Largely unscathed Watts deserves new investment, proponents say.

Richard McNish, project manager of Los Angeles' tiny Watts redevelopment project, believes it was neither luck nor criminal oversight that allowed the Martin Luther King Jr. Shopping Center to escape last month's civil unrest without being torched: It was civic pride and economics.

"People fought for 20 years to get this shopping center. It's the only one the community has and even those who were looting the stores saw value in it," McNish said. "That's why it wasn't destroyed."

While every one of the 25 stores inside the 100,000-square-foot retail hub suffered broken windows and stolen merchandise, total damage was less than $500,000. And no sooner had the riots ceased than merchant clean-up efforts were organized and talk began of renewal among the minority entrepreneurs.

Last week, the parking lot at the center, built in 1984 by developer Alexander Haagen, was three-quarters full and some of the larger shops were doing a brisk business. Situated at the corner of 103rd Street and Compton Ave., the MLK Shopping Center is at the heart of where the 1965 Watts disturbances started; some still call it "Charcoal Alley."

In last month's tumult, "they took our ATM machines and our computers, but we still opened Monday (after the riots) with a borrowed cash register," said Charlotte Burnett, manager of California Federal's Watts branch. "Everything is basically the same, except customers seem a little uneasy."

Sav-On Manager Kevin Mosley says his store lost about 25 percent of its merchandise, though the retail chain's insurance will cover the $175,000 in swiped goods. What concerns him the most, besides when The Boys supermarket nearby will re-open, are the unemployed.

"People around here want jobs, job training, just something," Mosley said.

For his part, McNish isn't sanguine the Rebuild L.A. rhetoric will mean an economic turnaround in the community. As many as one-third of the Watts' 50,000 residents are unemployed and the local median household income is $15,000, half the state average. Moreover, nothing has filled the employment void left when nearby plants run by Lockheed Corp. and Kaiser Steel vanished years ago.

"It's twice as hard to build something here than in downtown," McNish said. "I had to go to the federal government, the CRA, the (city's) Community Development Department, Union Bank and a private business" just to get the financing for an 18,000 square foot office building. "The IBMs and Honeywells aren't coming in here."

However, there may be one windfall from April's violence: local support for redevelopment.

Two years ago, the CRA proposed transforming the 107-acre Watts project into a 2,000-acre tract with $200 million in government investment for housing, child care, public improvements and employment training centers. But community and business leaders, fearful that redevelopment meant eminent domain and bulldozed homes, angrily rejected the plan before it went to the City Council.

Since then, the CRA and district Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores have formed a citizens panel to come up with a more palatable plan to preserve existing housing and to develop only vacant lots. Instead of waiting until mid-1993 to forward the expansion plan to the council, McNish wants to use provisions under state redevelopment law allowing streamlined revitalization approval in disaster areas.

"We're still going to have to hustle," McNish concluded.

To Milke Flores, however, the surprisingly little damage at the MLK Shopping Center and other parts of the community should demonstrate to business and the world "Watts is a community, not the name of a riot."

"We need federal enterprise zones because companies in a recession don't just pick up and go without incentives," she said. "But after the riots, we had to actually turn people away who showed up spontaneously to clean up the shopping center -- they felt like part of its success story."

To date, most of the CRA's $50 million total investment in the 24-year-old redevelopment project has been for affordable housing and restoration of the historic sites, like the Watts Train Station.

This year, the agency earmarked only $7 million for Watts, compared to $91 million for the heavily commercial 133-acre Bunker Hill Redevelopment Area in downtown L.A.