Dunbar Hotel

In the summer of 1928, W.E.B. Du Bois praised Los Angeles's new Somerville Hotel as a luxurious "jewel," and it housed many National Association for the Advancement of Colored People delegates during the group's first West Coast convention. Named for its original owners, Jamaica-born John Somerville and his wife, Vada, the hotel was built with African American laborers, contractors, and craftsmen and with community support; the Somervilles were the first black graduates of the University of Southern California School of Dentistry. The four-story brick hotel featured shops, a 100-seat dining room, a piano lounge, a nightclub, and a grand mural-adorned lobby that became, from the late 1920s through the 1930s, a fashionable gathering place for black America's elite as the surrounding neighborhood emerged as the heart of Los Angeles's African American community. The hotel helped spur development along Central Avenue, where jazz clubs soon opened and the area became known to some as "Little Harlem" and "Brown Broadway." After the 1929 stock market crash, the Somervilles sold the property to businessman and lawyer Lucius Lomax Sr., who renamed it the Dunbar after African American poet, playwright, and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar. At a time when many hotels in downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills would not accommodate black people, the Dunbar welcomed guests such as Joe Louis, Langston Hughes, Pullman porters, and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, who later became an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Under both the Somervilles and later owners, it also became a lively social center for entertainers including Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Lomax sold the property in 1934 to Father Divine, founder of the International Peace Mission Movement, and in 1936 James "Jimmy" Nelson and his wife, Katherine, took ownership and guided the Dunbar through influential decades. As integration and demographic change reshaped the area, the music scene declined, middle-class African Americans moved westward, and the hotel lost its upscale clientele and fell into disrepair. Rehabilitated in 1988 as affordable housing and restored again in 2013 through a $30 million renovation for low-income seniors, the building is now a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and is listed on state and national registers of historic places.

Los Angeles, California · United States