STATE'S GLOWING IMAGE LURES TOURISTS.

Byline: Edwin McDowell The New York Times

After a battering by earthquakes, urban riots and recession, California is in the midst of a tourist boom. Hotels, amusement parks and attractions from San Diego to San Francisco are racking up record numbers of visitors.

``This state is having just a land-office summer,'' said John Poimiroo, the state tourism director.

Although tourism nationwide will increase 2 percent this summer over last, according to D.K. Shifflet & Associates, a research concern in McLean, Va., it is expected to rise 6 percent in California.

With the summer waning, the state shows every sign of meeting if not exceeding those projections. In all, one in six tourist dollars nationwide is spent in the state.

Tourism in Southern California is especially strong, fueled by a steady influx of foreign visitors.

The occupancy rate at hotels in Los Angeles climbed to 71 percent this year, the highest rate since 1989. It had plummeted to 57 percent in May 1992, the month after the riots that followed the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King.

Hotels downtown registered a 21 percent gain in the first quarter compared with the same period in 1995 and a 55 percent gain in April over April 1995.

One reason for the bullish season is that ``we haven't seen any disasters to scare off visitors in a few years,'' said Helen Chang, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Those disasters included the Loma Prieta Earthquake in Northern California that killed 67 people in 1989 and the Northridge Earthquake in Los Angeles that killed 61 in 1994, as well as the 1992 riots.

California also was hit hard by the nationwide recession that helped shrink the number of tourist visits by Americans to the state, to 183 million in 1993, from 192 million the previous year.

The new wave of tourism has been fed by the many low-cost airlines operating throughout the Western states, from which California derives most out-of-state visitors.

California has been on a roll for more than a year. Last year it attracted 197 million American tourists, 9 million more than in 1994 and 47 million more than runner-up Florida's 149.6 million last year.

The rise in California's share of the nation's tourists, to 10.9 percent last year from 10.4 percent in 1994, was the first such increase in eight years.

Those figures are especially meaningful in a state that has known hard economic times and where tourism is the biggest industry, bringing in $55.2 billion last year, and the third-largest employer, accounting for almost 700,000 jobs.

The state boasts three of the nation's 10 most popular theme parks, including Disneyland, a perennial leader. Attendance at Disneyland, in Anaheim, fell 20 percent from 1990 to 1994 and jumped 38 percent last year, to 14.1 million, according to Amusement Business, a trade magazine. Attendance is strong again this year.

Crowds also have been flocking to Universal Studios to experience a new $110 million Jurassic Park ride. Attendance is up an estimated 40 percent at the park this summer over last, and the 43,000 visitors on July 5 broke a 31-year-old single-day attendance record by 22 percent.

``A friend from home visited Los Angeles a few months ago and told me not to miss Jurassic Park when I came,'' said Manuel Gutierrez of Madrid, Spain, after a day at the park. ``I've never been on a ride like that before. It was great.''

Part of the comeback, especially among international tourists, can be credited to ``Baywatch,'' a television program syndicated throughout much of the world that depicts adventures of lifeguards on a California beach. And streams of tourists are visiting sites that played roles in the O.J. Simpson murder case.

``Lots of our guests, including lots of foreign guests, want to know where the jurors slept and how close is the courthouse,'' said Lew Fader, general manager of the Intercontinental Hotel, where the jury was sequestered. ``They'll pull out maps and ask, `Where's 875 South Bundy Drive?' '' the scene of the slayings.

San Francisco's hotel occupancy rate of 74 percent last year led all California cities, Chang said. And it rose 5.5 percent in the first quarter of this year, she added.

Occupancy in the area of Fishermen's Wharf, a leading tourist attraction, increased 14.4 percent in the first quarter.

While studying a map to plot her route to Fishermen's Wharf, Hyazintha Borstner of Austria said her tour of U.S. cities would not have been complete without San Francisco. The reason is that in Europe people do not usually see such a harmonious cultural mix, she said, citing the former Yugoslavia.

``Here,'' she added, ``you see how people of different origins and cultures live together in peace.''

Even though the number of tourists from Mexico and Canada has fallen because of those countries' weak currencies, visitors from Japan, Germany and Britain continue to flock to San Francisco and Los Angeles, attracted in part by strong exchange rates.

Foreigners make up almost 25 percent of the 22 million annual visitors to Los Angeles, and they generate 40 percent of its $9.7 billion in tourism revenues.

Many foreigners have been enticed by marketing trips that officials from the state and some cities have made to Europe, Asia and South America.

In the past year, West Hollywood, a 1.9-square-mile city, marketed its hotels and attractions in London, Berlin and Sydney, Australia. Two months ago it was host for 1,000 foreign tour operators and travel agents at a convention.

After the riots California sponsored a $20 million advertising campaign in Japan to lure free-spending Japanese tourists, whose numbers dropped from 1.1 million in 1989 to 785,000 in 1992. An undetermined number responded.

But although many Japanese travel elsewhere in the United States on their own or with family or friends, two-thirds of the Japanese tourists in Southern California arrive in tour groups, concerned about safety, experts say.

The passage of time also has helped lure American travelers. ``After the riots I was a little scared about going to Los Angeles,'' said Steven Jefferson, who was visiting from Miami. ``But now I don't hear as much about crime in Los Angeles, or at least I haven't read much about it lately.''