Dunbar Hotel

pretty cool hotel , stayed here to celebrate our good friends birthday , close to everything , Bars are excellent

Now used for low income housing, I love this place not because of what it is now but for the images it evokes. When it opened in 1928 it was the only luxury hotel west of the Mississippi River where African Americans could stay. It had 100 rooms on the second and third floors and a pharmacy, barbershop, beauty shop and a flower shop on the first floor. It was a place of elegance for world-renowned entertainers, refused lodging by the white hotels in which they performed. It hosted such luminaries as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton Count Basie and Lena Horne. Joe Louis, Ray Charles, W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall all stayed here. The spirit of the past continues to haunt those who pass by.