IN RETROSPECT 1988 : Fires, Gunfire--and a Few Cheers--Punctuate the Year for Los Angeles

For Los Angeles, 1988 was a year at the flash point, a volatile period in which spectacular fires and senseless street-gang gunfire dominated the headlines.

The most stunning single news event was probably the May 4 blaze that threatened to turn the city’s tallest skyscraper, the 62-story First Interstate Bank tower, into a colossal torch.

Working feverishly, 275 firefighters quelled the flames within four hours.

But five floors were gutted, one employee was killed and the 15-year-old edifice--in which a sprinkler system was at long last being installed--suffered $45 million damage. Moreover, the fire served as a graphic reminder of how, without sufficient safeguards, even the grandest symbols of the city’s progress are vulnerable to a single errant spark.

Later the same month, much of the already storm-battered Redondo Beach Pier went up in smoke. In July, the 40-story Union Bank’s downtown office tower caught fire and burned briefly. And in December, fierce Santa Ana winds triggered a series of hellish firestorms that destroyed 37 houses and apartment buildings from the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys to West Los Angeles.

Throughout the year, a seemingly endless series of gang-related shootings across the county underscored man’s baser instincts. More than 325 lives were erased, including those of a police officer and several toddlers. By early November, the gang-related death toll for the city of Los Angeles alone had already exceeded 1987’s record total of 205.

The year 1988 was also one in which a burgeoning city continued to slowly strangle itself as a consequence of pollution, poverty and population growth.

The stories didn’t always make daily headlines, but the signs were readily visible to anyone peering out their windows.

Freeway traffic edged closer to a halt. The homeless population increased. Smog levels were the third-worst in the decade.

It wasn’t just difficult to breathe or get to work in 1988. It was also tougher to find a place to live.

The average monthly rent for a vacant one-bedroom apartment in the city approached $600--and a whopping $900 for new units. In October, the median home sale price hit $191,474 in Los Angeles County--an increase of $35,000 in just one year.

The Good News

But the year had its bright moments too.

In June, 60,000 jubilant fans mobbed the Civic Center to celebrate the crowning of the Los Angeles Lakers as the first back-to-back pro basketball kings since 1969. Four months later, the hordes returned to hail the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team of improbable over-achievers who scrapped their way to a World Series victory.

For hundreds of thousands of Southland residents, the willpower to seek better living and working conditions began to pay off in 1988. Almost half of the illegal aliens nationwide who applied for permanent residence under the federal amnesty program did so in the government’s five-county Los Angeles district.

The year 1988 also saw the unveiling of designs for two major downtown cultural beacons.

Los Angeles architect Frank O. Gehry’s model for the $100-million, 2,500-seat Walt Disney Concert Hall, the future home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Bunker Hill, was generally received with enthusiasm. But the avant-garde “Steel Cloud” concept for the proposed West Coast Gateway over the Hollywood Freeway earned decidedly mixed reviews.

These were some of the major stories of 1988:

STREET GANGS

Los Angeles’ two black street gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, received national attention as members spread their violence while peddling crack cocaine in more than 40 cities from Minneapolis to Shreveport.

Back home, the bloody war between factions of the two gangs plunged to new depths.

Following the January shooting death of an innocent bystander, Karen Toshima, in Westwood Village, police beefed up patrols in the long-time sanctuary for late-night strollers. The decision drew harsh words from black community leaders, who labeled it a disproportionate response.

Police soon initiated a series of gang sweeps that focused on South-Central Los Angeles and Watts, the stomping ground of most Blood and Crip “sets.”

In April, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates upped the ante in response to a South Los Angeles drive-by shooting in which one youngster was slain and eight were wounded. Declaring a “war . . . on the rotten little cowards,” Gates pledged to flood city streets with 1,000 extra officers on random nights in order to arrest gang members.

Among the innocent victims: 15-month-old Dalayfayette Polk, shot while playing in the yard of a Watts home . . . Jorge Gonzalez, 9, shot outside his family’s home in Venice . . . Irma Saucedo, 6, and her father Salvador, 39, shot in the living room of their east Compton home as they were watching the TV program “America’s Most Wanted” . . . and Latonjyia (Nicki) Stover, 18, and Jamee Finney, 13, shot while sitting in a car; they were mistaken for relatives of a drug dealer who had cheated gang members out of $14,000 in cocaine.

FIRES

The first frantic calls about the First Interstate blaze came trickling in to Los Angeles Fire Department headquarters at 10:37 p.m. on May 4.

Before the flames were extinguished, they had soared to nearly 2,000 degrees at the heart of the inferno, and a crowd of 1,500 people had gathered outside the tower to gawk in fascination.

The human drama rivaled the intensity of the flames, as more than 40 janitors and others struggled to escape. Maintenance worker Alexander John Handy, 24, sent to check on the initial alarm, was killed when his elevator opened directly into the flames.

By December, officials said that 59% of leased space in the tower had been reoccupied and that the barriers would soon be removed.

POLICE DEATHS

Ten Los Angeles peace officers were killed in the line of duty in 1988. They were:

- LAPD Officer Daniel Pratt, 30, by automatic rifle fire while pursing a suspect in a drive-by gang shooting.

- LAPD Officer James Beyea, 24, shot with his own gun in a struggle with a burglary suspect.

- LAPD Officers Derrick C. Connor, 28, Manuel Gutierrez, 26, and David Lee Hofmeyer, 25, in a collision between two police cruisers speeding to assist in an arrest.

- U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agents Paul Seema, 52, and George M. Montoya, 34, by suspects in an undercover heroin investigation.

- Sheriff’s Deputy Jack Miller, 33, by gunfire while serving a search warrant on a suspected cocaine rock house.

- Sheriff’s Deputies Roy A. Chester, 41, and James D. McSweeney, 43, in a helicopter crash during a joint drug interdiction mission. Three National Guardsmen and three sheriff’s deputies from other Southern California counties also perished in the accident in Imperial County.

COPS IN TROUBLE

In several other ways it was a bad year for Los Angeles law enforcement agencies.

Two former LAPD detectives, Robert Von Villas, 44, and Richard Herman Ford, 48, were convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy in a 1983 contract killing.

And three former DEA agents--John Anthony Jackson, Darnell Garcia and Wayne Countryman--who were charged with conspiracy and tax violations, were also accused in court documents of cocaine trafficking and having ties to major Los Angeles drug dealers.

Meanwhile, Mayor Tom Bradley ordered a review of the LAPD’s secretive Special Investigations Section after The Times reported that the unit watches armed robbers but rarely attempts to arrest them until after they have victimized shopkeepers and others.

An in-house review by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office was undertaken of all cases in which jailhouse informants testified during the last decade. Spurring the action was convict Leslie White, 31, who demonstrated to sheriff’s deputies that he could gather enough information by telephone to convincingly fake the confession of a murder defendant he had never met.

Before the year ended, Chief Gates had earned a dubious distinction, becoming the first major city police chief to be held individually liable and ordered to pay punitive damages for actions deemed to have violated the constitutional rights of citizens. Gates was ordered by a federal court jury to personally pay more more than $170,000 to the family of an East Los Angeles man injured when his house was ransacked by anti-gang officers searching for a murder weapon. The city is appealing.

STRIKES

For five months, Hollywood writers had a single, less-than-lucrative outlet for their creativity--the messages they scrawled on their picket signs. In the longest walkout in film industry history, 9,600 members of the Writers Guild of America went to war against the studios, in large part over the question of payments for reruns of TV programs sold for syndication.

The strike forced studio layoffs and crippled support businesses ranging from script-copying services to the elegant eateries where writers and producers cut their deals while doing lunch. In the end, the writers agreed to tie the residuals they earn to the revenues producers receive from reruns.

Later in the year, 3,200 Hollywood drivers, studio electricians and laborers struck the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers for three weeks.

Also staging a three-day walkout were 4,000 nurses at county-run hospitals. The nurses, who were ordered to return to work by a judge, eventually settled for a two-year, 14.5% wage increase.

AIDS

AIDS continued to take a heavy toll in Los Angeles in 1988, with 1,068 AIDS-related deaths reported through November. In all, more than 6,000 cases and 3,700 deaths have occurred here since the epidemic began.

Several new hospices for terminally ill AIDS patients were opened in Los Angeles. In the case of a Hollywood hospice, the city Board of Zoning Appeals rejected complaints of neighbors who demanded that it be moved away from their block of single-family homes.

The county Board of Supervisors also committed $2 million to support AIDS hospice programs. Yet the board spurned a plan to prevent the spread of AIDS by handing out condoms and bleach kits for cleaning dirty needles.

Late in the year, a county health advisory committee recommended measures that would expand access to certain treatments, including use of the drug AZT, to county patients infected with the AIDS virus. AZT has been shown to prolong the lives of some AIDS patients.

Year-end statistics revealed one glimmer of hope. They showed that the growth of the epidemic among white gay men has slowed significantly in Los Angeles County, San Francisco and New York City.

MISCELLANY

Other major stories of 1988 included: the Labor Day weekend evacuation of 28,000 Eastside residents after a chemical spill; the February aftershock of the October, 1987, Whittier Narrows earthquake and a December temblor centered in Pasadena, each of which resulted in about 30 minor injuries.

The immigration of about 13,000 Soviet Armenians to Hollywood and Glendale and the outpouring of prayer and support after the devastating December earthquake in their homeland; the emergence of Los Angeles as the primary point of entry for South American cocaine and the arrest of two alleged leaders of a drug ring that allegedly distributed more than a ton of crack cocaine a week.

The Election Day defeat of propositions calling for oil drilling underneath Pacific Palisades and the issue of $90 million in bonds for restoration and expansion of city libraries damaged by earthquakes and fires.