Dunbar Hotel - Hotel Somerville Opens in 1928

Hotel Somerville Opens in 1928

The hotel was built in 1928 by John and Vada Somerville, socially and politically prominent black Angelenos. John Somerville was the first black to graduate from the University of Southern California. The hotel was built entirely by black contractors, laborers, and craftsmen and financed by black community members.

For many years, the Somerville was the only major hotel in Los Angeles that welcomed blacks, and it quickly became the place to stay for visiting black dignitaries. In 1928, the Somerville housed delegates to the first NAACP convention held in the western United States. In 1929, when Oscar DePriest (the first African American to serve in Congress in the 20th century) visited Los Angeles, he was met at the station "by a large delegation of colored people, who formed a parade and escorted him to the Dunbar Hotel."

The hotel was known for its physical amenities. Its Art Deco lobby had a spectacular chandelier (also in the Art Deco style), Spanish arcade-like windows, tiled walls and a flagstone floor. The lobby was said to look like "a regal Spanish arcade, with open balconies and steel grillwork, as opulent as the Granada Building at Lafayette Park." One person who was present at the hotel's groundbreaking ceremony recalled it was “a palace compared to what we had been used to.”

The hotel came to represent a level of achievement among the black community. Historian Lonnie G. Bunch III said, "On the one hand, blacks were not allowed to stay at major hotels. But with enough financial wherewithal and a strong sense of community a black man could build a large hotel." Unlike earlier segregated hotels and boarding houses, the Somerville (and later the Dunbar) offered luxury amenities – a restaurant, cocktail lounge and barbershop. One person noted, "The Dunbar symbolizes luxury and respect even in the worst of times." Roy Wilkins wrote in the New York Amsterdam News of the hotel's luxury and service: "Everything was just the opposite of what we had come to expect in ‘Negro’ hotels."

The Somerville/Dunbar also played an important role in anchoring the new Central Avenue community. Prior to 1928, the black community in Los Angeles had been centered around 12th Street and Central Avenue, near Downtown Los Angeles. Somerville was the first to build a major structure so far south in the 42nd Street neighborhood, and soon other businesses followed.

After the stock market crash in 1929, Somerville was forced to sell the hotel to a syndicate of white investors. The passing of the hotel from its original black ownership was a disappointment for a community that viewed the hotel as a symbol of black achievement. The hotel was renamed the Dunbar in 1929, in honor of poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

In 1930, the hotel was purchased for $100,000 by Lucius W. Lomax, Sr. (1879-1961). With ownership being restored to an African-American, the “debilitating impact of John Somerville's loss was reversed, and the hotel once again became the gem of black Los Angeles.”

During Somerville's ownership, there was no nightclub or live music at the hotel. It was not until February 1931 that the Dunbar was issued a permit "to conduct a cabaret in the dining room." Though he had sold the hotel, Somerville and others in the neighborhood opposed the establishment of a cabaret in his hotel, stating that such a use "would cast a lasting stigma on it."