Once a historically Black hotel, the Dunbar reopens as a wine bar
The sun gleams over the pink house at 723 NW Fourth St. Its most recent owner, Maude Wilson, fell in love with the building at first sight. (Briana Farrell/Atrium)
June 24, 2021 | By Lauren Rousseau
The pink, two-story house has stood for years in Pleasant Street, Gainesville’s oldest historically Black neighborhood. Age has withered its walls and chipped its paint. It has lost the luster of its glory days. And yet, every few years, someone new has come along to imagine a rebirth in its interiors.
Most recently, in 2020, that person was entrepreneur Maude Wilson. At first sight, she was intrigued by the straight central hallways and spacious rooms, bathed in the natural sunlight streaking through the windows. They made for an olio of potential. Then she laid eyes on the backyard’s stretches of green grass and knew she had to buy it. Plus, the pink house had a balcony. She had always wanted one of those.
Wilson took a spare key from the property owner and drove by the house for a second time that same day. And a third time, the next. And several more times that week. She knew she would have to find a new spot for her business, Downtown Wine and Cheese. She had managed to modernize the establishment since taking it over from its previous owners six years ago, but its foundations were now crumbling, and her landlords, she says, were unwilling to do anything about it.
Sure, there were other options in Gainesville, but they all seemed consumed by shadows. The spaces were too small, the roofs too low. The pink house and its sunlit rooms lingered in her thoughts.
Wilson signed the papers the first chance she got, and in the fall of 2020, amid a raging coronavirus pandemic, she and her family moved into the second floor. She did what she had to do to make her teenage son, Landon, comfortable with the dorm-style layouts — communal bathrooms and long hallways that reminded him of “The Shining.” Then, she got to work to clean, paint and transform the lower level. She needed to get ready for customers, the first this building was going to see in decades. She was a confident woman. Or at least confident enough to have had the words, “Not afraid to lose,” tattooed on her right arm.
On a cool, late winter night, Wilson finally threw open the doors of the pink house for an exclusive group of family, friends, coworkers and neighbors. She wore her signature black pants and flowy black shirt, and she spoke proudly of the building’s renovation. And its history.
In small, masked groups, Wilson walked guests down a narrow hallway decorated with stock-photos of those rumored to have once graced the halls: Ella Fitzgerald, B.B. King, Bo Diddley. They passed a spot where Wilson envisioned a bar reminiscent of a hotel lobby. They walked through a seating area decorated with knickknacks that evoked a different era and a gift shop stocked with wine bottle openers, notepads and gummy candies. Maybe this could be the place where college students bring their parents, Wilson hoped. Maybe they would pick up a souvenir T-shirt that showed off the name of her new wine bar and its “old Florida” ambiance.
During a fundraiser event for her new wine bar, Wilson guides guests around the pink house. She points out spots where customers will order drinks and purchase souvenirs, but she also shares why the property was so special. Because historic photos of the Dunbar Hotel have been difficult to find, Wilson hung glossy stock photos of Black history. (Karter Nancy/Atrium)
Because that’s what it really was: old Florida. But not because of the white egrets or swaying palms painted on an inside mural. Or the citrus splashed all over the menu. This pink house wasn’t just another crumbling home in the neighborhood, yearning, like so many of its neighbors, for some love. This was a place of shelter and solace during an uglier time; a place that stored in its crevices a history yet to be voiced. A history that Wilson, perhaps unknowingly, would help uncover.
The Dunbar’s big dreams
The pink house, the Dunbar, was never just an ordinary building.
Wilson understood this, but perhaps in a limited sense. She was, after all, a white woman and not a native of Gainesville. She hadn’t heard much of the Black neighborhood that the pink house sits in. She only heard fragments of the Dunbar story.
In 1936, Jack and Sophronia Dunbar, a Black couple, opened the Dunbar Hotel on Fourth Street, then called Grove Street. It was the first and only hotel in Gainesville that accepted Black people during the days of Jim Crow.
Famous Black musicians were rumored to occupy the same rooms Wilson swooned over when they stopped in town to perform music. The Cotton Club in Gainesville was part of the Chitlin’ Circuit, a group of performance venues located throughout the South where Black musicians could play.
But that’s where the story ended for Wilson and many other Gainesville residents, whether they lived in the Pleasant Street neighborhood or not. The Cotton Club, now a museum and cultural center, offers glimpses of Gainesville’s Black history, but little is known about the Dunbar.
Almost a century has passed since the hotel’s inception and oral histories have offered the only clues as to what really happened. Sadly, time made those voices grow fainter. Part of this was because of the lack of media coverage of Black businesses during segregation. The Gainesville Sun archives confirm this — the only references to the hotel from 1955 to 1964 were of a rare occasion when a hotel guest was either a victim or a culprit in a crime.
Few people who had first-hand experience of the hotel are alive to share their stories. Jack and Sophronia’s grandchildren, now in their 60s and 70s, remember their grandmother worked as a maid for a white woman in her big house. For a while, the woman loaned Sophronia money, and eventually, when she was dying, she gave Sophronia the deed to the Fourth Street lot.
It was Sophronia, not Jack, who slabbed wood together to build the Dunbar. The two-story was built in 1936. In 1947, they added front steps to lead up to the building. Daughter Lillie Bell Dunbar commemorated the event by etching the date into the cement of one of the front steps.
The Dunbars dreamed big; they had plans in store to build a third floor, but in the end, they couldn’t round up enough money.
In the early days, the pink house wasn’t pink at all. A creamy tan coated its exterior, with brown paint detailing to match. A mosquito screen encircled the entire structure. Rocking chairs lined the front porch. That’s where Grandaddy Jack liked to sit, stuff tobacco in his mouth and spit in a bucket right next to him. He always wore a white button-up shirt, brown pants, suspenders and a top hat. His right eye was missing — he lost it while shoveling coal to ignite the trains. He wore a black prosthetic eye that spooked some of the neighborhood kids.
Jack Dunbar stands at the entrance of the Dunbar Hotel. His wife, Sophronia, ran the hotel but her grandchildren say she did not like to be photographed. (Photo courtesy of Becky Palmore)
Sophronia was known to be a woman ahead of her time. It was she who truly ran the hotel. It’s not that Jack didn’t want to help; he was always at work at the Seaboard Air Line Depot, one of Gainesville’s three railroad stations at the time that helped export cotton, vegetables and fruit.
Back then, $3 secured a room for the night and a complimentary breakfast of grits, eggs and sausage. The Dunbar was the only hotel for people who had any Black blood in them, no matter how famous. That’s why famous Black musicians had to stay there. But most of the hotel’s guests were ordinary working folks, like strawberry pickers and vegetable farmers.
All guests stayed on the second level and shared communal bathrooms and lounge areas.
Sophronia ran a tight ship. She wore a multicolored striped apron, all day, every day, and sang hymns while cooking. The Dunbar had no official staff. The hotel was run by family members. Luckily, there were a lot of them.
Jack and Sophronia had three daughters and one son: Lillie Bell, Effie, Ruby Beatrice and Charles. Each of them has since had children of their own. Many of the Dunbars either lived at the hotel or visited each day. Some of the grandchildren stayed in settler-style cracker houses connected to one another in the shade of fruit trees in the backyard.
At least three times a week, Sophronia required her grandchildren to do their chores and clean the hotel. They did the laundry, washed the dishes, swept the floors. Every once in a while, they walked to the icehouse with a wagon and broke off frozen chunks to fill up the hotel’s ice box.
The children often rushed to finish their chores so they would have enough daylight in which to play. Along with many of the Pleasant Street neighborhood kids, the Dunbars raced bicycles and roller-skated down the streets. Sometimes, they rode brooms like galloping horses.
When the sun started to set, the adults ushered the kids inside. Some of the grandchildren thought it was because it was time for dinner, something Grandmama Sophronia took seriously. She fed the children first — all of them, even the white kids who sometimes played outside with her grandchildren.
But there was another reason why Sophronia was so anxious about the dark.
She didn’t grow up with the songs of social justice that her grandchildren would hear in the 1950s and ‘60s. She came of age long before the civil rights movement and harbored the trauma of slavery her parents endured.
She feared the Ku Klux Klan, and it was in the dark of night that they came out.
Changing times
A year ago, when Wilson first moved into the pink house, neighbors watched keenly. Some had seen the house in many iterations, and they grew curious about Wilson’s ambitions. One of those neighbors was Carlton Thomas.
He has lived in the Pleasant Street neighborhood most of his life — he wouldn’t reveal his age but said only that he looks younger than his years. His house, an indigo blue shotgun adorned with pinwheels and a miniature hot air balloon in the front lawn, sits directly across the street from the Dunbar.
Carlton Thomas has seen the Pleasant Street neighborhood change through the years. When he heard that the Dunbar would be reopening as a wine bar, his reaction was: “Oh, Lord. Here we go again.” (Karter Nancy/Atrium)
In the 1800s, formerly enslaved people built the neighborhood’s first homes. Many were passed down from generation to generation, including Thomas’s house. But unlike the Dunbar, his home never really changed. What transformed were the surroundings.
Thomas grew up alongside the Dunbar grandchildren. He and Charles Dunbar Jr. used to play cowboys and Indians in the hotel’s backyard. Charles liked to pluck fruit from the trees and plop them into his mouth. Peaches, blueberries, pecans. Sometimes he popped into Thomas’s house, too, and picked from the bowl of candy his mother always had sitting out. In those days, the neighborhood children knew which houses were stocked with the sweet stuff. They knew where to find the butter cookies, ice creams and candies.
After college, Thomas moved to the northeast and stayed away for years until his mother got sick. That’s when he moved back home. When she died, he took over the house. But by then, the neighborhood had changed.
Thomas keeps many of his childhood memories wrapped inside of a grey plastic bag. On a sunny spring day, he sifted through report cards, photos of Lincoln High School football games and even portraits of prominent Gainesville natives like Claronelle Smith Griffin. (Karter Nancy/Atrium)
Gainesville ended formal segregation in 1970. Black kids integrated into the white schools and the need for “Black-only” businesses diminished.
The Dunbar children had little interest in running the hotel. Many of them and their children scattered to cities like Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Sophronia died in 1969, and the task of taking over the hotel seemed like a load too hefty and arduous. Jack Dunbar sold it the following year, and for a while, the building sat empty. Abandoned.
Teenagers sometimes snuck into the building to hang out. Homeless individuals found shelter within the Dunbar’s walls for a night or two. Graffiti slowly blanketed the walls. The structure started to wither. And many of the families the Dunbars knew trickled out of the neighborhood as a new era brought transformation.
By the 1990s, as drugs crept in and crime shot up, 54 of the Pleasant Street neighborhood houses were boarded up or vacated. In an effort to memorialize those that were still standing, the City of Gainesville designated Pleasant Street a historic community in 1991. But that didn’t do much for those witness to the changes.
In Pleasant Street, decade-old lots sit next to newly-built houses. Some residents are happy to see the neighborhood get a fresh coat of paint. Others are concerned about the changing demographics and increasing property prices. (Lianne D’Arcy/Atrium)
Thomas’s wife, Deborah, moved from Philadelphia to Gainesville to join her husband that same year. Gainesville already felt small and backward but the lack of neighbors on Fourth Street made it seem even more so.
Things got more animated in 1999, when Rhonda Riley and Gail Jane bought the Dunbar to turn it into Pleasant Place, a nonprofit home for homeless teenage moms. The two women renovated the building and covered it in the creamy salmon color people recognize today.
The Florida Trust for Historic Preservation commended Pleasant Place for its rehabilitation of the Dunbar Hotel. The Thomases remember seeing boyfriends trying to sneak into Pleasant Place late at night and hearing some of the girls crying about their misery.
The Dunbar Hotel was abandoned when Pleasant Place founders Gail Jane and Rhonda Riley bought the pink building. Its wooden structure was so worn down that the nonprofit owners had to construct a new roof, install new windows and update all of the building’s wiring. (Photos courtesy of Gail Jane)
The pink house changed again in 2016, when the University of Florida chapter of Beta Upsilon Chi took over. Carlton Thomas didn’t think a Christian fraternity would be much trouble, but to his surprise, they partied — even on weekdays.
The boisterous nature of what the pink house had become bothered Deborah Thomas. She wanted to move away. But she understood she was living in her husband’s family home. She understood history needed preservation.
Wine and preservation
Wilson also understood the need for preservation. She intended to bring back the Dunbar in some ways to its past glory, though residents of Pleasant Street had their trepidations. For now, she is marching forward with her plans to open a wine bar.
The pink house is still permitted as a bed and breakfast but not a restaurant. Because the Pleasant Street neighborhood has never had a restaurant among its residences, Wilson had to formally seek reviewal from the neighbors directly surrounding the property.
Wilson hadn’t always planned on owning a business. Her mother was a homemaker, so she figured she would be one as well. Wilson had worked service jobs since she was 17. She’d been a salesclerk at Macy’s, a department manager, waitress and eventually the owner of Downtown Wine and Cheese. The only time she took a break was to care for her son after he was born.
Despite her lack of formal education, Wilson, now 47, never doubted she’d be able to run her own place. She was always the type to go above and beyond at her jobs, creating ways to increase sales and better the brand, even when input wasn’t exactly accepted by higher-ups.
She moved into the second floor of Downtown Wine and Cheese, too, and modernized the wine bar. She advertised it on social media and opened it up to sorority wine tastings, Valentine’s Day specials and even haunted houses.
Wilson knew she could turn the pink house around, too. But she knew she couldn’t carry on the Downtown name for her new wine bar. No, this place had too much history.
Like the Dunbars, Wilson has had the help of family and friends to refurbish the Dunbar. Fifteen-year-old Early, Wilson’s “junior-executive-assistant” and family friend, stopped by the Dunbar for months to paint and hammer. (Mingmei Li/Atrium)
Neighborhood concerns
Wilson occasionally feared she might have been too ambitious to take on the Dunbar. She had originally planned to open its doors in late 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic made that impossible. On the bright side, it did give her more time.
Money had been scarce after the pandemic shut everything down. Wilson found herself living on credit cards to make ends meet. She didn’t have to let go of any of her three employees, but their salaries left a gaping hole in Wilson’s pocket.
Luckily, like the Dunbars, Wilson has her friends and family to help her complete her project.
She slathered fresh layers of paint on the walls and plowed through the weeds in the grass until dirt filled her nail beds. She secured vintage decor at Gainesville’s Haven Hospice Attic Resale. She hosted a birthday in August and a wedding in October.
She has dreams of launching the Dunbar Foundation. In honor of the many musicians who have graced the Dunbar’s halls, she imagined a nonprofit that would help fund music programs for students of color in the Gainesville area. She also hopes to give away a scholarship to a student pursuing music in college.
Through it all, neighbors have kept an eye on her progress.
One of them is Barbara Watson, 69, who grew up running around the Pleasant Street neighborhood, playing games with other children while the grown-ups barbecued meat on the grill. She moved in the 1990s to a new house she had built just a street away from the Dunbar, where she still lives with her daughter, Rhonesha, and grandchildren.
The faces of her neighbors have changed over the years. As a child, she only saw other Black people. Now, she sees white people settled in her neighborhood.
Barbara Watson has lived in the Pleasant Street neighborhood all of her life. She’s always loved the rich family dynamic of the neighborhood. (Lianne D’Arcy/Atrium)
Watson is hoping the new wine bar in the pink house might be beneficial to the neighborhood. Maybe it will bring a nice change of pace. Maybe it will even strengthen the community by offering a place for neighbors to come together, grab a drink and talk.
But not all of Watson’s neighbors feel that way. Wilson knows her Dunbar dreams don’t always mesh with her neighbors’ concerns.
Deborah Thomas worries about crime. What kind of people will patronize the new wine bar and how will alcohol change the dynamic? How will a wine bar flourish with the police headquarters practically in its backyard?
Others are concerned about congestion. How will a bar affect Pleasant Street, where the houses are painted rich hues of teal and violet, where children, dogs and cats scurry around, where the roads are narrow and residents park on the street in front of their homes? Will the Dunbar patrons take up every inch of parking space? Carlton Thomas remembers well how hard it was to park a car in the previous iterations of the pink house, when it was a home for teen mothers and when it was a fraternity. A wine bar, he worries, may repeat old ways.
Dunbar grandchildren, Becky Palmore and the Rev. Izzy Williams, who both live in Gainesville, don’t have much to say about what happens to Jack and Sophronia’s hotel. As far as they are concerned, Grandaddy Jack sold it, and what happened after that was no longer the family’s business. Wilson is the rightful owner now, they say, whether the neighborhood likes it or not, and the Dunbar is hers to do with as she wishes.
Change is a part of life, and the Dunbars’ descendants accept it. Dunbar granddaughter Eleanor Jenkins said she might even have to stop by for a drink.
The $3-a-night hotel room can never return; the complimentary breakfast of eggs and grits replaced by charcuterie and cheese boards. And guests of a new demographic will seek comfort, not in a bed, but in wine glasses and conversation.
Through it all, the pink house still stands. As a hotel. A shelter. A fraternity. A wine bar. And always, a placard of history.
At the time of publication, The Dunbar Hotel has operated as an event space for wine tastings in
partnership with Downtown Wine and Cheese, Wilson’s former establishment in Gainesville.
Customers roam the Dunbar’s halls once again, sipping on red wine, Champagne and even a
pecan-infused Grove Street margarita. Wilson hopes to formally open the Dunbar as a wine bar
by 2022.