Quake Deals Riot Areas Another Disastrous Blow : Aftermath: Many homes and businesses are declared unsafe in neighborhoods still reeling from 1992 unrest.

By PAUL FELDMAN

Jan. 22, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

During the 1992 riots, the Messiah Baptist Church served as a safe harbor, dispensing food and clothing and offering a secure place to sleep as chaos raged outside in the Crenshaw district.

But this week, the reverberations of an earthquake centered 20 miles to the north have forced city building inspectors to shut down the West Adams Boulevard structure, which suffered nasty cracks in its hefty bell tower and a collapsed ceiling and chimney in its fellowship hall.

“We took care of hundreds here in 1992,” said the Rev. Kenneth J. Flowers. “Now, if push comes to shove, we’ll have to end up holding our Sunday services in a tent.”

While most government and media attention to the earthquake has focused on the San Fernando Valley, hundreds of structures in Southwest and South-Central Los Angeles also were struck and left unsafe for occupancy.

Among them are institutions at the core of the city’s African American community. Messiah Baptist, Southern Missionary Baptist Church, Bethany Baptist Church, the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theatre and offices of the Family Savings and Founders National banks have been shut down, at least temporarily.

Also closed because of earthquake damage were numerous stores and offices in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, including the Governor’s Business Revitalization Center, which was created after the riots to assist victimized businesses seeking state government permits to rebuild.

Unlike the period of the riots, when fires and looting were mainly limited to business blocks, this week’s earthquake has also struck home--literally--in many residential neighborhoods.

At the north end of the Crenshaw district, dozens of small bungalows and Spanish-style homes suffered significant structural damage--severed foundations, toppled chimneys and jagged cracks in the walls. At noon Friday, many residents remained without gas or water service and had not yet been paid a visit by city Department of Building and Safety inspectors.

“My whole house slipped off the foundation,” sighed Robert Petite, 81, who has lived on West 28th Street since the early 1950s. “I’m still living here but I don’t know if my house is livable.

“I’ve been trying to get a city inspector to look, but I just get a busy signal when I call,” said the retired chef, who cowered in the bedroom closet of his wood-frame home for 30 minutes after the earthquake struck.

Around the corner on Vineyard Avenue, Sagas Tome, who is eight months pregnant, and 11 relatives were spending the nights in a creaky, unheated plywood garage because they feared that the heavily damaged apartment building next door to their house will collapse in the next strong aftershock.

“Are you the building inspector?” Tome asked a reporter. “Everyone here is living in fear.”

With residents and business owners across Los Angeles still making inspection requests late this week, city building officials had planned to add 100 inspectors to their crews Friday.

But Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said it was inexcusable that homes in South-Central Los Angeles had not yet been inspected. “No one should be waiting for an inspector at this point,” said the councilman, whose district includes the area.

Preliminary estimates indicate at least $6.9 million in damage to 268 structures in neighborhoods of central Los Angeles, including those south of the Santa Monica Freeway. But the figures are certain to skyrocket as building inspectors continue their survey.

Ridley-Thomas estimated that well over 1,000 South-Central Los Angeles residents have been left without housing. At Jim Gilliam Park alone, more than 300 people have been sleeping outdoors each night, many of them residents of damaged 1950s-era apartment buildings in the Baldwin Village neighborhood.

“It’s kind of the untold earthquake story,” said the councilman, who is co-sponsoring an earthquake preparedness and recovery exposition this morning at the Crenshaw Christian Center. “There was just no hiding place from this earthquake.”

Other neighborhoods of central Los Angeles that were hit hard in the 1992 riots also suffered damage in the earthquake, among them Koreatown, Pico-Union and East Hollywood.

“Our wall split open like cooked popcorn,” said Gloria Salinas, who lives in a single-bedroom Koreatown apartment with her husband and three children. “No one was hurt, but we were all so scared. We don’t want to go back in.”

Moreover, some Korean American businessmen whose stores were looted in the riots have now suffered a double blow, according to Korean American attorney and activist Angela Oh. “These businesses have already been suffering because the economy is so bad,” she said. “And many of these Korean families live out in the Northridge area.”

On South Figueroa Avenue near the Los Angeles Sports Arena, which itself has been closed temporarily as a safety precaution, four buildings have been judged unsafe by building inspectors. In a parking lot, 30 residents camped under makeshift tents. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said building manager Luz Ruiz, who is pregnant and has seven children. “They say it’s going to rain this weekend. . . . My children are already sick.”

Along major thoroughfares of Southwest Los Angeles, where inspections had been made to most stricken churches and businesses by late Thursday, many of the brick-facade buildings judged unsafe were those that had undergone costly earthquake reinforcement during the last five years.

“We reinforced for over $200,000 in 1992,” said Lula Washington, director of the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theatre, whose West Adams Boulevard headquarters now features a 30-foot-long hole in the wall of its second-floor rehearsal hall.

“When I saw this building, I almost collapsed myself,” she said. “And then today, ironically, we had to pay our fire insurance. We sent out a check to protect a building that we can’t use.”

Washington hopes to receive enough federal aid and contributions to make an estimated $100,000 in repairs to the hall, a 69-year-old former Masonic Temple. She is also scrambling to find rehearsal space for her dance company, an after-school “I Do Dance, Not Drugs,” program and tumbling program for teen-agers.

“There’s a lot of activities that will be displaced,” Washington said. “And we don’t have any money.”

At the corporate office of the Founders National Bank on Martin Luther King Boulevard, beams are cracked and the bank’s sign lies in the bushes. Repairs will cost an estimated $600,000 and take six months, with the office temporarily moved to branches in the Crenshaw Plaza Shopping Center and Gardena.

Family Savings Bank’s main office in the 3600 block of Crenshaw Boulevard was closed when it was flooded by a fire safety sprinkler system triggered by the temblor. The bank plans to set up temporary facilities in its parking lot within three weeks while repairs are made.

Perhaps the worst-hit building in South-Central L.A. was the Southern Missionary Baptist Church, whose congregants spent $250,000 on earthquake reinforcement repairs three years ago.

“There’s no question we’ll have to tear it down,” said the Rev. J. L. Gates, who was dressed in a gray suit and a white hard hat, with a tape measure dangling from his belt. “We made it through the (Rodney King beating) trials, but the tribulations got us.”

At Bethany Baptist, on Martin Luther King Boulevard, where a railing now hangs off the side of the sanctuary, Sunday services have been rescheduled at Dorsey High School. And at Messiah Baptist, Flowers was still wavering between a tent in the parking lot and a Jewish temple in Hollywood with which his church has a covenant relationship.

While waiting for a structural engineer to arrive to determine the extent of the bell tower damage, Flowers reflected that the earthquake--in the wake of rioting, flooding and fires--represented a wake-up call from above. “I think God is speaking to get our attention, to say that we need to recognize that he is still in control and in charge,” he said.

Thus far, the message concerning quake damage in Southwest Los Angeles has not yet reached much of the world, he said.

“People from back East call and they don’t know that we were even affected by the earthquake. Yes we were, we felt it big time.”

But the message from above certainly made an impact on the altar of Messiah Missionary, Flowers added, citing a stained glass representation of the Holy Spirit that was shaken loose.

“A brick came down,” he said, “and sent the Holy Spirit right into the piano.”