Olympic Games.

But many residents feel they did not share in the good times, and they blame the Bradley Administration for failing to help. They see a city in crisis: families forced to live on litter-strewn streets, crime out of control and the collapse of social order in the nation’s worst riots in this century.

On Wednesday, the mayor will walk out the door of his City Hall office for the final time, stepping aside for a wealthy political novice named Richard Riordan who has promised great things for Angelenos--much as Bradley did 20 years earlier.

What the historians will write is anyone’s guess. But for now, Tom Bradley leaves behind a city of people who, at best, are ambivalent about whether Los Angeles’ longest-serving mayor lived up to his promise.

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The Bradley of 1973 was nothing short of a phenomenon--a black mayor elected in a mostly white city by a unique coalition of blacks and liberal whites.

His breach of the color barrier and the shattering of the city’s decades-old domination by conservatives instantly had the pundits touting him for higher office.

For a group of staff members, former aides and Bradley appointees who gathered recently to say farewell, the euphoria of the early days lived again.

“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” said Bob Kholos, Bradley’s first press deputy. He recalled how he was a veteran just out of Vietnam in 1969 when he heard then-Councilman Bradley campaigning on the radio in his first, ill-fated mayoral bid. “His voice was so gentle, so sincere,” Kholos said. “It was so refreshing that I went right in and volunteered.”

Kholos joined the unprecedented coalition that Bradley brought together in the wake of the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Kholos is Jewish and grew up in the San Fernando Valley. He joined Westside liberals, South-Central Los Angeles blacks and others who were intent on proving that an African-American could be elected, even in a city where the population was less than 20% black.

Sharing memories with Kholos was Maurice Weiner, who managed Bradley’s first City Council campaign in 1963. He became the new mayor’s first chief of staff and has been one of his most loyal allies.

“Tom Bradley did something that I didn’t think was possible at the time, that a black person could be elected by a predominantly Anglo group of people,” Weiner said. “It was a revelation.”

As the party broke up, the two old Bradley loyalists embraced. Kholos nodded toward the mayor and said: “It’s been great to have shared the same hero with you.”

When this idealistic new regime arrived at City Hall, it began to remake the city’s leadership and work force in the image of the population itself--a trend that continued throughout Bradley’s tenure.

When Sam Yorty left office in 1973, the commissioners who helped set policy in most city departments were overwhelmingly white and male. Just 17% were women, 6% African-American, 9% Latino and 1% Asian-American. Twenty years later, nearly half of commissioners are women, nearly a quarter are African-American, 17% are Latino and 12.5% are Asian-American.

Hiring numbers for the city’s more than 44,000 employees reflect similar diversity.

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If Bradley’s first campaign pledge was greater inclusion for all groups in government, his second was that Los Angeles would have a subway. And it does, although about 18 years later than he had predicted.

As of last week, a photograph of the beaming mayor has greeted riders at what is now known as the Civic Center/Tom Bradley station on the Metro Red Line.

The newly elected Bradley had said that beleaguered Rapid Transit District buses could never hope to efficiently serve the sprawling city. He promised that a subway would open within his first 18 months.

Instead, for most of his years as mayor he fought to make good on his pledge. He persevered when voters rejected a transit sales tax increase, when the Ronald Reagan Administration tried to cut off funding and when virtually no one seemed to believe that Los Angeles would support a subway.

His doggedness was rewarded early this year, when the first subway segment opened, connecting Union Station and downtown with MacArthur Park.

For wheelchair-dependent Eric Davis, the subway and the light-rail Blue Line connecting downtown and Long Beach have provided a new measure of freedom.

“I live in Long Beach but now I have access to everything. . . . I can come downtown and I don’t have to depend on anyone,” said Davis, 35, who credited Bradley and former county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn as the fathers of the mass transit system.

The subway is a centerpiece of Bradley’s substantial city-building efforts--along with the redeveloped downtown, a larger and more efficient airport and the busiest port on the West Coast.

The question for many of his core constituents, though, is what Bradley did not rebuild--the tired shopping districts, the battered housing and the abandoned factories of South-Central Los Angeles.

Even at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza--a Bradley redevelopment project designed to halt the flight of quality businesses from the black community--the question of priorities is raised.

Sultana Khabeer, who was wearing a Nelson Mandela T-shirt and shopping with her daughter, said the mayor, whom she once supported, has lost touch.

“Mayor Bradley has not done enough for black folks,” said Khabeer, a federal government employee who was standing at the edge of the mall’s Tom Bradley Court. “This place is window dressing. It’s a Band-Aid solution, but it took us a long time to figure it out.”

Although the shopping center has brought some retailers to the African-American community, many of its shops remain vacant and city redevelopment officials and mall managers have struggled in vain to attract a high-end anchor store.

Khabeer and many other shoppers say that, in the meantime, they hope they will keep money in the hands of black merchants and the black community.

Khabeer represents a vocal undercurrent of sentiment in the African-American community that the conciliatory Bradley approach has outlived its usefulness. “Mayor Bradley knew who his bosses were, and it wasn’t black people,” she said. “Black people in this city are much worse off than they were 20 years ago.”

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Bradley, however, makes no apologies for reaching out to the business Establishment and other groups, saying that his limited powers under the City Charter made it impossible for him to govern by edict. “If I had not sought the support and encouragement of the business leaders of this city, I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything,” he said.

Even on the most emotional issues, Bradley said, it would not have served any purpose for him to be anything but pragmatic.

Despite years of protest in the black community about police abuse, Bradley insisted that any attempt at reform would have been impossible to push past a mostly pro-police city and City Council until the videotape of the Rodney G. King beating in 1991 made the need for change brutally clear.

His approach eventually worked, as voters last year approved a series of reforms that make the chief of police more accountable to elected officials and rank-and-file officers answerable to civilians, as well as to their peers.

But even the Christopher Commission--Bradley’s own appointees who proposed the reforms--said the mayor should not have waited for the King beating to act.

The public’s demand for more accountability was paralleled by its call for more police--a call that Bradley tried in vain to answer by asking voters to raise property taxes to hire more officers.

The city’s population has climbed nearly 25% during the Bradley decades, but crime has risen faster--murders have doubled, rapes nearly tripled and aggravated assaults jumped by more than eight times.

“It’s two completely different worlds,” Police Officer Rigo Romero said. With gang killings and dope dealing a daily reality for poorer neighborhoods, fear of crime has been forced into the consciousness of the entire city by freeway shootings, carjackings and automated teller machine holdups.

Everyone talks about safety, from the recent mayor’s campaign, to City Hall budget battles, to conversations in supermarket checkout lines.

At a cozy Brentwood cafe, patron Karen Rohrbacher complained that Bradley did not seem to get the message.

“The thing that has always bothered me in this city is the safety issue,” said Rohrbacher, who produces TV commercials. “I don’t think (Bradley) ever paid attention to the issue. Especially during the last four years, I think he was really out of touch.”

Unwinding with a cafe latte after a trip to Europe, Rohrbacher sat an arm’s length from where O.J. Simpson was eating breakfast and not far from where Maria Shriver chatted with friends. But in the midst of this picture of L.A.’s good life, Rohrbacher talked about a friend being carjacked and her own filming locations being robbed.

A world away, in a gritty South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood where crime is as omnipresent as the fear of it, the Rev. Robert W. Ross recalled the violence that destroyed his family in 1985. When thugs came gunning for one son who had been mixed up with a gang, they instead found Ross’ wife and another son, 15, who had no gang ties. Both were shot dead in their home.

The Baptist preacher saw in the tragedy not the complicity of Bradley or other government officials, but the fallout of a society that had forgotten about discipline and respect. The mayor was one of the first to reach out to console Ross--calling to offer his help and a reward for the killers’ capture.

The reward led to the arrest and conviction of two gang members, but Ross said it was the personal call from the mayor that made the deepest impression.

“It told me he remembered,” Ross said. “It told me he had sympathy for humanity.”

It is the paradox of Tom Bradley that many people can tell such personal stories, but that the public at large saw an increasingly distant and inscrutable figure--”the Sphinx of City Hall.” The mayor could be impassive, almost waxen, behind the podium, delivering his remarks in a monotone, even in the midst of a riot.

Still, schoolchildren received autographs and a pat on the head when Bradley lingered after public appearances. A delicatessen owner got a charge from an impromptu Saturday drop-in, in which the mayor stopped just to ask: “How’s business?” And a city councilman was invited to stand with him during an appearance because Bradley insisted he be there, despite political rivalries.

From his vantage point on a chaise longue, propped on the sidewalk across from the Union Rescue Mission, Roy (Panama) Hull said he also has seen that common touch with some of the nearly 100,000 Angelenos who live on the street.

Hull recalled that when the city removed an encampment from the alley behind the mission a few years back, Bradley dropped by to recommend other places where the uprooted could sleep.

Hull credited Bradley for a city program that provides vouchers for Skid Row hotels and for the more humane treatment he believes street dwellers have received lately from police.

“He is keeping the heat off the homeless. I think he asked them to be compassionate,” Hull said. “Maybe he could have done even more if he had more money.”

But the increasing legions of bedraggled and often deranged street people did not sit well with other residents. Many wanted to know why Bradley’s Community Redevelopment Agency appointees did not direct more funds into low-income housing or temporary shelters.

Bradley bristles at suggestions that he is distant or uncaring. He said those are characteristics of the two Republican Administrations that chopped 75% from the federal funding for the nation’s second-largest city.

Supporters said Bradley received too little recognition for his accomplishments because his initiatives often were crafted behind the scenes.

It was this quiet but persistent leadership, they said, that led to his and the city’s triumphant staging of the Olympic Games. Nine years after the sports extravaganza, Bradley still cites the Games as his crowning achievement.

“It was the greatest joy of my life. Some have referred to it as 16 days of glory,” the mayor said. “But it didn’t come easily. I had to fight everybody, from local politicians who denigrated the importance of the Games, to others who predicted gridlock and bankruptcy for the city or that terrorists would be having a field day.

“None of those things happened. People came back to me and apologized,” Bradley said, beaming. “They said: ‘You were right and I was wrong.’ ”

Those were heady days for the third-term mayor. His bitter 1982 loss in the governor’s race was fading into the past. When he faced Councilman John Ferraro for mayor in 1985, he won his most convincing victory ever--reinforcing his unassailable position as the city’s leader.

But four years later, on the verge of another reelection effort, Bradley found himself in an ethical and political crisis from which he would never fully recover.

Critics said Bradley let his personal and public business interests come precariously close to overlapping. The most serious revelation involved his entanglements with Far East National Bank, for which Bradley served as a paid adviser.

In a rare exception to his usual stoic stance, Bradley acknowledged “errors in judgment” in the wake of disclosures that the city treasurer’s office deposited $2 million in the bank after a phone call from the mayor. Bradley was never charged with a crime, but his popularity began to slip. Political challengers attacked him personally and challenged his policies.

And, for the first time in earnest, politicos began to discuss who would inherit leadership of Los Angeles.

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During a weeks-long series of parties and dedications, the Bradley faithful have preferred to remember the good times. He has received nearly 50 honors, including having his name placed on the subway station, a pedestrian bridge and the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In his last official act, Bradley plans to attend Riordan’s July 1 inauguration. Bradley modestly says that he will not speak but will merely appear on the platform “as one of the spectators.”

Bradley says he plans to distance himself from affairs at City Hall, unless he is asked for advice. He says he is not concerned about how the conservative Republican Riordan might alter his legacy.

“If I can’t control it, I’m not going to worry about it.”

That does not mean that Bradley intends to slow down. He will join the law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison just minutes after the inauguration.

He chuckled at the notion that--after just two unofficial trips in 20 years--he might want to travel before starting his new job. “I’m not about to sit back and retire to the rocking chair,” he said.

Still, Ethel Bradley has high hopes for the new incarnation of the man she calls “The Mayor.” After decades of 15-hour days, she is counting on her husband spending more time at home--a two-story house the Bradleys will soon occupy on a hill overlooking downtown and South Los Angeles.

“I hope he at least doesn’t work on weekends,” Ethel Bradley said wistfully. “But he doesn’t say whether he will or whether he won’t. . . . It will take time for everything to quiet down. But it will. It will.”

THE TIMES POLL: How Bradley Ranked

Here is a look at the voter approval ratings, in percentage, of Mayor Tom Bradley at various points in his tenure, along with a look at where the city stood politically at the time.

1984: Leads effort to bring Olympic Games to Los Angeles.

1989: Over the next three years, Bradley and some of his associates are involved in more than a dozen investigations and ethics controversies, beginning with Bradley’s acceptance of $42,000 in fees for serving as an adviser to two banks doing business with the city.

1991: Los Angeles police beat Rodney G. King, prompting a prolonged struggle by Bradley to remove Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

1992: Not guilty verdicts are returned for police officers accused in the King beating, touching off the worst rioting in the city’s history.

Disapproval ratings: March 21, 1985-15%; May 13, 1989-30%; Sept. 14, 1989-37%; March 8, 1991-28%; March 21, 1991-30%; April 4, 1991-39%; July 14, 1991-41%; May 4, 1992-46%; May 12, 1992-55%; Feb. 2, 1993-47%; May 10, 1993-52%; May 30, 1993-50%

Note: “Don’t know” category not shown.

Source: The Times Polls