Groundsite Image Gallery
Lawrence House
Artist: Hughes, Langston
Height: 0.000"
Width: 0.000"
Lawrence House, 811 Vermont St., demolished.
This African American hotel may have been the hotel where Langston Hughes worked after school. However, in his fictionalized autobiography, his hero writes about hotel patrons who were White salesmen. In some ways, however, this structure fits Hughes’s writing. He describes the “Drummer’s Hotel” as: “A three-story frame structure, dilapidated and run down, it had not been painted for years.”
Other hotels from that time were the Fairfax Hotel (708 Massachusetts St.), Santa Fe Hotel (700 Connecticut St.), Place House (846 New Hampshire St.), and Savoy Hotel (846 Vermont St.) (See Appendix 1). The Santa Fe was also a wooden frame building of three stories. Vermont St. was the location of African American businesses at that time. This 1895 photograph is by E.S. Tucker.