Between 1900 and 1920, a residential building boom helped establish a commercial district on Dowling Street, the Third Ward’s main artery, with restaurants, shops, churches, stores, professional offices, movie theaters, and nightclubs. At the corner of Elgin and Dowling Streets, architect Lenard Gabert designed the Eldorado Ballroom for philanthropists and business owners Clarence Arnold Dupree and Anna Johnson Dupree. Opened in 1939 and named for one of the social clubs of the Black community’s prominent professionals and business people, it gave members of the Black middle and upper classes a place to display wealth and sophistication. The ballroom launched the careers of musicians and band leaders including Milton Larkin, Illinois Jacquet, and Arnett Cobb, and in the late 1950s it hosted popular entertainment acts by nationally known Black blues and R&B artists. By the 1960s, migration out of the inner city led many area businesses to relocate or close, and the declining importance of social clubs, inadequate parking, and competition from other venues contributed to the ballroom’s closure in the 1970s. After the Duprees died, oilman Hubert Finkelstein bought the property in 1984 and donated it 15 years later to Project Row Houses, and the Eldorado Ballroom remains one of the few historic buildings from the Third Ward’s former commercial district.