Hahn Plaza’s Community Roots Protect Denny’s

Last year, when Donald J. Bohana talked of building a Denny’s in the Kenneth Hahn Shopping Plaza, he referred to the shopping center as possibly the most secure mall in Los Angeles. Until last week, Bohana didn’t know how right he was.

The 5,000-square-foot Denny’s, which will be the first family-style, sit-down restaurant to open in the Watts-Willowbrook area since the Watts riots of 1965, was under construction when rioting broke out April 29. The result: The opening date has been set back by about a week. The restaurant will now open over the July 4 weekend.

“We are probably the only shopping center in that vicinity that survived,” says Bohana, a Los Angeles native and founding director of the L.A.-based Guardian Bank. “We have good security--the guards live in the community. They knew that if the gangs took the center they were out of a job. One guard told me, ‘I have child support to pay, and I’ve got another family to take care of, and I am not going to be out of work because of this nonsense.’ So it gets back to the key of employing people, giving them a stake in what’s happening. And these guards definitely had a stake.”

They weren’t the only ones. Bohana had already sunk about $200,000 of his own money into construction costs. “We are a quarter of the way completed, so it would have been devastating,” he says. “But I talked to Denny’s; they kept calling me during the rioting from Spartanburg (S.C., company headquarters). Even if the site had gone up, we decided we were going to go for it anyway. We would have started all over again.”