Dunbar Hotel, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

Dunbar Hotel is a storied cultural monument where Historic South-Central's Black civic heritage meets Spanish Revival architecture and the surviving physical centerpiece of Central Avenue's twentieth-century social world.

Set along Central Avenue near East 42nd Place and just steps from Central Avenue Jazz Park, the four-story building occupies a prominent corner within the commercial corridor that developed south of Downtown. Brown brick rises above a stuccoed ground floor articulated by broad semicircular openings, giving the substantial street façades a disciplined vertical and horizontal order. Moving toward the entrance brings the exterior masonry into contact with an interior sequence of flagstone flooring, arched openings, ornamental metalwork and spaces arranged around the historic lobby. Upper floors retain the massing of a large urban hotel above ground-level rooms conceived for gathering, dining and commercial activity. The result is a building whose scale and surviving architectural fabric still communicate the ambition of the institution created inside it.

What you should know about Dunbar Hotel.

Dunbar Hotel is best known for opening as the Hotel Somerville on June 23, 1928, after dentists and civic leaders John Alexander Somerville and Vada Watson Somerville set out to create first-class accommodations for Black travelers excluded from major Los Angeles hotels under segregation. John Somerville had become USC's first Black graduate in 1907, and Vada Somerville later became the university dental school's first Black female graduate; their civic work also included helping organize the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP. The couple undertook about $250,000 in debt to develop the project, which was financed through the Black community and constructed entirely by Black contractors, craftspeople and laborers. More than 5,000 people attended the opening celebration, and days later the hotel received delegates to the NAACP's 19th annual convention, the organization's first national convention held in the western United States. The original complex contained more than 100 guest rooms alongside dining and gathering spaces furnished at a cost of $35,000, creating a level of accommodation deliberately equal to major hotels that denied Black patronage. Financial pressure following the 1929 stock-market crash forced the Somervilles to relinquish the property, and subsequent ownership brought the Dunbar name honoring poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Lucius W. Lomax Sr. purchased the hotel for $100,000 in 1930, returning the property to Black ownership during a period when Central Avenue was expanding into the principal business and cultural district of Black Los Angeles. The hotel received Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status in 1974 and entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, preserving the institution created by the Somervilles as a nationally significant site of Black social history.

The hotel's next defining chapter grew through the musicians, writers, athletes and political figures who converged inside its public rooms during Central Avenue's ascent as a major center of Black nightlife. James and Katherine Nelson purchased the property for $87,500 in 1936, and their family management coincided with decades when performers working elsewhere in segregated Los Angeles found accommodation and community at the Dunbar. Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway and Nat King Cole belonged to a much larger roster associated with the property, joining guests including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Joe Louis and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson operated the Showboat nightclub within the complex during the 1930s, adding another entertainment room to a building where orchestras rehearsed on the mezzanine and professional networks formed across the lobby. Integration gradually weakened the geographic concentration that had sustained the corridor, and the hotel closed during the 1970s before preservation efforts redirected its future. A late-1980s rehabilitation converted the former guest floors into senior apartments and reopened the property in 1990 with a Black history museum component. Another major rehabilitation completed in 2013 incorporated the building into Dunbar Village, creating 43 senior residences inside the historic hotel and linking it with adjoining affordable housing. The succession of hotel, entertainment center, cultural institution and residential community has kept the property physically connected to the Black civic history that gave it national importance.

How to fold Dunbar Hotel into your trip.

Dunbar Hotel works as the anchor for a South Los Angeles sequence tracing religious institution-building, Black theatrical culture and economic self-determination through three institutions created during the expansion of the city's African American community.

Begin at Second Baptist Church, a congregation organized in 1885 that grew from a small prayer group into one of Black Los Angeles's most consequential civic institutions. Rapid membership growth led the church to purchase property on Griffith Avenue in 1924 and commission Paul R. Williams with Norman F. Marsh to develop a Lombardy Romanesque Revival sanctuary; Black-owned businesses supplied the skilled workforce, and the completed building opened January 3, 1926 with seating for 2,500. A. Philip Randolph addressed a public gathering there within weeks, and the church subsequently hosted NAACP national conventions in 1928, 1942 and 1949. Its political role extended through the civil-rights era, with Martin Luther King Jr. speaking there repeatedly and the congregation raising funds in 1954 to print the legal brief connected with Brown v. Board of Education. Continue to Lincoln Theatre, opened in 1927 as a purpose-built stage and movie palace serving Black audiences during an era when racial discrimination restricted access to entertainment venues elsewhere in Los Angeles. Architect John Paxton Perrine gave the building a Moorish Revival façade with ceramic tile, arched bays, onion-shaped capitals and lance-like spires, leading into an auditorium equipped with an orchestra pit, substantial stage and seating for 2,100. Its programming drew performers shared with Harlem's Apollo Theatre, earning the Lincoln a reputation as the “West Coast Apollo,” and the stage hosted artists including Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Billie Holiday. Bishop Samuel Crouch acquired the theater for his congregation in 1961, beginning a later religious chapter that preserved the large auditorium after the era of segregated entertainment ended. Conclude at Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building, constructed in 1928 for the company William Nickerson Jr., Norman Oliver Houston and George Allen Beavers Jr. had founded three years earlier to address discriminatory barriers confronting Black Angelenos seeking insurance. Architect James H. Garrott designed the two-story Mission Revival headquarters and contractor Louis Blodgett executed the project through Black labor, with the insurer occupying the upper floor and merchants leasing commercial rooms below. Golden State Mutual remained profitable through the Depression, began paying dividends in 1930, expanded into Illinois in 1938 and Texas in 1944, and reached nearly $24 million in policies by the end of World War II. The firm's growth eventually carried it to a larger West Adams headquarters in 1949, leaving its original purpose-built home as an enduring artifact of Black entrepreneurship on the corridor. The progression moves from a congregation that turned architecture into civic capacity through a theater built for audiences excluded elsewhere and culminates in an insurance company that converted an underserved market into employment, capital formation and interstate business expansion.

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