The Dunbar Hotel at 15th and U Streets NW was a gathering place for Black Washington, welcoming touring musicians, Howard University faculty, and visiting professionals. It stood on the northeast corner, in a building that had started life as the Portner Flats, a luxury apartment house for white residents.
The hotel opened under the Dunbar name in 1945 and became one of the city’s leading hotels for Black travelers during segregation. By 1974, the wrecking ball had taken it down.
The Smithsonian sent us five photographs of the place, from the long exterior along 15th Street to dining rooms set with white linen and a bar lined with stools. Here is the story behind those rooms.
From the brewer’s apartment house
The building started as a real estate gamble by Robert Portner, the Alexandria brewer who supplied beer to the Union Army during the Civil War, made a fortune at it, and moved his family across the river to Washington in 1881. By the 1890s he was deep into DC real estate. The Portner Flats was his showpiece. Construction began in 1897, the architect was Clement A. Didden, and the first apartments opened to luxury tenants on the corner of 15th and U.
Skeptics called the project Portner’s Folly because they thought it was too far from the center of the city. But the first phase rented quickly, and by late 1898 Portner was planning an annex to the north.
The Portner flats, in Washington, are to be duplicated. An annex is to be erected on the lots immediately adjoining the site of the present building on the north, on 15th street, between U and V streets northwest. The cost of the improvements will be about $150,000.
Alexandria Gazette, December 2, 1898
By the time the third and final phase was finished in 1902, the Portner ran the full block from U Street to V Street along 15th. It was, at that moment, the largest apartment building in Washington.
The Portner’s residents included prominent politicians. The Evening Star’s Senate directory in December 1900 placed Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver of Iowa at “Portner Flats” alongside the listings for the Cairo and the Hamilton. The manager, Volney Eaton, fielded a phone call in January 1901 from a delegation of the Blaine Club of Pennsylvania trying to book several hundred rooms for the inauguration. Mr. Eaton told them the Portner was “comparatively full of guests.”
It was the kind of building you ran with five tons of soft coal a day. A Washington Times piece from December 1904 described the boiler operation at “the Portner Flats Fifteenth and U Streets northwest,” where “a furnace is used which is automatically stoked from the bottom.”
The Portner remained a white-tenant apartment house until the end of World War II.
1945: the Dunbar Hotel opens
The Portner family sold the building in 1945, as the neighborhood around it had become a center of Black Washington.
The conversion cost roughly $800,000 and turned 123 apartments into 485 hotel rooms, according to historian Paul K. Williams. The hotel took its name from Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Black poet who had lived in nearby LeDroit Park and whose name was already attached to Dunbar High School.
Segregation left Black travelers with limited choices for a room in Washington. The Dunbar joined the Whitelaw Hotel at 13th and T as an important place to stay and gather.
Architect Harvey Warwick owned the hotel; Black businessman Theodore Hagans Jr. later acquired a majority stake, according to a 1981 Washington Post profile.
For musicians playing the Howard Theatre and other venues around U Street, the Dunbar was a place to stay after the show. Duke Ellington, Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, and Count Basie were among the entertainers associated with the hotel.
The Dunbar’s bar and ballrooms were also where Black professional Washington gathered. The Evening Star covered the National Bar Association’s 1949 dinner at the hotel, with civil-rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston as the headline speaker. The Star described the room as full of “many Negro leaders and judges of the courts in the District.” Howard University faculty and other Black professionals also gathered here.
The crackdown years
By the early 1950s the Dunbar was in trouble with the city. The Evening Star’s coverage of the District’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board hearings in March 1951 is unmistakable about what the trouble was, and about who the hotel was for.
The Alcoholic Beverage Control Board today heard testimony in 23 charges of liquor law violations lodged against the Dunbar Hotel, Fifteenth and U streets N.W. … The ABC charges against the hotel, which caters to colored guests, include selling whisky to standing guests; allowing numbers game writing, and permitting solicitation for prostitution.
Evening Star, March 28, 1951
A few months later the District License Board took up the Dunbar’s appeal of License Superintendent C. T. Nottingham’s refusal to renew the hotel license at all. Manager Welker C. Underdown testified, the Star reported on July 26, 1951, that the Dunbar was “doing everything possible to correct the bad reputation that hotel acquired” after the ABC citations. By the July hearing, the hotel had also lost its liquor license.
The liquor and hotel-license hearings tell one part of the Dunbar’s story. The same building had hosted the National Bar Association dinner in 1949 and remained a gathering place for Black Washington.
Integration also changed the Dunbar’s place in the city. As other Washington hotels began accepting Black guests, travelers had more choices, and the Dunbar declined. The hotel partially closed in 1964.
1968 to demolition
The April 1968 riots following the assassination of Dr. King devastated parts of the U Street corridor. Two years after the riots, the District government bought the Dunbar in 1970, and the building stood vacant for four years.
Preservationists tried to save the building, but the Dunbar Hotel came down in 1974.
Campbell Heights, an apartment complex for seniors, was built on the site in 1978. A Cultural Tourism DC marker near 15th and U tells the Portner-to-Dunbar story.
What the Smithsonian photos show
The five photographs give us a look at the building before demolition: its long street frontage, three views of the dining rooms, and the bar. They are preserved in the Smithsonian’s Scurlock Studio Records, collection AC0618.
If you ever wondered what the corner of 15th and U used to look like before Campbell Heights and the Reeves Center and the bike lanes, that exterior shot is your answer.
We dug this one up with help from AI and checked it against the original records below. Here’s how we use AI.
