On a sidewalk in South Los Angeles, the words are still pressed into the concrete. Hotel Somerville. Most people step right over them without realizing they’re walking across the grave of a dream. But if that concrete could talk, it would tell you about two Jamaican immigrants who dared to build a palace in a city that didn’t want them.
It would whisper about the night Duke Ellington’s fingers danced across ivory keys while police cars circled outside. And it would scream about the Supreme Court decision that gave black Americans their freedom and, in doing so, destroyed the most vibrant neighborhood Los Angeles had ever seen. In 1907, a young man named John Alexander Somerville walked across the stage at the University of Southern California to receive his dental degree. He was the first black student to ever graduate from USC’s dental school.
In the back rows, a handful of black faces watched with pride and apprehension, knowing the weight this moment carried. John had arrived from Jamaica around the turn of the century with nothing but ambition and the unshakable belief that America’s promises weren’t just for white people. His mother had taught him perseverance, and America had shown him that excellence could break through walls that seemed impenetrable. He graduated with honors, not just passing but excelling.
When professors doubted him, he studied harder. When classmates excluded him, he befriended the textbooks instead. When the dean suggested he might be happier at a colored institution, John smiled politely and reminded him that USC had accepted his application, his tuition, and his presence in the classroom. Five years later, in 1912, John married Vada Watson, a brilliant young woman from Pomona who was about to make history of her own.
Vada’s mother had migrated from Arkansas, part of an early wave of black families seeking better lives in California, and she raised her daughter to believe that education was the only inheritance that couldn’t be stolen. The Los Angeles Times awarded Vada a scholarship to USC in 1903, an unprecedented honor for a black girl in an era when most universities barely acknowledged women’s existence. While other women fought for the right to vote, Vada fought for the right to drill teeth. She sat in dental school classrooms where she was the only woman and the only black person.
In 1918, she became the first black woman to graduate from USC’s dental school, and then the first woman of any color to be licensed as a dentist in the entire state of California. Together, they opened their dental practice on a street where black professionals were beginning to stake their claim. The waiting room was modest but immaculate, with fresh flowers every week and the latest equipment. They treated white patients and black patients alike, and word spread that the Somervilles weren’t just good dentists but exceptional ones who treated everyone with dignity.
Their home became a gathering place for the city’s small but growing black middle class, and in 1914, they hosted a meeting that would change Los Angeles forever. Sitting in their living room, a group of concerned citizens co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP. They debated strategy late into the night, always focused on one question: how do we make America live up to its promises? The organization would soon become the most powerful civil rights force in American history, and it was born in part on Central Avenue.
John traveled frequently for his practice and his NAACP work, serving on the national board after being elected in 1927. By every measure America claimed to value, he was a success. He drove a nice car, wore well-tailored suits, shook hands with senators. And yet, every time he checked into a hotel, the same scene played out.
The clerk would look at his expensive luggage, his custom suit, the quiet confidence of a man who had earned his place in the world, and then look at his face. Suddenly there were no vacancies. Suddenly there had been a terrible mistake with the reservation. Suddenly they were closed for renovations.
His money wasn’t good here. His dignity didn’t count here. And John Somerville, who had spent his entire adult life proving that excellence should transcend prejudice, finally accepted a hard truth. Some walls can’t be climbed by being twice as good.
Sometimes the only solution is to build your own door. In 1928, he purchased a prime lot at 4227 South Central Avenue, right in the heart of what was becoming black Los Angeles. This wasn’t going to be some wood-frame boarding house. It was going to be a four-story hotel with one hundred guest rooms, sixty private baths, and thirty-five thousand dollars worth of custom furniture.
The total cost was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, roughly four million in today’s money, which meant entering what one source described as a quarter-million-dollar indebtedness. John insisted that every worker on this project be black. The architects were black. The carpenters were black.
The electricians were black. In a city where black men were typically relegated to hauling lumber, this was unprecedented and radical. Mothers brought their children to watch the construction, pointing up at the black men in hard hats and telling them, that could be you someday. In the summer of 1928, the Hotel Somerville opened its doors, and for its grand debut it hosted the NAACP’s nineteenth annual national convention.
It was the first time the organization had ever met on the West Coast, and the honored guest was W. E. B. Du Bois himself, standing in the lobby of a hotel built by black dreamers for black travelers.
The symbolism wasn’t lost on anyone. But history has a cruel sense of timing. Fourteen months later, the stock market collapsed. The Great Depression crashed over America like a tidal wave, and the Somervilles, drowning in debt from their dream, lost everything.
Within a year, the hotel was foreclosed on. The palace they had built was ripped away before they could catch their breath. The hotel changed hands, purchased from the bank by a man named Lucius Lomax, who renamed it after Paul Laurence Dunbar, the celebrated black poet who wrote, We wear the mask that grins and lies. It was a fitting name for a hotel that would soon wear many masks itself.
On September 4th, 1931, the hotel acquired a cabaret license, and Club Alabam opened its doors in the basement. Central Avenue became the epicenter of the most electrifying jazz scene west of Harlem. Curtis Mosby, a band leader who wasn’t the greatest drummer but was an absolutely brilliant businessman, ran the club. People called him the mayor of Central Avenue.
The club employed nearly one hundred black Angelinos, with a weekly payroll of fifteen hundred dollars, a fortune in the depths of the Depression. People lined up around the block to hear the music pouring out of that basement. Inside, the air was thick with cigarette smoke and perfume, with sweat and excitement. A trumpet screamed, a saxophone answered, and for a few hours the troubles of the world faded away.
Then came 1936 and the hotel’s golden age. James Nelson, known to everyone as Jimmy, bought the Dunar Hotel. He was a Chicago businessman and money lender with a reputation for fairness and kindness. The Los Angeles Sentinel described him as very capable, progressive, but reserved and unassuming.
He was a boxing enthusiast, and his suite featured a giant indoor patio where he and his wife Catherine entertained constantly. With the help of his nephew, he set about restoring the Dunar to glory, polishing the brass, repairing the damage from years of struggle, training the best staff they could find. Soon a mythology began to build. The Dunar Hotel, people whispered reverently, was a cross between the Waldorf Astoria and the Cotton Club.
It was where a shipyard worker could stand in the same lobby as Duke Ellington, where a schoolteacher could have dinner at the next table from Joe Louis. Duke Ellington kept a permanent suite at the Dunar whenever he was in Los Angeles, carrying himself like the royalty his nickname suggested. Louis Armstrong’s trumpet echoed through the hallways, that gravelly voice greeting everyone with genuine warmth. Count Basie’s piano filled the lobby with that driving Kansas City swing.
Lionel Hampton’s vibraphone made the chandeliers shake. Billie Holiday’s voice, raw and aching and perfect, drew crowds so thick you could barely breathe, and grown men wept. Ella Fitzgerald scatted her way into history. Lena Horne’s elegance graced the stage.
Cab Calloway’s energy brought the house down. Nat King Cole’s smooth voice melted hearts, and Ray Charles, still finding his way in the world, discovered his sound on Central Avenue, blending gospel and blues and jazz into something that would eventually be called soul. Joe Louis walked through the lobby and people parted like the Red Sea. Langston Hughes wrote in the lobby, his pen scratching across paper, capturing the rhythm of black life in verse.
Thurgood Marshall strategized in the hotel’s meeting rooms. Anyone who was anyone in black America made their way to the Dunar at some point. Between 8th and 42nd Streets, Central Avenue itself became known as the Black Broadway. But even in the golden years, the darkness was gathering.
On January 15th, 1947, a young woman named Elizabeth Short was found murdered in a vacant lot in Leimert Park. The case became known as the Black Dahlia murder, and it was never solved. The investigation sent shockwaves through Los Angeles, and the LAPD, looking for someone to blame, started raiding the clubs. Then in 1950, William Parker became chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
He was a complicated man, educated and intelligent, who reformed the LAPD in some ways. But he viewed integrated nightlife as a moral threat to Los Angeles. Under Parker’s leadership, the LAPD began a systematic campaign of raids and harassment targeting Central Avenue’s clubs. The raids happened weekly, sometimes nightly.
Drug violations, real or imagined, permit violations no one had enforced last week suddenly became critical. Club owners spent more time in court than in their establishments. The constant harassment wore everyone down. It was death by a thousand cuts.
The musicians started to drift away. The crowds thinned. The magic began to fade, not because the music got worse, but because joy can’t survive under occupation. And then came May 3rd, 1948, a date that should have been cause for celebration.
The United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelley versus Kraemer, ruling by a vote of 6-0 that racially restrictive covenants were unconstitutional and couldn’t be enforced by courts. Suddenly, black families who had been confined to Central Avenue were free to buy homes anywhere in Los Angeles. It was a massive civil rights victory. But victory had consequences nobody anticipated.
Duke Ellington, who used to keep that permanent suite at the Dunbar, started staying at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard instead. Can you blame him? For years he was told he couldn’t stay in white hotels. Now he could.
The black professionals, the doctors who built thriving practices on Central Avenue, the lawyers, the business people, the entertainers, they started leaving. Not all at once, but steadily, inexorably, like blood draining from a wound. They moved to Leimert Park, to Baldwin Hills, to View Park. They bought houses with yards.
And who could fault them for that? But the economic engine that powered Central Avenue began to sputter and choke. Segregation had accidentally created a complete black community where the wealthy lived next to the working class, where money circulated within the community because there was nowhere else for it to go. When the black doctor moves to View Park, where does he spend his money?
At the grocery store in his new neighborhood, white-owned. His economic power now flows out of the community. Multiply that by thousands, and the neighborhood they left behind starts to hollow out. The businesses that depended on their patronage start to fail.
The jobs disappear. The hope evaporates. Segregation was evil, no question. Fighting it was righteous and necessary.
But it had forced the creation of something extraordinary, and when that legal barrier came down, the community began to die. In 1953, another blow fell. The musicians’ unions merged, and black musicians could now work in white clubs downtown and in Hollywood, places that paid better and offered more exposure. Why stay on Central Avenue?
The defense industry jobs that had brought two hundred thousand black people to Los Angeles during World War II dried up after 1945. Unemployment started to climb, and into that economic vacuum rushed something darker. The drug trade found fertile ground in communities where hope was becoming scarce. The neighborhood that once vibrated with jazz and joy began to decay.
At the Dunbar Hotel, Jimmy Nelson died in September of 1952 after a long illness. His widow, Julia, took over management, but the golden years were ending. In 1957, Seless King III, the little boy who grew up in the lobby watching legends walk through the doors, took over the hotel with his wife and renamed it King’s Hotel. He fought to keep the place alive, but he was fighting against the tide of history.
The 1960s blurred into the 1970s in a haze of decline. The hotel struggled, lurching from owner to owner, crisis to crisis. The building that once represented the pinnacle of black achievement now stood as a monument to broken promises. In the early 1970s, a comedian named Rudy Ray Moore moved into a nine-room apartment at the Dunar.
By this point, the hotel was barely functioning, but the rent was cheap. Moore was a profane, outrageous performer known for his character Dolemite, a trash-talking, rhymes-slinging, kung fu fighting hustler. In January of 1974, he started filming a movie at the now-abandoned hotel. The paint was peeling, the furniture was gone, the chandeliers were coated in dust, but Moore saw possibility in the ruins.
He financed Dolemite himself, calling in every favor, mortgaging his future on this improbable dream. When it was released in April of 1975, critics hated it, but audiences, particularly black audiences, loved it. The film became a cult classic, and years later Eddie Murphy would star in Dolemite Is My Name, telling Moore’s story of persistence and refusing to let anyone define your worth. That same year, 1974, the hotel closed for good, though Los Angeles designated it historic cultural monument number 131.
In 1990, the Dunbar reopened, not as a hotel but as low-income senior housing. The grand lobby where W. E. B.
Du Bois once stood became a common area for elderly residents. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was dignified. The hotel that the Somervilles built as a haven for black travelers who couldn’t stay anywhere else had become a haven for elderly black residents who needed affordable housing. But even that stability didn’t last.
In 2008, the property foreclosed. History rhymed in painful ways. Then in 2012, a thirty-million-dollar renovation brought the Dunbar back to life. The facade was restored, the lobby rebuilt to echo its former grandeur, and the building was redesigned as forty-one affordable senior apartments.
It wasn’t what the Somervilles envisioned, and it wasn’t the jazz palace of Central Avenue’s golden age, but it was survival. John Alexander Somerville died on February 11th, 1973, at the age of ninety-one. He lived long enough to see his hotel lost, renamed, transformed, and abandoned, but he also lived long enough to see the civil rights movement he helped birth achieve victories he could never have imagined. Vada died just a few months before him.
Sixteen days before her death, they celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary. Their story was complicated. They created something magnificent and lost it almost immediately. They built a monument to black dignity that became, in its own way, a monument to the complexities of progress.
Today, forty-one elderly residents live in the Dunbar. They probably don’t know about Vada becoming the first woman dentist in California. They probably never heard Duke Ellington play. They probably can’t imagine W.
E. B. Du Bois in the lobby. But they’re living in a building that represents a specific kind of American story, the story of people who were told they didn’t belong and built their own belonging.
Central Avenue doesn’t swing anymore. The jazz has faded. But if you stand very still on a quiet evening, maybe you can almost hear it. The faint echo of a trumpet.
The ghost of a voice singing about heartache and hope. The rhythm of a dream that refused to die even when history tried to kill it. The Dunbar Hotel is still standing, and as long as it stands, the story it tells, complicated and painful and beautiful and true, will endure.