A LOOK AHEAD * Angelenos from the Fairfax district to East L.A. have decided that the new art complex is a must-see attaction. The anticipation cuts across geographic and cultural boundaries, because, even though . . . : Not Yet Open, Getty Captures Attention of City

At the dusty Universal City construction site where 20-foot-tall machines have just burrowed through the Santa Monica Mountains, there is big pride in big construction.

And that is why, despite his allegiance to the subway, Metro Rail engineer Ben Fardi finds himself bowing in homage to another Los Angeles opus that in so many ways dwarfs his own: the new Getty Center, that castle of steel and travertine that has risen like a medieval stronghold on a Brentwood mountaintop.

“It’s so fantastic,” Fardi said.

Although his view comes straight out of the Engineering News-Record rather than Architectural Digest, it bears a close resemblance to the widespread awe that is drawing trendsetters from around the world to the center’s Dec. 16 public opening.

Fardi--who is educated, but by no means a cultural dilettante--is one of many Southern Californians who is not caught up in the hoopla over the region’s new billion-dollar edifice to art, but will be in line once the glitter recedes.

From rubber-booted tunnel men to immigrant shop owners on the San Gabriel Valley’s main drags, a recognition of the Getty and its portent for the future is seeping into everyday Los Angeles. The masses may not know that the opening of the center is expected to draw more than 700 journalists from around the world to Los Angeles. They may not know that it is being heralded as a cultural event of international significance. But they do sense that this promises to be a transcendent experience, and they want a piece of it.

“I have to go,” said Stephanie Wang, manager of Americana Immigration Service in Alhambra, even though she has not seen the Getty and is not sure yet where it is. “I [am going to] go with my kids. They knew about it, probably from school.”

Although it may never top Disneyland or Universal City in popularity among everyday people, the Getty has already been pegged by many of them as a must-see attraction.

“We’ve been talking it over, me and my wife, to take our kids there,” said another Metro Rail engineer, Amarat Wipaghathagit.

The Getty Center, a 110-acre arts complex designed by architect Richard Meier, will house the Getty Museum, whose extensive and highly regarded art holdings were moved from the Roman-style villa in Malibu last summer. It will also house the Getty Trust’s five other institutes, which foster scholarship and preservation of art worldwide.

You can see the actual Getty as you drive past a gantlet of Getty street banners on Beverly Boulevard in the Fairfax district. But far beyond, those same signs are also popping up in quarters not accustomed to being wooed by L.A.’s culturally connected.

On bustling Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard in East Los Angeles, their significance is being slowly grasped.

“A few days ago they started putting them up,” said Jerry Cruz, a Garfield High School student who helps his family at the Botanica Guadalajara on weekends. “I was trying to figure out what they meant.”

“Around here it’s very rare that they know what that’s about,” Lety Aguirre said as she tended her family business, Aguirre Shoes.

But Aguirre knows.

“I care,” she said. “I was an art major. I used to go to the Norton Simon Museum.”

Aguirre has also heard that tours are booked for months and knows it’s hard to get time off work.

“I’ll just wait,” she said. “I would love to go there.”

There is a simple division in how Angelenos have discovered the Getty. Those who live in the San Fernando Valley and commute to the Westside, or vice versa, probably have seen it before they knew what it was, their curiosity roused by the huge escarpment cut into mountains, then the serpentine tramway--possibly wondering what Arab sheik was building a palace overlooking the San Diego Freeway.

Others who know about the Getty are more likely to have picked up the message on television or by reading about it in a newspaper. Those who don’t can be quick to catch its significance.

George Chavez, the harried manager of Brooklyn Hardware on the street now renamed for Cesar Chavez, has already decided to take his daughters there, and will add it to the itinerary for the visits of his small-town relatives.

“Since we got a big city, people like us to take them and see the places,” Chavez said.

That same range of attitudes can be found in Century City, where lawyers, stockbrokers and clerks in the high-rise buildings can boast the city’s most splendid view of the Getty.

Some are enthralled; others hardly notice.

The receptionist at International Leasing Finance Corp., which occupies the entire 39th floor of the SunAmerica Tower, had never heard anyone discuss the view of the Getty.

Just one floor down, however, the offices of SunAmerica Inc. are aglow with civic pride over the Getty opening, said Sharon McQueen, executive assistant to chairman Eli Broad, the man now in charge of fund-raising for Los Angeles’ other coming cultural attraction, the Disney Concert Hall.

That Getty Trust President Harold Williams and his soon-to-be successor Barry Munitz are both on SunAmerica’s board may stimulate interest too.

A few floors further down, Korbi Delabarre, the receptionist at Chartwell Partners, noticed the construction project through her boss’ window one bright clear day when the Westside dew receded.

“It was just really big and sad,” said Delabarre, a Midwest native. “L.A. makes me kind of sad. Anyplace where there is open space, they build on it.”

In every quarter, some voice of opposition rises.

“On this side of town, it’ll be like, ‘Who cares about that?’ ” said bodybuilder Ray Sarni, who manages Rick’s Gym on Valley Boulevard in Alhambra, and says he’s heard his fill about the Getty. “They only made it for the civil people, people who can afford it, high society, grand people, mayors and everybody. Where does art put food into the table of homeless and poor people?”

Ditto Gerald Hillard, the counterman at Club Video on Crenshaw Boulevard in the Crenshaw district.

“That’s a lot of money going to waste,” said Hillard, who added that he sought but didn’t get a carpenter’s job building the Getty. “There are too many homeless people on the streets to put a billion dollars in a building.”

They are the usual charges--degrading the land, denying the poor, cowering behind a veil of elitism.

But they have surprisingly few adherents, and they are muted by the chords of good will that the Getty has played with meticulous care--from its negotiations with the homeowners of Brentwood and Bel-Air (who fought then finally endorsed the massive construction project) to its Research Institute’s support of Roosevelt High School students in mapping the history of Boyle Heights.

The chorus resounded in Sherman Oaks, whose powerful homeowner group is best known for the “not in my backyard” defense to any assault on the graceful Santa Monica Mountains.

When Getty chief Williams spoke at the group’s monthly meeting last week, an unusually large crowd came out to listen in rapt anticipation and book their spots on the association’s tour.

“Opposition to the Getty is like opposition to motherhood,” said longtime homeowner group President Richard Close. “It’s too important a facility for Los Angeles to be opposed, especially when they made such strides to be a good neighbor.”

Close says he’s the kind of person who is unlikely to drop by the Louvre when he goes to Paris. But he sees more than a museum atop the hill as he commutes to his Century City law office.

“It’s a feeling that this is part of the resurgence of Los Angeles,” he said.

Back on Crenshaw Boulevard in a shop called Topaz Wigs, shopper Leigh Manley sings a variation on the same theme, pausing after checking herself out in the braided look to praise the Getty poster signs outside proclaiming “IMAGINE, DISCOVER, EXPLORE, ENJOY.”

“They’re reaching out to people that the other guys don’t,” Manley said.

As a symbol of the city’s prominence and cohesion, there may be no better parallel than Dodger Stadium, which still holds the city in its thrall 35 years after its debut.

Congregating for their lunch break in the press box of the venerable stadium, some Dodger staff members sensed a kind of sympathetic destiny linking their two institutions. After all, the Getty expects to draw more than a third of the annual visitors that the Dodgers do.

Jean Nuttal, who has worked in the ticket office for 13 years, dismissed the notion of competition.

“You’re talking about the rich and famous,” she said. “The person off the street will not go to the museum. They will come here.”

But payroll director Jesus Dominguez finds the Getty simply too stirring, “like a castle in the hills,” to dismiss it as unappealing to any class.

“I pay the big guys and the little guys,” Dominguez said. “I tell you that sometimes little people appreciate art. This is for the big guys and the little guys.”

“Regular people, they could be interested,” added accounting trainee Monica Cortez. “But there is no way for them to get there. If you don’t have a car, how are you going to get there?”

(Actually, it’s cheaper and in some ways easier to see the Getty if you don’t have a car. Motorists must book a reservation for parking and pay $5. Anyone who can bicycle, ride a bus or get a lift can show up unannounced and get in free.)

The question of regular people’s access to the Getty has undoubtedly been obscured by the international news media’s fin de siecle giddiness over the opening party.

“Can I be invited?” asked one young woman in the Dodger lunch crew, answering with the conventional wisdom. “I don’t think so.”

Astonishing as it may seem, some people have turned down invitations to the opening.

James Burks, director of the William Grant Still Art Center in southwest Los Angeles, said he prefers to go to South Africa, where he is promoting his mission of cultural tourism to inner-city Los Angeles.

“It is a great party,” Burks said. “People will say for years, ‘We were there when it opened.’ Unfortunately, I just won’t have it on my resume.”

Burks nevertheless sees the Getty and its money as a wonderful elixir for Los Angeles’ ailing cultural education.

“When I grew up in Los Angeles, we didn’t have Proposition 13,” he says. “I saw ‘Blue Boy’ at the Huntington Library. I went to the opera at the Shrine. The energy the Getty can expend getting young people exposed to cultural values could be tremendous. To that extent I see it as positive.”

Even as visiting arts journalists send home gushing reports on the highbrow ambience at the kickoff events, people like Burks will be tempering their excitement with a long view of history.

“This ain’t a retirement party,” said Thomas Benitez, the director of Self-Help Graphics, an East Los Angeles gallery for Chicano art. “This is an inauguration.”

Benitez, who sees his mission as sending his East Los Angeles brand of culture around the world, doesn’t recoil, as others may, at the Getty’s Eurocentric focus.

“I don’t think the Getty is responsible for collecting Chicano art,” Benitez said. “I’m not responsible for collecting Greek antiquities. What I expect them to do is engage the Chicano community so we understand the relevance of what they’re doing. . . . It takes time to understand why it is there.”

The idea that the Getty can find its place in the city’s mishmash blend of international and indigenous cultures doesn’t confound Angelenos such as Benitez as it did multimillionaire David Geffen when he confided to a reporter for the New Yorker that he thought the Getty too good for Los Angeles.

“I think the question should be, ‘Is the Getty Center good enough for Los Angeles,’ ” Benitez said.

Inside a manicurist’s shop on Manchester and Vermont in South-Central Los Angeles, a woman named Promise agreed.

“You don’t just want to get a pat on the back. You can’t just showboat,” said Promise, who wouldn’t add a last name, as she inspected her new two-inch nails. “Is it touching somebody?”

Promise said she’ll make a point of visiting with her daughter, the one of her five children whom she regards as a blooming Picaso.

“My daughter would love it,” Promise said. “That would be worth it, if she was inspired.”

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Visiting the New Getty Center

Location: The Getty Center is located at 1200 Getty Center Drive in Brentwood.

Hours: Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Closed Mondays and major holidays.

Cost: Admission to the museum is free; parking is $5.

Transportation: Parking reservations are required and can be made by calling (310) 440-7300 or, for the hearing impaired, (310) 440-7305. Information is in English and Spanish. Visitors without a reservation can come via bus, taxi or bicycle, but parking in nearby neighborhoods is severely restricted. MTA bus No. 561 and the Santa Monica Blue Bus No. 14 stop at the front entrance on Sepulveda Boulevard. Bicycle racks and taxi stop with direct phone lines to cab companies are located in the parking garage.