Dunbar Hospital

01 / The story of this place

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A group of Black physicians founded Dunbar Hospital in 1918 inside a converted three-story Romanesque Revival-Queen Anne house built in 1892, giving Detroit's Black community its first hospital of its own at a time when white-run hospitals routinely denied Black doctors admitting privileges and turned away Black patients. The twenty-five-bed facility had operating rooms, a laboratory, a pharmacy and a nurse training program. Physician Ossian Sweet, who would soon become nationally known after defending his newly purchased home from a mob in 1925, worked at Dunbar after returning to Detroit in 1924. The hospital operated until 1962, later giving way to larger Black-founded institutions in the city, and the building was preserved by the Detroit Medical Society, which used it as headquarters starting in the late 1970s. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, the building has been closed to the public since 2004 despite repeated efforts to reopen it as a museum.

1. Founded 1918 as Detroit's first hospital for Black patients and doctors
2. Housed in a Romanesque Revival-Queen Anne mansion built in 1892
3. Ossian Sweet worked here after returning to Detroit in 1924
4. Operated as a hospital until 1962
5. On the National Register of Historic Places since 1979; closed to the public since 2004