Dunbar Hotel Rehabilitation

The Dunbar Hotel, originally named the Somerville Hotel, was the center of the African American community from the 1930s through the 1950s.  The Dunbar Hotel was the anchor of a two-block area of jazz clubs on South Central Avenue, the social and entertainment mecca for jazz in Los Angeles. The hotel met the demand for modern, clean, first-class African American hotel accommodations given prevalent discriminatory practices of the time.

The project unquestionably restores the Dunbar Hotel’s historic qualities and provides quality management, ensuring preservation of the Dunbar Hotel and quality of life for all residents.  It reactivates street life, revitalizes the neighborhood, and enhances public safety. Now at the heart of a newly flourishing Central Avenue district, the Jazz and Civil Rights corridor is being rediscovered and music has come back to the Dunbar with the Central Avenue Jazz Festival, Jazz workshops and performances.

After nearly a hundred years the Dunbar Hotel showed wear from decades of slow decline. By 1974 when the Dunbar Hotel was designated as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument (Number 131), the majority of the storefronts were altered or boarded. Two years later, the Dunbar Hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 17, 1976. The 1989 rehabilitation and subsequent remodeling further altered public spaces in ways unsympathetic to the original design.

The first step in the preservation process was ESA’s preparation of the Historic Resources Rehabilitation Report for the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). That report documented the 425 character-defining features and spaces associated with the Dunbar Hotel’s period of significance (1928-1970), and developed a maintenance, restoration, and rehabilitation plan to guide future undertakings. After Thomas Safran Associates (TSA) took ownership of the Dunbar Village in July 2011 they sought to continue their revitalization of Central Avenue by lovingly rehabilitating the crown jewel of the neighborhood in a way that paid respect to its storied past.

As historic preservation consultant for the project, ESA supported the TSA team by making sure historic preservation standards were being met and providing solutions to preservation challenges. Once the project was fully developed, we prepared the final plan review report to document the project’s conformance with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation for compliance with CEQA. ESA overcame preservation challenges that included creative solutions to address providing new mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and seismic strengthening in a way that was concealed and matched the historic original.

Beyond structural challenges the team was faced with economic ones: how to best pay homage to the building’s historic appearance with preservation that didn’t exceed an established budget. ESA worked with the team to find the right vendors, craftsmen, artisans, and art conservators for the project so that the building could be fully restored including the beautiful mural paintings in the hotel lobby. The team made difficult choices that allowed the best possible preservation at the greatest value.