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| Between 1906 and 1931 the Golden West Hotel on NW Broadway and Everett was the only hotel in town that would accept black guests. It became a central location for African American social and economic interaction. |
By the time it closed in 1931 the Golden West Hotel, at
the corner of NW Broadway and Everett, had become the center of the African
American community in Portland. The
five-story, one-hundred room hotel included a Chinese restaurant, candy
store, ice cream parlor, saloon, cigar store, theater and Waldo Bogle’s
barbershop on the ground floor and George Moore’s Golden West Athletic Club in
the basement. The athletic club included
a Turkish bath, gymnasium, boxing ring and card room. Located just a block from both the original Mt.
Olivet Baptist Church and the Bethel AME Church, the Golden West became a
Sunday gathering place for African American families. Before 1919 housing was not formally
segregated in Portland, so most African American families lived in various
neighborhoods on the east side, but they worked in or near Union Station and
went to church in the neighborhood. As
the largest black-owned business in town, the Golden West was a natural gathering
spot for black Portlanders, but it didn’t start that way.
Contrary to popular belief, proprietor William D. Allen,
who came to Portland from Tennessee in 1901, never owned the building that
housed the Golden West. The building was
erected in 1893, as a three-story, eighty room hotel and was originally called
the Tremont House. Just blocks from
Union Station in NW Portland, the Tremont House dominated a neighborhood that
was in swift decline. By 1905, when the
new owner, J.H. McClung of Eugene, leased the building to Thomas McNamee, who
renamed the hotel the Golden West, it was a rundown building in the heart of
what was becoming known as “coon town,” a district dominated by
African-American businesses and residents.
After decades of holding on against opposition, segregation and racial
discrimination, Portland’s African American community had finally established a
foothold. Many black Portlanders worked
for the Southern Pacific railroad, or one of the large downtown hotels, and
worked their own businesses in their off hours.
The stability of jobs for a small group of African Americans, allowed a
prosperous, but small, black community to thrive.
McNamee probably didn’t allow black people to stay at the
Golden West, and that was one of the main reasons that his business
struggled. For more than a year the
building was tied up in a lawsuit between the new owner, McClung, and W.
McPherson, who operated the Tremont House and the nearby Gilman House. The lawsuit, and publicity surrounding it,
probably suppressed business as well.
McNamee opened the Golden West Hotel on Christmas Day, 1905, advertising
a full turkey dinner for 25 cents, but the business never took off. Within days McNamee was in debt and some his
creditors had brought lawsuits against him for payment. By spring 1906, McNamee had had enough and
the Golden West changed hands again.
It was probably at this time that William Allen first
became involved with the hotel, although his identity was kept secret at the
time, probably because of the color of his skin. Instead Al Wohlers, an ex-policeman who had
become one of the North End’s most notorious saloon owners and brothel
operators, was the public face of the Golden West. Wohlers ran a saloon at NW Fourth and Davis
and rumor said that the vice payoff went from the illegal businesses in the
North End to Wohlers, who cut it up and distributed the graft to the Police
Bureau and city officials. In the decade
after he became involved with the Golden West, Wohler’s became one of the
city’s most powerful “fixers.”
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| Waldo Bogle ran the Golden West Barbershop, just one of the many black-owned businesses that operated in the Golden West Hotel. |
When Allen took over as proprietor of the Golden West the
hotel began to be the focal point of Portland’s black community, because it was
the only hotel in town that would accept black guests. It soon filled up with lodgers, many of them
railroad workers and Pullman porters who worked on the Southern Pacific out of
Union Station. Although Allen was able
to find a good base of clients, the business continued to struggle. Leon V. Jenkins, who was a patrol officer in
the neighborhood starting in 1909 and became chief of police in 1919, said that
the neighborhood of the Golden West was “one of the toughest districts in the
city.” The neighborhood was filled with
crumbling old buildings and crowded with poor people. It soon became a focus of street crime and
many people, black and white, refused to walk through the district without
being armed.
W.D. Allen struggled to make the business prosper and
early in 1907 an opportunity allowed him to get the hotel on a paying
basis. Late in 1906 the famous variety
theater Paris Inn, located at NW Third and Davis, lost its license and was
forcibly closed down by the city. The
Paris Inn was a theater that presented racy burlesque shows. Upstairs the theater had a series of booths,
where patrons could enjoy the favors of the Inn’s attractive cast. Mayor Harry Lane had promised to close down
prostitution in the North End and the Paris Inn became the focus of one of his
campaigns. Al Wohlers negotiated a
solution with the owners of the Paris Inn and a compromise with the
police. Fifteen prostitutes from the
Paris Inn relocated to the Golden West Hotel and with the connivance of members
of the Police Bureau began to operate from the upstairs rooms. Allen was probably happy to have the extra
income, because from that point until the Great Depression, the hotel was a
profitable business and Allen began to get his share. It wasn’t until Prohibition in 1916 that the
hotel began to be a real money-maker, though.
W.D. Allen was very active in his community, a member of
both the Colored Masons and the Improved (Colored) Benevolent Order of
Elks. Like many of Portland’s most
successful businessmen, Allen made his money from illegal activity while making
himself a vital and respected member of the community. Allen had a complicated relationship with the
police, as well. Like many Portland
hotel and saloon owners he cooperated with the police whenever it furthered his
interests and occasionally suffered a raid.
Allen managed to keep his reputation clean, only being convicted one
time – in 1919 he was fined $150 for possession of liquor. Allen was accused of many crimes, but never
convicted of most of them. There were at
least three attempts by the city to pull the license of the Golden West Hotel,
but Allen managed to keep the business going until 1931.
In 1911 Col. M.W. Hunt, a surgeon in the Oregon militia
for more than twenty years, retired from his Salem law practice and invested in
real estate in Portland. In June of that
year Hunt bought the building that housed the Golden West Hotel for
$85,000. It was a time when the Uptown
neighborhood was improving. The name of
Seventh Ave. was officially changed to Broadway and the street was widened from
60 feet to 80 feet. A large fire in 1908
cleared many of the crumbling old buildings and opened up construction
opportunities in the neighborhood. In
1912 the new Post Office at Broadway and Hoyt began construction and several
other major projects began. Hunt
invested more than $40,000 in his new building, temporarily removing the façade
and adding two stories and more than twenty guest rooms. After 1913 the Golden West Hotel became very
prosperous. The new fifth floor became
one of the most prestigious addresses in town for a black Portlander. Late in 1913, Hunt sold the building to a
Canadian investor at a tidy profit and it remained in the hands of Canadians
for several decades.
When Prohibition went into effect in January 1916, the
prosperity of the Golden West Hotel accelerated. One of the most important, and stable sources
of high quality liquor in Portland was the Southern Pacific Railroad, that made
regular runs between Portland and Oakland, CA.
Liquor was still legal in California, until 1920, and the Pullman
porters, cooks and waiters of the Southern Pacific aided the smuggling and
distribution of bonded whiskey all over Oregon.
The Golden West Hotel became the Portland headquarters of the “Pullman
Porter Bootlegging Ring” and the fifth floor became the home of some of
Portland’s richest black bootleggers.
Men like Tom Johnson, Sam “Yam” Wallace, John Lowe and Harry Duvall made
their headquarters at the Golden West and lived in high style in suites on the
fifth floor. After 1916 residents of the
Golden West Hotel became regular entries in the “New Car Owners in the County”
column of the Oregonian.
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| In 1916, when Prohibition went into effect, the saloon at the Golden West closed and Al Green converted it to a candy shop/soda fountain. Green continued to sell bonded whiskey provided by the Pullman Porter Bootlegging Ring that operated from the building. |
That same year, Al Green converted the Golden West’s
saloon into a candy store – in 1922 it became an ice cream parlor. George Moore, W.D. Allen’s brother-in-law,
opened the Golden West Athletic Club in the basement and began to train boxers
there. The Athletic Club also featured a
large, hidden card room and the telephone number “Broadway 77” became one of
the city’s most reliable connections for cocaine and heroin. An elaborate system of electrical buzzers was
installed to warn card players in the basement, lottery players in the
restaurant and brothel and drinking customers upstairs when a raid was about to
occur. The days of financial hardship
were over for the Golden West and it was during this period that it saw its
most important use as a community center, as black women’s groups held meetings
there and the restaurant filled up with black families on Sundays after
church. African American Portlanders who
grew up in the 1920s remembered the Golden West very fondly, and knew nothing
of the illegal activities that were carried on there. Some of them remembered getting their first
drink at the Golden West, where whiskey sours cost 25 cents.
Many of the people involved with the Golden West Hotel,
including W.D. Allen and barber Waldo Bogle, were interested in music and the
Golden West’s house band became legendary.
The theater in the Golden West was the site of Portland’s first jazz
concert in 1914 and the hotel was immortalized by a jazz improvisation called The Golden West Hotel Blues, which was
broadcast over Oregonian Radio in
1922. Many young black Portlanders were
introduced to music at the Golden West Hotel, including Allen’s son, William
Duncan Allen Jr., who became one of Portland’s most famous musicians in the
1930s. As the only hotel available to
black visitors to Portland, the Golden West hosted many important African
Americans, including labor organizer A. Phillip Randolph and Illinois
congressman Oscar DePriest.
In 1931 Portland’s African American community was under
intense pressure to relocate to the eastside, to the new “negro district” around
Williams Avenue. The Great Depression
had started and the Golden West had fallen on hard economic times. Allen closed the Golden West Hotel that year
and opened a new hotel on the eastside – The Melody. A couple of years later the New Golden West Hotel
opened in the old location, but it soon took on the character of Portland’s
transient hotels, full of poverty, misery and crime. In its second incarnation the Golden West was
an integrated hotel that took both white and black guests, but it didn’t last
long. In 1943 with housing at a premium
the hotel reopened as the Broadmoor Hotel, providing temporary housing for
transient workers. The Broadmoor closed
in 1984, and interest in black history inspired a movement to restore the
building. Central City Concern, a low
income housing organization, acquired the building in the 1980s, restoring the
hotel and providing low income housing.
The history of the Golden West has been partially preserved at the
building and it is the centerpiece of any serious tour of African American
historical sites in Portland.
The Golden West Hotel is probably Portland’s most
important African American historical site. The underground activities that
occurred there are largely forgotten, but live strongly in rumor. This article is an attempt to correct that
problem and give factual evidence to the rumors that persist. Portland history is full of respectable
businessmen and community leaders who made most of their money from illegal activities. In this respect William D. Allen can be
recognized as a true Portland businessman.
