Dunbar Hotel

Description

This legendary downtown hotel was the center of L.A.'s jazz scene and the African-American community in the 1930s and 1940s, when such luminaries as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and Count Basie performed there, and celebrities like Langston Hughes, Redd Foxx, Joe Louis, W.E.B. Du Bois and Jack Johnson were among the hotel's guests. The Central Avenue hotel has been in decline ever since, although occasional events are still held there.