The thrill of Sugar Hill
Black entertainers not only revived West Adams—they challenged racist covenants and laid the groundwork for the Fair Housing Act.
Nobody threw a party like Hattie McDaniel. In her white and green Mediterranean mansion high atop the Los Angeles neighborhood of Sugar Hill, McDaniel, dressed in the latest fashion, hosted evening salons that brought together some of the greatest entertainers of the 20th century.
“The best of black show business performed within the walls of 2203 South Harvard,” McDaniel’s biographer Jill Watts writes. “Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Count Basie all played there. Ethel Waters sang and Butterfly McQueen did dramatic recitations. On many evenings, McDaniel herself joined in. It was private and intimate, but it was also independent and unfettered, free of white interference.”
The daughter of two former slaves, the multi-talented McDaniel had moved into the rambling mansion in the early 1940s.
Hattie McDaniel, 1941. Los Angeles Public Library photo collection
“She had the most exquisite house I had ever seen in my life, the best of everything,” entertainment legend Lena Horne recalled.
The property boasted endless porches, a beautiful, large backyard, and a basement that McDaniel converted to an air raid shelter. The public rooms were delicately appointed, painted in light colors, and decorated with French provincial ivory furniture. McDaniel’s eclectic passions and achievements were on full display—her white grand piano, her collection of books on African-American art and history, her doll collection.
And on the fireplace mantle, the best supporting actress Oscar she had won for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind. “I’m a fine black Mammy [on screen],” McDaniel told Horne. “But I’m Hattie McDaniel in my house.”
While McDaniel was the undisputed queen of WWII-era Sugar Hill, the neighborhood had enjoyed a long and storied history before her arrival. When it was laid out in 1902, the hilly area was called West Adams Heights.