Once-famous hotel for blacks has new hopes for inclusion in plans by CCDC
By Rachel Cromidas
September 20, 2008
DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO – The Clermont Hotel was a celebrated jazz hotspot in the 1930s, frequented by musicians such as Charlie Parker and Nat King Cole. Today it's a halfway house for parolees.
Now supporters of the runner-up proposal by local developer Robert Green, which includes a plan to restore the Clermont, want the CCDC to make good on its promise to incorporate African-American culture into the project.
Green was first solicited to create a proposal for the site by Larry Sidiropoulos, co-owner of the hotel, in 2006. The plan involved restoring the hotel to the way it looked when it was built in 1887, with wooden exterior lining instead of stucco, Green said. They also discussed creating museum space for the Black Historical Society and signed a franchise agreement with a jazz club owned by the Charlie Parker's family.
The CCDC reviewed seven proposals for the space, including Green's, before selecting the 7th & Market project in March 2007. Development was halted in August pending investigations into Graham's ties to Related.
Before Related was selected, Graham said in a statement that “one prominent feature of the project would be a cultural use and/or performance-art space that celebrates the African-American heritage of the block.”
Said Sidiropoulos, who purchased the hotel in 2004 with two friends, Anthony Laureti and Ashley Abano: “We played by the rules, and we were the runner-up in the selection process. To save time, money and effort for us, the city should start talking to us or enter into an exclusive negotiation agreement for the site.”
CCDC spokesman Derek Danziger said the agency's board has not made any decisions about the future of the site, but it hasn't ruled out the Green plan. “There's got to be some time to resolve any of the outstanding issues going on first.”
The Clermont Hotel was almost demolished in 2000, when the city first considered developing the Seventh Avenue property. The original plan was to build a parking garage, Park It on Market, to accommodate the crowds at nearby Petco Park. The Black Historical Society reacted with alarm.
“It was amazing that the redevelopment agency so wanted to demolish the site to put up a gaudy parking lot. The hotel had quite a history of Jim Crow and racial segregation,” said Karen Huff-Willis, president of the society.
In 2001, the society successfully lobbied to designate the hotel as a historical landmark that could not be torn down.
Huff-Willis remembers a hard-fought struggle with the CCDC for the Clermont Hotel, focused around a debate over whether the hotel was actually segregated. The agency “stooped pretty low,” including calling into question whether the term “colored” in the Yellow Pages really meant black.
Huff-Willis said the Clermont once was one of the largest colored hotels in the downtown, providing elegant rooms to well-known entertainers, including Billie Holiday.
The historical society conducts a weekly Harlem of the West Tour of downtown San Diego.
“We like to point out the very front of the hotel, the room on the bottom floor to the right, where Jelly Roll Morton used to stay,” Huff-Willis said of the famous early jazz pianist. “It was quite a social meeting place in the mid-1930s and '40s.”
However, by the 1970s, the Clermont, later renamed the Coast, was run-down and dangerous. “It had become a drug-infested, very violent place,” Huff-Willis said. “It was notorious, thanks to a couple of murders that occurred there.”
Neighbors considered the building an eyesore and disregarded its history, she added. But Huff-Willis is more optimistic today.
“Now that the so-called 7th & Market project is on hold, the hotel's future is very bright,” she said. “This is an opportunity for the CCDC to maybe bring in a developer that will re-think the project.”
Sidiropoulos agreed. “The process didn't seem fair to us over the last couple of years. Absent a developer's help, we really can't improve the building the way it needs to be.”
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