Restored Hotel to Be Symbol of Blacks’ History

‘With the advent of civil rights, desegregation in public places, I think it’s important for us not to forget the road we had to go through.’

Like a prized silver antique tarnished by decades of neglect, the Dunbar Hotel badly needs polishing to restore its luster. Under an unusual arrangement with the city, in which a cultural museum and low-income housing units will occupy the same structure, the South-Central landmark is about to get it.

A hub of Los Angeles’ black culture in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, the stately Dunbar has not aged gracefully. The signs of urban tarnish--graffiti-marred walls, broken windows and blackened bricks--have built up in the days since the Central Avenue hotel shined.

The Dunbar, in its heyday a West Coast cross between the Waldorf-Astoria and the Cotton Club, hosted Lena Horne, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Redd Foxx and Joe Louis as the only major Los Angeles hotel welcoming blacks. But in the ‘70s, the hotel declined drastically, with transients staying in rooms once reserved for the stars. Today, the empty hotel is sandwiched between vacant lots, funeral homes and other small businesses at the corner of Central Avenue and 42nd Street.

The hotel may approach its former splendor after a yearlong $2.9-million face lift is completed in the fall of 1988. But instead of hosting the celebrated and the rich, plans are for the renovated Dunbar to celebrate black history and provide rooms for the poor.

The project is being directed by the nonprofit Dunbar Hotel Cultural and Historical Museum project and bankrolled by a 30-year loan from the city’s Community Development Department and Community Redevelopment Agency.

The plans represent a 19-year crusade for Bernard Johnson, founder and director of the museum group and a man who has spent his retirement working on the hotel.

“I’m overjoyed,” said Johnson, a 70-year-old former county health worker who purchased the hotel in the aftermath of the Watts riots. “I’ve put almost all of my energy, time and resources into making this happen.”

After purchasing the hotel in 1968, Johnson first tried to run the Dunbar as a hotel, but closed it in 1974 because he was losing money. Since then, the Dunbar has operated intermittently as a museum. Johnson successfully lobbied city officials to declare the hotel a historical landmark and get it listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“With the advent of civil rights, desegregation in public places, I think it’s important for us not to forget the road we had to go through,” Johnson said.

The Dunbar was built in 1928 by Dr. Alexander Somerville, who started construction after a trip to San Francisco where he could not find a hotel that would give rooms to blacks. Enraged by the experience and determined to change the situation in Los Angeles, Somerville built a top-flight hotel at a time when blacks usually stayed with friends, relatives or in third-rate boarding houses.

The Dunbar quickly became the hub of an expanding Central Avenue music scene, linked to the nightclubs and celebrities who came there--entertainers who could play, but not stay in downtown hotels.

Celes King, whose family owned the hotel from the 1930s to the ‘50s, remembers seeing a nonstop parade of stars check in.

“I saw them all,” said the 64-year-old King. “The Duke Ellingtons, the Cab Calloways the Billie Holidays--almost any major personality you could think of. There was just about no major black person in America who had not gone through the Dunbar Hotel. It was a Mecca.”

Integration Catalyst

King, a past president of the city’s chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said the Dunbar is significant because it helped trigger the city’s integration.

“What the Dunbar did was actually begin a trend and cause part of the reaching out for equal facilities,” said King, who runs a bail bond agency. “It showed that blacks had the capability to build a society that would reflect the normal society of America and show that we were not different from other races in the country.”

But as public discrimination came to an end, so did the Dunbar’s popularity.

“When integration was achieved and equal accommodations came along, it no longer represented the symbol that it did,” he said. Restoring the Dunbar “will go a long way to reestablishing the original culture that was the Los Angeles black community,” King said.

The restoration project will involve gutting 115 hotel rooms on the top three floors of the four-story, Mediterranean-style structure and turning them into 72 low-income modern housing units. The mezzanine, lobby and basement will be devoted to the museum and cultural center, retaining the original 1930s decor. The building’s five street-level shops will also be renovated for new commercial use.

A fire sprinkler system will be added and extensive plumbing and electrical work will be done to make the units habitable. The unreinforced brick walls, which Johnson says have withstood three earthquakes without a crack, will be brought up to present earthquake codes. Exterior walls, which feature sweeping arches with wrought iron trim, will be restored to their original condition, with ornate balconies restored.

Still in Good Shape

“It will involve a fairly major rehabilitation to bring it as close as possible to the original appearance,” said Bruce Moore, a partner in Architectural Enterprises, the firm drawing up the project plans. “But the building is in pretty good shape considering how old it is.”

After needed approvals from local and state building agencies, the renovation project should be completed within a year after the work begins in October or November, Moore said.

Johnson admits his plans have been substantially scaled back. He first wanted a black walk of fame on Central Avenue and museum displays in each of the hotel rooms. Although he first opposed the city’s idea for low-income housing, which cut significantly into museum space, Johnson said he thinks the two can coexist.

“This is probably the only way and the best way to go,” he said. “After awhile, we thought (low-income housing) was a good idea since that would make the museum self-supporting.”

Adding the low-income housing made the hotel eligible for city funds and will bring in an estimated $280,000 annually, income to be used in paying the loan, city housing Director Ralph Esparza said.

Solution That Works

“We like to think we’re being innovative,” he said. “The area needs more housing and the hotel people need an income source. This solution gives us both.”

After the renovation, Johnson said, he will try to get more memorabilia to fill the hotel and begin plans to locate a black cultural and resource center in the Dunbar. Years of uncertainty, he said, have hampered efforts to expand the collection and create the museum he envisioned.

“I’m not sure if they (black entertainers) were unwilling, or just didn’t want to give up their things when they didn’t know what would happen,” he said. “Who knows, maybe when we have the Dunbar in top shape they’ll be lining up to give.”