Los Angeles may preserve ‘Green Book’ properties

Aster Motel, Los Angeles

Los Angeles and the Getty Conservation Institute are exploring the possibility of rehabbing and protecting about 50 properties once listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book.

A few of the properties may be designated as L.A. Historic-Cultural Monuments, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The Green Book was created by Victor H. Green, a postal service worker from Harlem, N.Y., who began publishing the guide in 1936 to help African Americans avoid, as he put it, “embarrassing moments” after motorists started exploring long-distance roadways including Route 66, the nation’s first transcontinental highway.

Most of the 224 Los Angeles sites have been razed or put to other uses. But 56 survivors include landmarks such as the Biltmore Hotel, Clifton’s Cafeteria and the Dunbar Hotel, where famous figures such as Lena Horne, Joe Louis, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and others would stay when they visited the city because white hotels would not house them.

There were also dozens of lesser known welcoming locales, including the Hayes, the Aster Motel and a modest wood-framed house in the 1200 block of South New Hampshire Street listed in the guide as the residence of “Mrs. J. O. Banks.”

The Times produced this video about a black man from Texas who used the Green Book.

The New York Public Library digitized several editions of the Negro Motorist Green Book, published from 1936 annually until shortly after the Civil Right Act became law in 1964. Surviving copies of such magazines now are quite rare.

Candacy Taylor also has been busy documenting what is left of the properties on Route 66 in the Green Book, including the ones in L.A.

The National Park Service and National Register of Historic Places also are getting involved in this effort to document and preserve surviving places that served black motorists during the Jim Crow era.

(Image of the Aster Motel sign in Los Angeles, which was listed in the Green Book, by Richard Ha via Flickr)

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