Built in 1947, the Hayes Motel was ultra modern at the time, boasting rooms complete with radios and showers. Now owned and operated by Lily Ho, 78, the site has fallen into disrepair. According to Taylor, it’s one of the Los Angeles Green Book sites that’s most in need of help.

South Central was once called the “Harlem of the West,” frequented by Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. Other musical greats once graced the streets of Central Avenue, but because of racist policies such as redlining, many Angelenos now associate the area with the ghetto.

Originally the Hotel Somerville, the Dunbar Hotel and jazz club was located at the heart of that jazz scene. Black built, owned, and operated, it was considered one of the finest black hotels in the nation, playing host to other greats such as Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, and W.E.B. Du Bois, and the first national convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Unsurprisingly, it was the most often listed LA site in all 30 years of the Green Book. About a decade after segregation ended, the hotel closed its doors.

It was declared a Historic-Cultural landmark in 1974. In the decades following, the hotel underwent a series of reconstructions, most resulting in its being used as low-income housing. In 2013, it was carefully restored and converted into low-income senior housing. For Taylor, this iteration of the Dunbar is beautiful and fully “appropriate for the Green Book legacy.”

Another hotel that was highly praised as being the finest and most luxurious “negro hotel in the nation,” the Regal Hotel stands, completely dilapidated, in what is now Skid Row. No longer host to the NAACP or fancy galas, the Regal Hotel is also in desperate need of care. For Taylor, the stark difference between the grandeur of sites like the Regal in the past and their squalor today says a lot about the history of housing discrimination in LA.

The Green Book included a variety of businesses, including hairdressers and drug stores. Allums was opened in 1940 by William Henry Allum, and primarily released ads for medicines curing stomach ailments. The building still stands, but is shuttered.

The Aster Motel is claimed to have put up Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia—before she was stalked on her way to the Biltmore Hotel. Opened in the 1940s, it is one of the more modest hotels listed in the Green Book. It still stands in relatively good condition, but it is closed.

Many people know the Biltmore as the Beaux-Arts landmark that was once the largest hotel west of Chicago, as the famous hotel that hosted presidents and celebrities, and as the setting for Chinatown, Ghostbusters, Ocean’s 11, Spider-Man, and National Treasure. But the Biltmore also has a less-told history of welcoming those routinely kept out of the limelight.

In the 1940s and ’50s, its Grand Avenue Bar was part of the small string of establishments called “the Run” that served as a bustling hub for the LBGTQ community. And from 1962 to 1964, when it was listed in the Green Book, it hosted numerous black sorority events, as well as the Outstanding Student Awards for black scholars and the Women’s Lawyers Association. Significantly, it was in its halls that the chairman of the United Civil Rights Committee spoke out against Proposition 14, which would have re-legalized housing discrimination in California, saying, “the California Real Estate Association has admitted its concern is not with property rights—it is to destroy human rights.”

Clifton’s Republic, originally called Clifton’s Brookdale, is an anomaly among Green Book sites across the country; few have been lucky enough to undergo an almost $9-million restoration. Brookdale and Pacific Seas were just two in a string of Clifton’s, all of which were pay-as-you-wish eateries, a policy implemented in response to the Great Depression. Both the cafeteria and the original Pacific Seas hosted black modeling shows and awards in journalism banquets that featured black journalists.

“It was always music and food that brought white people into more acceptance of bending some of the rules.” — Candacy Taylor

Green Book sites were often hubs in the African American music scene, providing venues and hotels for the many notable performers, including Marvin Gaye, Little Richard, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday, to play and stay in. In the south and the south-east, these sites lined what was called the Chitlin’ Circuit. In Los Angeles, there was Central Avenue. Jack’s Basket Room, a jazz club that derived its name from the house speciality (fried chicken and shoestring fries served in a rattan basket), was at the heart of the Central Avenue scene. An after hours spot where impromptu jams were likely to break out, hot chicken was served until 2 a.m. and again at 6 a.m. for those who stayed through the night.

Besides its legendary food and music, Jack’s Basket Room boasted a radio broadcasting booth and held massive charity meals for underprivileged children. Listed in the Green Book from 1947 to 1955, the building is abandoned now. But, if you look closely, you can make out the faint lettering of its iconic motto painted on its facade: “Chicken ain’t nothin’ but a bird.”

The Hotel Norbo, built in 1912, was once an all-hours spot for musicians to play and patrons to drink. But, by the 1970s, it had become low-income housing, and by the 1980s, due to Reagan-era policies, had fallen into squalor. As Taylor notes, LA County was eventually sued over the hotel’s dangerous and unlivable conditions. Today, it’s still single occupancy housing in the heart of Skid Row.

[Green Book sites] are part of the story of African Americans in Los Angeles, and the story of Los Angeles itself writ large. — Ken Bernstein for the Los Angeles Times

Hotel Watkins was converted from a 1920s apartment building into a hotel and jazz club, called the Rubaiyat Room, by Bill Watkins in 1945. It was the first black hotel on the Westside, and it was the place that legendary entertainers flocked to as the Central Avenue scene petered out in the 1960s.

The original Hotel Californian is another Green Book site with a long and complicated, boom-and-bust history. Built in the 1920s, the hotel was the site of multiple fires and scandals, and it eventually became a symbol of Westlake/MacArthur Park’s decline before it was destroyed in 1995. Newly rebuilt in 2016, the Hotel Californian is now low-income housing. Its original neon sign, which was saved and stored for a decade in Griffith Park, was restored and re-installed on its roof, making it the oldest neon sign in Los Angeles.

Many of the fates of the Green Book sites are murky, and the Palm Vue Motel is no exception. It’s not widely known what happened to it—it may have been closed shortly after the 1992 LA Uprising—but what we do know is that it was opened in 1959 by the late attorney Sherman Smith and dentist Helen Guenveur, parents of the LA-based actor Roger Guenveur Smith. According to a spring issue of Jet magazine, the owners “spared no expense, even wall-to-wall carpeting and a swimming pool.”

Details of the hotel's demolition are murky, but it would have stood somewhere near the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center on Western.