The Hotel Carver: Pasadena’s First Black-Owned Hotel

107 S. Fair Oaks, currently know as  The Workshops Building (Photo – Staff)

In Lynn Hudson’s recent book, ‘West of Jim Crow: California and the Color Line’ there is a quote from long-time community activist Ruby McKnight Williams. It shatters the assumption that racism was an issue in the South, but not on the enlightened West Coast. “I didn’t see any difference in Pasadena and Mississippi except that they were spelled differently,” replied Ms. McKnight-Williams when asked about race relations in the city.

By Brian Biery

Red-lining, racial covenants, schools built for minorities, restrictions on where one could work and other forms of discrimination were just as prevalent in Pasadena as in Jackson or Birmingham, they were just not as obvious.

One example of segregation was the prohibition of Black and other minorities to spend the night in the luxurious hotels of the city.  The Castle Green would not allow People of Color to spend the night at the hotel.  They would allow them to work in the baggage room to offload the luggage of wealthy mid-Westerners who would come to Pasadena to spend their winter holidays at the spacious Castle Green but not to sleep in its beds.

So where would people who were not welcome in the city’s exclusive hotels stay when visiting Pasadena?  In the early parts of the 20th century there were few options other than a family member or friend’s home.  Starting in 1940, however, when Percy Carter and his family purchased the building at 107 S. Fair Oaks Ave. and converted it into The Hotel Carver, Pasadena had its first Black-owned hotel.

Named after George Washington Carver, the building, constructed in the 1880’s, was originally used as a showroom for a stagecoach company.  Carter restructured the building to add hotel rooms, the Blue Room dining hall, and a nightclub called the Onyx Club (later Club Cobra), which featured many of the talented L.A. jazz musicians of the day (such as trumpeter Clora Bryant and bassist George Morrow).

For nearly 30 years The Hotel Carver provided safe haven for those who were not accepted in the majority of hotels in Pasadena, this city that was clearly in the grip of Jim Crow and segregation.

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Popularized by the 2018 film ‘Green Book’, the ‘Negro Motorist Green Book’ identified where Black Americans could safely find food, drink, and shelter as they traveled around the country. A traveler’s survival was predicated on the knowledge of where it was safe to go in the malaise of Jim Crow Laws and sundown towns (Glendale), where African Americans and other minorities were under the threat of violence, rejection or arrest. The Hotel Carver is not listed in the ‘Negro Motorist Green Book’, even though other Pasadena businesses were identified during its era of publication from 1936 to 1967.

Photos of old Pasadena in the lobby (Photo – Staff)

Brian Biery is a community organizer, documentary photographer, and Adjunct Professor of Advocacy/Social Justice at Pacific Oaks College.