ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610210076
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
JAZZ greats Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Lionel Hampton. Contralto Marian Anderson. The Harlem Globetrotters.
As a young girl, Darthula Barlow Lash and her two sisters met them all in the coffee shop of Gainsboro's Dumas Hotel, owned and operated by their father and grandfather.
That was decades ago, in the heyday of Roanoke's Henry Street. Blacks were barred from downtown restaurants. Schools and libraries were segregated.
Back then, whites paid to see famous black entertainers perform - but they wouldn't rub elbows with them at lunch counters or sleep in the same hotels. So Armstrong, Calloway, Duke Ellington, Wilt Chamberlain and other famous black Americans ate and slept in the Dumas while visiting Roanoke.
The hotel has become a symbol of lingering resentment among some black Roanokers after years of decay and stalled urban renewal efforts in Gainsboro. That anger threatens local efforts to redevelop Henry Street into a multimillion-dollar entertainment district just a few hundred yards north of downtown.
Lash's family claims the hotel was "stolen" from them by the city and the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority - which later gave the building to Total Action Against Poverty. Now renovated with more than $800,000 in government grants secured by TAP, the property is known as the Henry Street Music Center.
The Lash family wants it back, either in whole or part, for black residents to use as a community meeting center and banquet hall. They also want the Dumas name restored.
In recent months, a rising chorus of black Roanokers has joined their requests.
The music center, they say, could be a north-of-the-tracks equivalent to Southwest's Jefferson Center. The city has invested more than $3 million in public money into that project, turning a dilapidated old high school - alma mater of some of Roanoke's most prominent residents - into beautifully restored office, meeting and banquet space.
"The Jefferson Center is a very important part of white people's history," says Vernice Law, Lash's mother-in-law. "If they can keep their history, what's wrong with us keeping ours?"
But on Oct. 7, City Council seemed to turn a deaf ear. Without comment and with pretty much no strings attached, council forgave a $212,000 city loan to TAP that was used for asbestos removal at the building.
Two of the five votes came from council members who also serve on TAP's board of directors: Councilman Nelson Harris and Vice Mayor Linda Wyatt. Mayor David Bowers and Councilman Jim Trout were absent.
"I didn't personally see any conflict of interest in the matter," Harris says. "That decision didn't benefit me personally in any way." Wyatt says she has yet to attend a TAP board meeting.
The vote came after seven black residents pleaded with council to ask TAP to turn the building over to the city in exchange for forgiving the loan.
They had hoped the city would then sell it back to the Lashes for what the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority gave them in 1987: $24,700.
"How could you justify taking it back from one organization that has invested $500,000 to $600,000?" Councilman William White said afterward. "You'd be taking something from a public agency and giving it to a private citizen."
"It wouldn't be fair to TAP, because it's TAP's building," Councilman Carroll Swain agreed.
"But it wasn't unfair for them to steal it from the Lashes?" countered Evelyn Bethel, a Gainsboro activist. "That's my response to that."
Despite council's vote, it appears the issue isn't over.
The next public workshop by the Henry Street Revival Committee is 7 p.m. Oct. 28 in the Roanoke Civic Center exhibition hall. Meanwhile, beginning Monday, the Roanoke chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is planning three days of picketing outside City Hall.
`A wonderful life'
How Darthula Lash's family ended up losing the old hotel is at the heart of their complaint. They cite a litany of harassment, pressure and broken promises in recounting how they came to sell it to the housing authority in 1987.
The family's ownership of the Dumas dates from 1934, when it was purchased by Lash's grandfather, M.D. "Mack" Barlow Sr. His partner was his son, Mack Barlow Jr., the father of Darthula Barlow Lash.
Her family lived around the corner from the hotel on Wells Avenue.
"It was a wonderful life," Darthula Lash recalls. "It was a very good business for us. We lived very well. [My father] wanted to leave his daughters something."
The elder Barlow died in 1964. Mack Junior passed away in 1973, leaving the hotel to Crystabel Barlow - his wife and Darthula's mother. She ran it for the next two years, until her health deteriorated. Lash and her husband, Wilton "Duke" Lash, who live in Northern Virginia, purchased the building from her mother in 1975 and promptly closed it down.
With few problems, it remained that way. Then in the early 1980s, as the Gainsboro Neighborhood Development Corp. outlined plans to build a shopping center on Henry Street, city building inspectors began visiting the hotel and finding one building code violation after another, Darthula Lash says.
Over the next five years, she said, she and her husband sank thousands of dollars into the building merely to comply with the city's demands.
There was upkeep on the sprinkler system - at least $300 annually; a demand that they board up windows that faced the street - $1,500. In 1982, the building was condemned, although city records don't reflect why.
Some of the demands seemed petty, such as an order to remove ivy growing on the back of the building, Lash adds.
"I absolutely think it was harassment," Lash says. "The Stone Printing building [a block over on Jefferson Street] and the Hotel Roanoke had ivy on them for years and years and years. We were milked and milked and milked in terms of what they were demanding we keep putting into the building."
Ron Miller, the city's chief of building inspections, says city records don't show the repeated code violations the Lashes complain of. According to an old index-card file system that is supposed to list each code violation, only three were recorded on the building between 1975 and 1982.
The city doesn't have copies of the actual violation notices issued, Miller says. It's unlikely, but possible, that violation notices were issued without being recorded on the index card for the building, he adds.
`Disbelief, betrayal'
Early in 1986, City Council authorized the housing authority to acquire about 35 pieces of property on or near Henry Street for a restaurant/entertainment district. One of the properties was the hotel.
At that time, according to tax records, the city assessed the fair market value of the building at $31,000 and the land at $8,000 - a total of $39,000. That appraisal had been constant for the previous five years.
But, for reasons nobody seems able to explain, later in 1986 the city cut its appraisal of the property to $23,500. Although the assessor still valued the land at $8,000, the building's value was cut 50 percent, to $15,500. The new property valuation took effect Jan. 1, 1987.
In December 1986, the housing authority offered the Lashes $24,700 for the building and land. That offer was based on an independent appraisal the authority had contracted for seven months earlier. Perhaps coincidentally, that independent appraisal also pegged the building's value at $15,500 - precisely what the city assessor later valued it at.
Because the Lashes wanted to keep the building in the family, they countered: They'd pay whatever it took to restore the hotel to the city's plans and specifications. And they offered a cashier's check as good faith.
"We were just flatly turned down," Darthula Lash recalls.
Instead, officials told the family to sell, or the authority would sue them and seize the property through eminent domain. And in March 1987, the authority's board of directors voted to condemn the land and take the Lashes to court.
Former Mayor Noel Taylor, then the driving force behind Henry Street revitalization plans, "told my son, 'Duke, there's nothing you can do. They're going to take it under eminent domain. You might as well accept the offer,''' Vernice Law says.
Reluctantly, the Lashes did. Duke Lash signed the papers transferring the property in September 1987. But in closing the deal, Lash says, the authority made him an oral promise: If it ever released the property, the Lashes would have the first option to buy it back.
Today, the family has lots of questions: Why did the city cut the hotel's appraised value so soon before the authority bought it? Was it so the authority could get the land at a cheaper price? Why did the city and housing authority give away the property less than three years later? And why didn't the Lashes get first crack at repurchasing it?
"We have experienced frustration, disbelief and a deep feeling of betrayal by the actions of the city officials, Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority and Henry Street Revival Committee," the Lashes wrote to the housing authority in April.
Neva Smith, executive director of the housing authority since 1992, says federal regulations require the agency to base its offers for real estate on independent appraisals, rather than values assessed by local government.
But if the earlier $39,000 value of the property had remained on city tax rolls, that would have been evidence the family could have used to seek more money for the property in court.
Jack Place, the attorney who handled the sale for the authority, says he finds the Lashes' account of the oral promise "hard to believe."
"If you want to get right down to the law of it, any contract to purchase real estate has to be made in writing. It's one of the few that does," Place says.
Taylor, who retired after 17 years as mayor in 1992, could not be reached for comment.
Will Claytor, who is director of real estate valuation for the city (but wasn't back then), says the city has no records explaining the cut in assessed value.
TAP changes plans
Months before the housing authority acquired the Dumas, Total Action Against Poverty was hatching its own plans for Henry Street.
Across the street from the hotel was the Ebony Club, a Henry Street nightspot. The nonprofit community action agency wanted to renovate it into a music center.
But TAP's plans changed in June 1987, three months after the housing authority began condemnation proceedings against the Dumas. Accounts vary as to why.
At the time, one TAP official called the Ebony Club building (which nine years later is still standing) "too far gone" to fix, something the agency apparently realized only after it had secured a $600,000 federal grant to renovate it. TAP said it would build a new structure, at a site to be determined after street improvement plans were firmed up.
More recently, both TAP Executive Director Ted Edlich and City Manager Bob Herbert gave a different explanation. Back then, they said, the city had plans to erect an enormous, $20 million convention center in Gainsboro. The old nightclub's land was part of that plan.
The convention center plan was dropped.
By 1989, the federal Department of Health and Human Services was demanding that TAP "use or lose" the $600,000 grant. According to Edlich, the city had a solution: Instead of the Ebony Club, TAP could renovate the Dumas and turn it into the music center.
TAP went for that deal, and the necessary documents were prepared transferring ownership of the hotel from the housing authority to the community action agency.
A costly surprise
But there was one final hitch.
Late in 1989, engineers working for TAP discovered asbestos throughout the building - even in its plaster walls. It would cost more than $200,000 to remove it. But the terms of the $600,000 federal grant barred use of the money for asbestos removal.
TAP asked the city for a $212,000 asbestos-removal grant. Instead, in January 1990, council offered the agency a two-year, $212,000 unsecured loan from federal Community Development Block Grant funds. The money would come out of funds council previously had earmarked for Henry Street improvements, but that weren't expected to be used in the near future.
"We protested privately that we did not have the resources to pay the loan. We were told that this was the best that could be done at the time," Edlich says. "With [the federal government] demanding action or the withdrawal of the $600,000, the TAP Board of Directors reluctantly agreed to the loan and proceeded with the renovation."
Documents for the loan were formally signed Feb. 9, 1990.
"It was not an arrangement that we felt good about, but the alternative of turning the $600,000 back, defaulting on our commitment to our federal grantors, and not preserving one of the very important structures of this important past was a lesser evil," Edlich says.
"Everyone was scrambling to try to find some way to have something positive done on Henry Street," Herbert recalls.
Ground was broken on the first phase of the music center renovations, which ultimately cost $812,000, including asbestos removal.
In February 1992, before that work was completed, the city asked for its $212,000 back. TAP replied that it didn't have the money. It asked for a five-year extension, which council granted.
In his report recommending the extension, Herbert wrote that it would give TAP time to complete the music center "and to accumulate resources to repay the loan."
But when the subject arose again this year, Herbert said it was painfully obvious even back then that TAP would never have the money to pay the city back.
With a renovated first floor and a double kitchen in the rear, the music center opened in July 1992. Although the kitchen regularly prepares meals for underprivileged children, the music center part of the building has never really taken off.
In 1994, it lost $2,427, according to TAP records. For the first 10 months of 1995, the music center did a bit better, showing a profit of $3,240 from renting space for a certified public accountants review class and other events.
Out of the loop?
The building has been free of controversy since its opening. Until this year.
In April, the latest version of a series of plans to revitalize Henry Street was brought forth by the Henry Street Revitalization Committee and the housing authority.
That plan, for a mini-version of famed Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn., generated angry public opposition.
Black residents of Gainsboro and other parts of the city complained that the plan was presented as a fait accompli. They publicly scolded the committee and the housing authority for leaving them out of the planning. It looked as though blacks wouldn't own any part of a project that was designed to renew a historic black neighborhood, they said.
It was also in April that Darthula and Duke Lash wrote the housing authority and TAP proposing that the building be given back to them or sold back for up to $24,000. The Lashes proposed the family would jointly own the building with unspecified professional organizations and one civic organization.
"The owners would be totally responsible for completion of renovations to the building," the Lashes wrote. Estimates by TAP and city officials peg that cost at up to $1 million.
Housing authority Executive Director Neva Smith, who didn't take her job until after the agency gave the building to TAP, responded that the authority no longer owned the building, so it has no say in its fate.
Edlich also responded, but not until nearly five months later, on Aug.27.
He didn't address whether TAP would be willing to give it up. (``We're not considering it," he said later.) But in the letter he argued that the money TAP invested in the building probably saved it from collapsing like the Palace Hotel did a few years ago.
The family disputes that. Although it is true the hotel's roof had leaked in the 1980s and ceiling plaster had fallen in some of its rooms, a building inspector's report from 1985 listed the hotel in "good" condition overall. And a restoration architect hired by the city in 1986 said the building was in "good serviceable condition," according to the building inspections office.
Darthula Lash estimates the hotel's interior could have been fixed up with about six weeks of cosmetic repairs and painting.
In September, after at least two closed-door meetings of council, the subject of the loan came up. Vernice Law calls council's forgiveness of it "the final insult."
"In view of the many positive things the blacks of this community have contributed to the city of Roanoke, we deserve to have a building we can call our own," she said to loud applause at council's Sept. 16 meeting. She later argued that the Music Center represents the only chance for blacks to have any ownership on a redeveloped Henry Street.
Law says TAP wouldn't lose anything by giving up the building.
"TAP didn't spend one dime on that building; it was all government grants," she says. The family, Law adds, would be willing to allow TAP to keep using the kitchen to prepare the Head Start meals, which is pretty much the only thing the building is used for now.
On Oct. 7, after council declined to ask TAP for title to the building in exchange for forgiving the loan, Law was fighting back tears.
"They don't look at us," Law said afterward. "They look through us, around us, like they're not even hearing. It's like, 'I'm looking at you, but I don't see you. I'm listening to you, but I'm not hearing you.'
"Am I so wrong to feel that way? Because I definitely feel that."
LENGTH: Long : 306 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. File/1966 Barlow family members pose in the lateby CNB1940s in the private dining room on the Dumas Hotel's second floor.
B&W. 2. NHAT MEYER/Staff. Crystabel Barlow (left) and daughter
Darthula Barlow Lash say the Henry Street Music Center should be
returned to their family. color. 3. File/1966. The Dumas Hotel had
more companions back in 1966 (right) B&W. 4. ERIC BRADY/Staff. than
it does today (left). color. Graphic: Map by staff KEYWORDS: PROFILE DIVIDED ON THE DUMAS