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Waiting for relatives to emerge from a gleaming Universal CityWalk gift shop, tourist Maryanna Watson of Houston went over her one-week Los Angeles itinerary:
Disneyland. Westwood Village. Knott's Berry Farm. Marilyn Monroe's grave. Stars' homes in Beverly Hills and Brentwood.
But would she see the Watts Towers or the murals of East Los Angeles, hear live jazz in Leimert Park or stop for lunch in Koreatown?
"No, not at all," said the 50-something grandmother, shaking her head. "The pictures I have of these neighborhoods are of gangs and crime and slums. I mean, is there another side?"
Until recently, the culturally rich "other side" of Los Angeles--including East Los Angeles, South Los Angeles and Koreatown--has been largely ignored by the local tourism industry, which has traditionally presented the city as a palm-lined playground for the rich and famous, dotted with theme parks and populated by suntanned blondes.
But a coalition of more than 30 labor leaders, community activists, business owners and local artists, known as the Tourism Industry Development Council, is working to change that.
The nonprofit, privately funded coalition came together with seed money from the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union shortly after the 1992 riots, when the city's tourism industry plunged into a two-year slump as images of burning buildings obscured prospective visitors' notions of fun in the sun.
The coalition has challenged the local tourism industry to undo some of the damage to the...