Deterioration and Redevelopment
Just as racial segregation had created a need for the Dunbar, racial integration in the 1950s eliminated the need. Duke Ellington, who had previously kept a suite at the Dunbar, began staying at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, and others followed. As one writer put it: “When the barriers against integration began to crumble in the late 1950s, so did the Dunbar Hotel.”
Bernard Johnson bought the Dunbar in 1968, but the hotel continued to lose money, and Johnson closed the hotel's doors in 1974. While closed in 1974, comedian Rudy Ray Moore used the hotel extensively in his low-budget film Dolemite, and in 1976, the movie A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich was filmed at the Dunbar. Owner Bernard Johnson also opened a museum of black culture for a time. But for most of the years from 1974 to 1987, the building was vacant and declined drastically, as transients began using it for shelter, and the building suffered from graffiti, broken windows and litter.
A renovation effort was started in 1979, but stopped when city funding ceased. By 1987, the Dunbar was marred by graffiti and generally tarnished by neglect. That year, a plan was announced to convert the Dunbar into low-income housing units with a museum of black culture on the ground floor. The 115 hotel rooms on the top three floors were gutted and replaced with 72 apartments. The mezzanine, lobby and basement retained their original décor and were converted into a museum and cultural center. The project was funded in large part with city redevelopment funds at a cost of $4.2 million.
In 1990, the Dunbar re-opened as a 73-unit apartment building for low-income senior citizens and museum of black history. Delegates from the NAACP national convention helped rededicate the Dunbar in July 1990 following its renovation. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley attended the rededication ceremony and praised the efforts to “breathe new life and vigor into this magnificent hotel.”
The Dunbar hosted a jazz show in 1991, attended by noted music journalist Leonard Feather. Feather wrote that the event was like “a visit to a haunted house.” When one of the musicians played a Duke Ellington theme, Feather said “you could look up at the balcony and see, in your mind's eye, Duke himself at a piano on the mezzanine, working out an arrangement for tomorrow's show.”
By 1997, the neighborhood around the Dunbar was 75% Latino, and by 2006 the neighborhood was predominantly Latino and poor, with most of the nearby storefronts having their signs written in Spanish.
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