Mini-Mall Hailed as Bringing Franchise Restaurant to Watts

A threadbare scrap of land in Watts could soon become home to a Denny’s restaurant and mini-mall, which backers say could supply the long-suffering community with more than 100 new jobs and help challenge the area’s negative image.

It will be the second Denny’s to serve Watts, an area that has struggled to recover from the 1965 riots and whose dearth of restaurants is a long-standing local grievance.

“We’ve been working on this a long time,” said Sweet Alice Harris, a prominent community activist. “We’ve said: ‘If we just had a place to eat a bowl of soup.’ Now we’re about to get that.”

The move did not exactly get off on the right foot, however.

Led by Mayor Richard Riordan, speaker after speaker lauded the move as history-making, claiming that no national restaurant franchise had served the residents of Watts for more than 30 years. Riordan’s formal announcement described the restaurant as the first to service Watts “in a generation.”

In fact, Denny’s opened in 1992 a franchise at the Watts-Willowbrook mall, an area technically in the unincorporated part of Los Angeles County but serving the same community. It was the nation’s first Denny’s franchise owned by an African American, and its opening was greeted with much of the same fanfare that officials tried to drum up for Monday’s announcement.

The restaurant was dogged by financial troubles in 1994, but is still in business today. Asked about the confusion, a Riordan aide said the new restaurant will be the first to service “the heart of Watts,” since the other establishment sits on the community’s border.

Despite the hyperbolic official claims, community leaders and business owners welcomed news of the restaurant.

According to plans, the restaurant will anchor a small strip mall that also will be the site of a Bank of America branch and a Rite Aid drugstore. Together, the three operations are projected to support 80 to 100 jobs, a small number relative to the area’s need, but one that residents and others said they hope will help turn around Watts’ image and encourage more development.

“This is a sign of stability,” said Leslie White, pastor at the nearby Grant African Methodist Episcopal Church. “We hope it will induce other businesses to come.”

The new shopping center, community members say, will change the scrappy collection of businesses in the area today, introducing a Spanish-style strip along Central Avenue, just south of Will Rogers Memorial Park. The center represents a $7-million investment, officials said, and was made possible largely because Bank of America agreed to contribute $500,000 worth of land and reconfigure its existing office on the site to a small portion of the overall acreage. That helped clear space for new buildings.

The most striking aspect of the new mall is the presence of Denny’s, still laboring to shed its negative image among some African Americans as a result of widely publicized incidents in which black customers were treated rudely and refused service. Those complaints grew into a class action lawsuit, which resulted in Denny’s paying a multimillion-dollar settlement.

The owner of the Watts franchise, Leighton Hull, acknowledged that the company has had its problems, but stressed that the new franchise will help give jobs to local residents and provide a rare place to dine in the community.

“We’re not just talking about bacon and eggs,” he said. “We’re talking about opportunity.”