WHY PEOPLE LOVE & HATE L.A. IT'S THE CITY OF SECOND CHANCES.

Byline: Erik Nelson Staff Writer

Eileen Schaffner still has flashbacks to that night six years ago when the Northridge Earthquake split her house in half and wrecked her $300,000 antiques inventory.

Does she love L.A.?

``You couldn't pay me to move back to Chicago,'' said the 61-year-old antiques dealer, who moved to Tarzana from the freezing cold and Windy City 35 years ago.

``I have mountains, I have valleys, I have oceans, I have scenic beauty. It's so . . . visual! But the main thing is the climate. That's probably No. 1. I have fine restaurants and enough of a variety of people to keep it interesting.''

From the breathtaking canyons that sometimes erupt in flames to the majestic valleys that regularly fill with smog, L.A.'s inhabitants get daily glimpses of heaven and hell, of things they love and hate. Theirs is a city of Technicolor temptations that writhes about inside 6.3 million air- conditioned solariums on wheels.

Angelenos love their city like a mistress and hate it as they would an oppressive master. Fortunately, this town isn't about work, even if there are plenty of jobs to be had these days. This is a town that plays and - via cell phones, celluloid and cyberspace - a town that tells the rest of the world how it can play, too.

Mostly, Los Angeles is the City of Second Chances, where everyone can be an emigre but no one is an alien.

``People don't care much about your past and your credentials,'' said Joel Kotkin, an urban planning expert and senior fellow with the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University in Malibu. ``It's a very open place, a place that an outsider can go in and do very well.

``It doesn't have the sort of social network and structure that older cities have. It's a great city for self-starters. It can be a miserable city for those who need a lot of support.''

And that might explain why this city hates its schools so much. The Los Angeles Unified School District has the best of the best, Harvard- and Stanford-bound graduates from nationally ranked North Hollywood High School. But the same school district gives diplomas to fewer than half of its high school students. If they all made it to graduation, there wouldn't be anywhere near enough seats to hold them anyway.

It's not that L.A.'s young people lack inspiration or role models, as 13- year-old Karin Ventura of Sherman Oaks can attest.

``Movie stars,'' said Karin. ``I saw 'N Sync at Jerry's Deli in Studio City.

``And I saw Michael Jordan at Fashion Square Mall.''

High-speed vanity

The city loves its celebrities, but hates its personalities. Vanity, thy name is Hollywood.

In the City of Angles, some people make themselves public figures by putting up busty building-size renderings of themselves, as did a woman known as ``Angelyne,'' to appeal to motorists who've seen her billboards along Hollywood Boulevard and the San Diego Freeway.

But you don't have to put out large sums of money to make it into television - even live television - in greater Los Angeles. For every luckless fugitive, desperate wife beater or fearless drunk, there's an unscripted drama in perpetual production.

Angelenos love police chases because they give the entire city an entertainment break, a thrill ride that has neither a 45-minute queue nor a predictable outcome. With contests like this, who needs an NFL franchise?

But people also hate chases because they are so unpredictable, interrupting the kind of television dramas that end the way a focus group says they should.

``I feel that there's a lot of negative culture here,'' said Carrie Bragg Vann, who after four years in San Marino is moving back to Honolulu.

``It doesn't have the sort of crime and violence and freeway chases and murders that take place here,'' she said, adding that where she's going, ``they only have one or two freeways,'' and they don't go on for 670 miles.

Freeways take toll

Ask anyone who beds down in this sprawling autopolis what they hate about it, and the first thing off their lips will be traffic.

From overburdened interstates that squeeze through mountain passes joining the Los Angeles Basin with the San Fernando Valley, Inland Empire and assorted lesser valleys to the arrow-straight boulevards with no left-turn signals, Angelenos live where the rubber meets the road.

``It's the worst in the country, by a number of different factors,'' said Bill Buff of the American Highway Alliance, which in November listed four L.A. freeway interchanges among the nation's 10 worst.

The Texas Transportation Institute, which looked beyond freeways, found that delays cost each of the 9 million L.A. drivers two weeks' time and $1,370 a year. That's what drove Lori Lennartz and her husband to the Rocky Mountains 22 years ago.

``There's too much congestion, too many people,'' she said as she waited for a shuttle bus at Los Angeles International Airport. Visiting her former home of Thousand Oaks to attend her niece's wedding, she admitted that she did miss one thing about Los Angeles.

``It's almost always nice. You can plan a picnic on Sunday without worrying whether it's going to snow or rain.''

Perfect weather

New York gets about 47 inches of rain and snow a year, and in February the average low temperature is 26 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina. It gets even colder in Chicago.

In Los Angeles, less than 15 inches of rain falls annually, and the average low temperature in February is 51 degrees, with highs near 70.

That's one of many reasons some people don't want to leave, even if they have to.

``My wife and I both consider Los Angeles our home,'' said Beau Janzen, who's staying in Toluca Hills until the movers come to take his stuff to New York, where he landed a new job as a computer animator.

``We'll definitely be back. We're even keeping all of our furniture in storage. This is the place we're going to end up settling down and raising a family,'' said the 30-year-old Kentucky native.

``In a couple of days, I'm going to be looking at just brick buildings as opposed to the rolling mountains,'' Janzen said, adding that he'll miss having ``plenty of hiking trails, great escapist places to go. There are hiking trails right in the middle of the city, but after 20 minutes you would swear you were out in the boonies.''

Untamed and undefined

It's a wild city with mountains and canyons and - as every David Hasselhoff and ``Baywatch'' fan in Frankfurt, Germany, knows - seamless white beaches. The city loves its water and wilderness so much it hurts.

If you're rich enough, you can buy a house right on the edge of a canyon or beach, close enough to watch as your house is consumed by wildfires, washed

away by a mudslide or carried off in a storm-fueled high tide.

But this is, after all, the land of make-believe, of rebirth, of denial. Or maybe it's just a statistical realism that comes from surviving scrapes in other towns, past lives and starting anew in Los Angeles.

``I do think about it happening again,'' says Schaffner, the earthquake survivor. ``But I don't think anything could measure up to that. I don't think the same thing could occur to me again. I'm a survivor; I came out of it. Within two months of the earthquake, I was in my new house.''

And that may be what makes Los Angeles what it is - being in one's own private space, according to Kotkin.

Ventura Boulevard, like so many boulevards in the city, ``is decrepit and unremarkable,'' but nearby in Kotkin's Valley Village home, ``I have a really nice back yard with a Jacuzzi and fruit trees.''

Sure, Los Angeles doesn't have the large public spaces or structures that define other cities, like New York's grand boulevards, skylines and parks.

But that lack of definition is part of what defines Los Angeles.

``The story of L.A., the narrative of Los Angeles, has not really been written yet,'' Kotkin said. ``Because it's ill-defined, new people can come in and help define it.''

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Photo: (color) no caption (L.A. illustration)

Photo illustration by Jon Gerung/Staff Artist

Photos by Daily News and Associated Press