April 2, 1989

The Roar of the Freeways

By ROBERT REINHOLD; ROBERT REINHOLD IS CHIEF OF THE LOS ANGELES BUREAU OF THE NEW YORK TIMES.

But those willing to accept Los Angeles for what it is - a place where the automobile has become the ultimate declaration of American independence, the vehicle of hedonistic life, personal liberty and the pursuit of happiness - will find a fascinating land of bungalows and mansions, Art Deco, Craftsman and daring post-modern architecture, lush gardens and parks, dramatic canyons and deserts.

This is not Paris, Rome or New York, certainly not San Francisco. Abandon all thought of walking. ''Unlike most cities, Los Angeles is not organized as a set of places or neighborhoods,'' according to the architect Charles Moore in his guide ''The City Observed: Los Angeles.'' ''It is so big that it must be seen, for the most part, as a set of very long streets or freeways or rides, and the places of interest as events along the way.''

Those events are extraordinary, weaving between the sublime and the absurd, hard reality and movieland fantasy. ''There is always something so delightfully real about what is phony here,'' Noel Coward once said. ''And something so phony about what is real.'' Some find this land a paradise, perhaps a paradise of paradoxes. But there is a price to pay for it: traffic congestion, earthquakes, gang crime and, not leastly, smog. Last month Southern California authorities voted to impose sweeping restrictions on everyday life to clean up the air, ultimately by reducing reliance on private automobiles, among many other things. But for now, the car remains king.

The following tours are meant to give the outsider a flavor of Los Angeles and its environs that goes beyond tour-bus routes, bringing the visitor closer to the everyday reality of Angelenos. It is a reality rooted in the American dream of single-family homes and the good life. Los Angeles - sprawl, freeway madness and all - is what it is because that's what people want.

In their book, ''Architecture in Los Angeles,'' David Gebhard and Robert Winter put it this way: ''Southern California is the most complete realization of the myth of the self-made, self-reliant, self-oriented individual that the world has ever seen.''

Thus armed, put the top down, adjust sunglasses and venture out. BUNGALOWS AND MANSIONS: West Hollywood and Beverly Hills

A fitting way to start this tour is breakfast at Hugo's, the show business hangout at 8401 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, where deals and scripts are cut over pasta mama and strong coffee. Thus fortified, drive west a few blocks on Santa Monica, turn right on Hilldale Avenue just before the Bank of America branch.

Then left on Dicks Street where you enter ''a sort of twilight zone of houses (or house fronts) that encompasses some of the most surprising architectural acrobatics on this planet'' in Charles Moore's words. Imagination has run amok in these tiny bungalows turned into mini-palaces. ''It is as if in each telephone-booth-size living room some mild-mannered Clark Kent of a decorator were changing into his Superman suit, so as to leap several jumps in scale with but a single bound,'' he said, adding that ''each house tries desperately to outdazzle its neighbors on a bit of land not much wider than the Mercedes or B.M.W. that sparkles out front.''

Behind square-cut hedges, tall pointy cedars, mini-palms and bougainvillea, this odd architectural parade marches up and down Dicks Street and nearby Norma Place, Lloyd Place, Vista Grande Street and adjoining streets. Among the delights are the stucco cottage with a turret and slit windows and an awning supported by conquistador spears over the front door (8968 Dicks), a Craftsman bungalow with redwood siding (8969 Dicks), a steel and dark glass contemporary (8936 Dicks) and a Sante Fe-style bungalow behind a dazzling display of cactus and succulents (9010 Norma). Least obtrusive but perhaps most elegant is the two-story Maya-style house by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, under two huge pines at 858 North Doheny Drive, corner of Vista Grande.

Crossing Doheny Drive brings you into Beverly Hills, and the passage is like going from ants to giants. Enter on Elevado Avenue and go straight, slowly observing the magnificent mansions built by old money and later show business, past Hillcrest Road and Foothill Road with their double rows of towering palms, Rodeo Drive with its great branching ficas, their silver-white bark lending a glistening elegance. Most of the houses here breathe big money, but imagination creeps in here and there. Turn left on Walden Drive to Carmelita Avenue, where you find the Spadena House, a Hansel and Gretel cottage originally built for a movie studio, which looks as if it is inhabited by a witch on a broomstick. Then follow Carmelita back to Rodeo Drive, turn right to No. 507 and wonder at this daring new Art Nouveau house (1978-83), which wraps around the back alley with its giant whorls and threatening gargoyles.

If it's time for lunch, park nearby and cross Santa Monica Boulevard into the commercial part of Berverly Hills. Here are all the famed shops of Rodeo Drive and an assortment of restaurants ranging from the Johnny Rockets diner on Beverly Drive for a 1950's burger to the Bistro Garden (176 North Canon Drive), the place to see such personalities as Nancy Reagan and spend a fortune on an ordinary lunch.

Now go back up Rodeo Drive to Sunset Boulevard, turn right and go past the pink and posh Beverly Hills Hotel.

North of Sunset are the grandest Beverly Hills homes, in the hills. Go left up Doheny Road, to Loma Vista Drive, entry to Trousdale Estates. Most of these mansions are guarded by gates and dogs, but the largest and grandest of all Beverly Hills estates is open to the public. It is the Greystone Mansion, built by the oil magnate Edward L. Doheny in 1929 and now owned by the City of Beverly Hills. The 18.5 acres of grounds and formal gardens are a city park, a quiet little-known retreat, and the vacant baronial English mansion is a frequent set for commercials and movies. It is not open for tours, but peer in the doors and windows at the magnificent stairs and paneled walls and imagine Beverly Hills in its social heyday. INLAND EMPIRE AND HIGH DESERT: San Bernardino, Riverside, Joshua Tree

This drive is probably best scheduled as an overnight rather than a day trip inasmuch as it involves 350 or more miles of driving round trip from Los Angeles. Take the San Bernadino Freeway (Interstate 10) from Los Angeles to San Bernadino, deep in the so-called Inland Empire, the fast-growing area that lies in the remote suburban orbit of Los Angeles. The smog here is about the worst in the Los Angeles Basin, but when it is clear there are fine views of the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains.

San Bernadino has a number of sites worth visiting, the oddest and perhaps most famous being the Wigwam Motel at 2728 West Foothill Boulevard (west of downtown in Rialto) on the old Route 66 on which so many generations of new Angelenos arrived before the freeways were built. The run-down motel is the ultimate Calfornia fantasy, 19 white and orange teepee-shaped huts forming a roadside motel. (''Do It in a Teepee,'' leers the sign out front.) San Bernadino has some classier monuments, too, mainly two fine Cesar Pelli buildings, the City Hall (300 North D Street) and the Security Pacific National Bank (402 North D Street).

Now take the freeway (I-215) that cuts through downtown for the short ride to Riverside. Get off at the Seventh Street exit and proceed two blocks to the 87-year-old Riverside Mission Inn. The inn complex, with Gothic galleries, Renaissance patios, chapels and stained-glass windows, was closed three years ago for ambitious restoration and renovations. Unhappily, the Wisconsin-based developer ran out of money just before the inn was to reopen as a hotel and museum last Dec. 28, after new staff had been hired and trained and rooms refurnished.

The property was turned back to the lender, Chemical Bank of New York, which is trying to decide what to do. In the meantime, the inn is fenced off, but it can be admired from the street, where you can enjoy a sandwich from Simple Simon's cafe and bakery on outdoor tables under orange and pine trees on the Main Street mall. For the latest information, check with the volunteers at the Friends of the Mission Inn, 3727 Sixth Street, whose storefront office is open from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M. Monday to Saturday.

From Riverside, get on Route 60 East, through Moreno Valley, and rejoin I-10. Just past the Palm Springs exit, turn north on Route 62 toward Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms. Here the road rises steeply to the high desert, a special ecosystem. The chief attraction is Joshua Tree National Monument, a 467,000-acre preserve that is home for the tall, ungainly and prickly Joshua tree, not to mention coyotes, yucca night lizards, tarantulas, rattlesnakes and kangaroo rats. The main entrance, which has a visitor center and book shop, is just south of Twentynine Palms on Utah Trail.

The terrain, with its big rounded granite rocks, mines and canyons, soft morning and evening hues, is alluring, peaceful and tranquilizing, despite the crowds that flock there on weekends. There are many good hikes; one easy one goes to the Barker Dam and a little reservoir near the Hidden Valley Campground. At sunset, go to Keys View for a view of the Coachella Valley reaching from the Salton Sea to Palm Springs and beyond. The preserve has no restaurants or accommodations apart from nine primitive campgrounds, but there are plenty of motels and restaurants in the towns of Twentynine Palms, Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley.

Now back down to I-10. Many side trips are possible over desert back roads, or to the glitter of Palm Springs, another overnight possibility. A pleasant trip, particularly during the blazing warm months, is to take winding Route 243 from Banning up to the cool mountain resort of Idyllwild. Ultimately, though, get back on I-10 for the grueling freeway trek back to the city. OLD CITY AND MOVIELAND: Echo Park, Silver Lake, Hollywood

This drive starts in one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, Echo Park, just northwest of downtown, which is experiencing revival. Start at the lake in the park, with superb lotus plants, where you can rent a paddle boat for $5 a half hour for three people at Torro's boathouse. Then take Sunset Boulevard east and go right on Douglas Street to Carroll Avenue to enter Los Angeles's Victorian past. Grand Queen Anne-style houses, many of them lovingly restored, line this two-block street as well as Kellam Avenue around the corner. The 1888 Sessions House at 1330 Carroll is a particularly fine example.

Now back to Sunset Boulevard, right on Echo Park Avenue, right on Morton Avenue and follow the signs to Park Drive, a high narrow street that edges Elysian Park and has some lovely homes with fine views. Right where the street turns left into Avon Park Terrace are two romantic Pueblo-style homes, dating to 1931, two rust earthen structures that rise steeply from the road.

Wind back around to Sunset Boulevard and turn right. The jumble of shops here speak volumes about the new Los Angeles reality: Chinese Herb Center, Phnom Penh Restaurant, Centro Professional Hispano. Turn right on Silver Lake Boulevard and enter the mixed, often funky Silver Lake district, home for many professionals who work nearby in downtown.

The house at 2300 Silver Lake Boulevard, just across from the reservoir, is considered a landmark in modern architecture, a leading example of the 1930's international style with its geometric rectangluar boxes and planes of opaque glass. It was designed in 1933 by Richard J. Neutra, the celebrated Austrian architect, who did much of his work in Los Angeles and later designed nine other houses just down the street from 2226 to 2250 Silver Lake and behind on Argent Place. All of them sit behind exquisite gardens of pine and eucalyptus.

Wander around to the other side of the reservoir and up to Micheltorena Street, along which numerous fine houses cling to the ridge of a hill with views of the city amid a profusion of foliage and flowers. No. 2236 is another modern classic (built in 1933) by R. M. Schindler, a European architect of the international school.

Again back to Sunset Boulevard and turn right toward Hollywood and onto Hollywood Boulevard. Just west of Vermont Avenue turn left into Barnsdall Park and proceed up the hill to the Barnsdall House (1918-20), sometimes called the Hollyhock House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in his pre-Columbian style. Now an art center run by the city, it was once the home for Aline Barnsdall, an oil millionaire who dabbled in Marxism. The house is open for tours ($1.50 admission) on Tuesdays, Wendesdays and Thursdays on the hour at 10 A.M., 11 A.M., noon and 1 P.M.) and on Saturdays and the first three Sundays of the month at noon and 1 , 2 and 3 P.M.

Proceed farther west on Hollywood Boulevard, once the center of the movie industry. Behind all the sleeze and schlock are the dazzling architectural remnants of the era between Vine Street and Orange Drive. The styles range from Art Deco to Zig Zag Moderne to Spanish colonial revival to Churrigueresque and Chinese. The most famous landmark is Mann's Chinese Theater (No. 6925); pick up Charles Moore's guide for more detailed explanations of the other delights.

Just above Hollywood Boulevard, off Highland Avenue, is one of the wierder Southern California adaptations. A cluster of moderne bungalows cling to the walls of a canyon. Residents park in garages below on High Tower Drive and get home by taking an elevator that runs up an Italian-like campanile. To end the tour, wind down Camrose Drive to 1999 North Sycamore Avenue and into the Japanese castle called the Yamashiro Restaurant for a cool drink. In a city with many fine Japanese restaurants, Yamashiro's strength is not its food but its commanding site, which affords panoramic views, at least when the smog has cleared . CANYONS: Topanga and Malibu

The extraordinary thing about Los Angeles is how close it is to spectactular mountains and rugged canyons, teaming with wildlife and denizens of the New Age. One of the nearest to central Los Angeles is Topanga Canyon, probably the only place in America where one is likely to see a hand-lettered roadside sign reading, ''Crystals and Geodes Ahead.'' Ahead, a young woman at a folding table sells those essential New Age tools.

Topanga is part of the Santa Monica Mountains, a range that stretches for 52 miles along the coast just above Los Angeles, much of it state park land. Drive up the Pacific Coast Highway (State Route 1) past Santa Monica to Topanga Canyon Boulevard (Route 27) and turn right, just in front of the red Malibu Feed Bin. The road quickly climbs into the mountains, past the Rainbow Village natural food store on the left. The Post Office marks downtown Topanga, center of a community of free spirits who enjoy a rustic life near, yet far from, the urban pressures of Los Angeles, riding horses, buying produce in the converted box car that houses the Topanga Home Grown market (''Fossils/Crystals/Crafts/Vegetables''). During the summer, there is outdoor theater at the Theatricum Botanicum, established by the late actor Will Geer.

Just past downtown, turn right on Entrada Road to the entrance of Topanga State Park ($3 admission). Good hiking trails lead from the parking lot, wind up the mountains, past mule deer, rabbit, native chaparral and live oaks. The higher elevations of the Backbone Trail offer views of the Los Angeles Basin all the way to Los Angeles International Airport and beyond and over the Pacific Ocean to Catalina Island. Inquire at the ranger station for maps and suggestions; carry water.

It's lunch time, so go back to downtown Topanga, take a right onto Old Topanga Road, and just over the bridge turn into the Inn of the Seventh Ray, a pleasant cafe with outdoor tables along a winding creek under sycamore trees. The menu includes the divine direction for $5.25, a sandwich of cream cheese, walnuts, dates and sprouts ''dusted with a special blend of ground nuts and seeds.'' Or try the violet fire eggplant for $7.20 and pick up some crystals at the adjoining shop.

Thus fortified with energy, nutritional and psychic, drive back toward the ocean and turn right on Fernwood Pacific Drive. Follow it to Saddle Peak Road; there are many scenic overlooks with grand views back to Los Angeles and over the Pacific. Turn right where it splits into Stunt Road, left on Mullholland Highway and then left onto Las Virgenes Road, which takes you into Malibu Canyon.

Just on the right is Malibu Creek State Park, which again offers nice walks. Nostalgia buffs will want to make the easy hike into the former set for the ''M*A*S*H'' television series. From the parking lot, follow Crags Road, a fire road, past the visitor center, around a little lake and into a valley that will look familiar; one almost expects the helicopter to come over the ridge. The set itself was burned in a forest fire, but there are still rusting frames of jeeps and trucks.

Take Malibu Canyon Road down to the Pacific Coast Highway to return to the city, stopping off at Malibu beach for a swim if there's time. Most of the beach is easily accessible, even though some of it is behind houses.