The hub of Central Avenue’s vibrant jazz scene in the late ’20s through the early ’50s, the Dunbar Hotel hosted everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Thurgood Marshall to Joe Louis, and served as a symbol of Black achievement during the Jim Crow era

I’m celebrating Black History Month throughout February by visiting sites on the National Register of Historic Places that are important to the history of Black Angelenos.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 17, 1976

This post is ostensibly about the Dunbar Hotel, an important venue and hangout spot on Central Avenue that hosted many Black luminaries in jazz, politics, sports and entertainment as they swung through Los Angeles in the early ’30s through the ‘50s. 

But since it’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m nothing if not a deep appreciator of abiding, faithful love, I shall first tell you the story of Drs. John and Vada Somerville. These two lovebirds were married for 60 years, and are inextricably linked with the Dunbar. I can’t do full justice to their remarkable life stories in a single blog post (read John’s autobiography for more details). So we’re going to focus on the years leading up to their founding of the Hotel Somerville, the progenitor to the Dunbar Hotel. 

The Somervilles‘ Story

John Somerville was born and raised in Jamaica in the late 19th century. He took a boat to San Francisco in 1901, with the intention of attending an American dental school and returning to Jamaica to build his practice. Instead of finding opportunity in the US, he encountered blatant racism. It didn’t matter how much money he had, he wouldn’t be admitted to the posh, whites-only hotels in SF. Disgusted, John moved south to Redlands in San Bernardino County, working in a bowling alley while he saved up to go to the USC School of Dentistry (It must have been one swanky bowling alley; tuition to USC’s four-year doctoral program now costs over $425,000). Despite protests from the white students, John matriculated and earned stellar grades. He graduated in 1907, the first African-American man to do so from USC dental school.

While at USC, John met Vada Watson, who was pursuing a liberal arts degree on an LA Times scholarship at the time. Vada was born in Pomona in 1885, and her mom instilled a serious work ethic in her and her six siblings. One of Vada’s brothers was the first Black lawyer in the LA City Attorney’s office; another was the first Black policeman in LA. 

John and Vada Somerville married in 1912. When WWI broke out, they grew concerned that John’s dental practice might be impacted if he were drafted. So Vada decided to learn dentistry herself, and in 1918 she became the first Black woman to earn a DDS from USC’s School of Dentistry (check out this photo of her graduating class. She’s the lone woman in the photo, at top right). She practiced professionally for 15 years – if the Sindecuse Museum of Dentistry is to be believed, she stopped mainly because patients came to prefer her over John, which led to some marital “problems.” 

The Somervilles were progressive leaders in the fight against discrimination their entire lives. They befriended NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, and In 1914, they established the LA chapter of the NAACP in their home, with John serving as its first president for a decade. Vada was involved with the Los Angeles League of Women’s Voters, the Council on Public Affairs and UCLA’s YWCA; she also hosted a club for Black women dedicated to discussing art and moral philosophy.

Their efforts were sorely needed. LA’s population exploded in the 1920s, and the number of Blacks doubled to just under 40,000. But the growth in population led to housing problems and rising racial tensions. South of Slauson, there were numerous acts of violence against Blacks who were trying to move into previously white-only neighborhoods. Racist clauses in property deeds continued to restrict landowners’ ability to sell homes to non-white families in many areas. And even in the “undesirable” area south of downtown where much of LA’s Black population settled, there weren’t many Black business owners. 

The Hotel Somerville

27 years after John had been denied entry to San Francisco hotels for being Black, the Somervilles resolved to build their own hotel in LA, where Blacks would be afforded the dignity they couldn’t receive elsewhere. To finance the project, they partnered with other local Black business leaders to form the Somerville Finance and Investment Company in March 1928. According to the building’s NRHP nomination form, the contractors, workers and craftsmen they hired to build the hotel were all African-American.

Three months later the Hotel Somerville opened at 4025 (now 4225) Central Avenue, right in the heart of a burgeoning commercial and cultural district for Black Angelenos. It opened just in time to host the dignitaries attending the NAACP’s first west coast convention, taking place up the street at the Second Baptist Church (see visit # 69). In the September 1928 issue of NAACP’s journal The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois called the hotel “a beautiful inn with a soul,” and “an extraordinary surprise to a people fed on ugliness – ugly schools, ugly churches, ugly streets, ugly insults…it was so unexpected, so startling, so beautiful.”

Looking at old photos, you can see what he means. The parapets and balconies and arched bays on the bottom floor almost give it a Spanish citadel vibe, regal and elegant. Then you enter the lobby, with its murals and tapestries and gorgeous light fixtures and exquisite furnishing, and it’s like you’ve been invited to a nobleman’s estate. In addition to the 100 rooms, there was a café, a restaurant, a beauty parlor, and an inside balcony that could fit an orchestra…this place was it. It quickly became the place to stay for Black celebrities traveling through LA, from Josephine Baker to Joe Louis, Thurgood Marshall to Langston Hughes. The Somerville was a shining symbol of success for a Black community often shut out of mainstream commercial life in a segregated city.

Next door to the Somerville was the Apex Club (later known as Club Alabam), perhaps the most prominent of Central Avenue’s nightclubs in the late ‘20s. Integrated audiences would pay top dollar to hear Ivie Anderson (who would later become Duke Ellington’s singer), comedians like Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and a house band led by Lionel Hampton. 

Transition to the Dunbar

The Hotel Somerville had a very brief opening act. When the stock market crashed in 1929, John and Vada lost the hotel. It re-emerged within a couple years as the Dunbar Hotel, named after African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, whose poem “Sympathy” inspired the title of Maya Angelou’s famous I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Its new owner, a former brothel owner named Lucius Lomax, added a nightclub at the Dunbar – the hotel was already housing all these great Black artists, why not let them play there, too? 

Despite the looming Great Depression, Central Avenue nightlife was booming in the ‘30s and early ‘40s. You could walk down the street and hear top-flight jazz musicians at Club Alabam, the Memo, Elks Hall, Hi-De-Ho or any number of clubs and after-hours joints. The Dunbar was a temporary home to the era’s finest entertainers, both those playing Central Avenue and those playing white clubs elsewhere in the city.  

Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Nat King Cole, Lena Horne, Billy Eckstine, Jelly Roll Morton, Count Basie, Ray Charles, T-Bone Walker, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, W. C. Handy….they’re all said to have stayed and/or played at the Dunbar during its heyday. Duke Ellington regularly took a suite, and would throw wild parties with “chicks and champagne everywhere” according to one of Ellington’s trumpeters Buck Clayton (as quoted in this KCET article). The Dunbar’s owner from the late ‘30s through the early ‘50s was a huge sports fan, and close friends with the boxing champion Jack Johnson, who briefly opened a club of his own in the Dunbar.

Postwar 

Things changed on Central Avenue after WWII. While there were still terrific musicians working the clubs, and plenty of cash flowing postwar, the demographics had shifted. And in 1948, the Supreme Court struck down the racial covenants that white landowners were using to keep non-white families out of their neighborhoods. As Wrecking Crew reedsman Jackie Kelso explained it in the excellent oral history Central Avenue Sounds: 

Very gradually, I imagine, many elements in the population in the Central Avenue area began to expand into areas that had not been available before. And the fact that there had been such an influx of people from all over the country during the war to Los Angeles to take advantage of the job opportunities in the defense industries, that created a type of housing pressure that somehow couldn’t be relieved until the restrictive covenant thing made it possible…after the war, it was almost as if there’s this exhilaration of ‘We’ve got more money than we know what to do with, and we can’t buy houses in any other area.’ And then, three or four years later [snaps fingers] ‘Yes, we can. Let me at it.’

-Jack Kelson in Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles

As upwardly mobile Blacks moved out of the segregated neighborhoods around Central Avenue, and business owners moved out too, the music scene declined, and the Dunbar along with it. By the ‘60s, the Dunbar was a tenant apartment building for mostly poor men. A new owner bought the Dunbar in 1968, opened a small Black history museum inside. By the ‘70s, the Dunbar was rundown; one of its residents, Rudy Ray Moore, used it as one of the main shooting locations for his blaxploitation flick Dolemite. 

The Dunbar was repurposed as low-income housing for the elderly in the 1990s, as it remains today. Seismic retrofitting forced the the removal of the parapets, so the roofline looks different than it did in the ‘20s. But a big buxx renovation, completed in 2014, restored much of the facade and lobby. It remains a beautiful, well-loved building. There’s a restaurant on the bottom floor, owned by a Mexican-American father-daughter team. And the name “Hotel Somerville” is still visible, emblazoned on the sidewalk on the Central Avenue side, a connection to the grand vision of John and Vada Somerville, from nearly a century ago.

NOTE: This post was a personal one for me. In the late ‘90s, my high school teacher Steve Isoardi co-authored a book about the Central Avenue jazz scene. Right after college I did a bit of work for the great flautist/composer Buddy Collette, helping him to organize his archives. Buddy played on the Central Avenue scene and was a bandmate of Charles Mingus. I’m grateful for this change to dig back into my own history as I dig into LA’s.

Recommended Reading

+Dunbar Hotel / Hotel Somerville NRHP nomination form

+Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (1999) (book)

+“A Beautiful Inn With A Soul”: A Photo of the Hotel Somerville Lobby, Los Angeles, September 1928 (The Homestead Blog, 2020)

+The Dunbar Hotel Was Once The Heart Of Black Los Angeles (LAist, 2019)

+When Central Avenue Swung: The Dunbar Hotel and the Golden Age of L.A.’s ‘Little Harlem’ (KCET, 2015)

+KNBC – Historic Dunbar Hotel Renovated (TSA Housing on YouTube) (video)

+Vada Watson Somerville (Black Past)

+John Alexander Somerville (Black Past)

+Los Angeles in “The Green Book” (Los Angeles Almanac)