Segregation-era hotel was the Phoenix hot spot long before Chase Field moved in

By Steve Stockmar
Mail |
X: @stevestockmar

The scene will look, feel and sound unquestionably familiar Thursday in downtown Phoenix.

Arizona Diamondbacks’ swag will be everywhere. Baseball fans by the thousands will be crowding every entrance. Blue sky and smiles. It’s Opening Day and every year it’s as communal as the city gets at the cozy, happy place for baseball fans on the corner of Jefferson and Seventh streets.

The spot is personal for Ann Saunders. Now living in Jackson, Mississippi, she spent a lot of time on this spot as a kid, literally from a baby.

She was back in Phoenix as recently as 2019 to visit cousins living in the Valley. They took a turn onto Jefferson Street and the sight was nothing like she’d ever seen, especially along the ballpark’s north entrance plaza. Sure, she knew the old Rice Hotel had been long gone from that spot. Her family’s long history at 535 E. Jefferson St. had come to a close for good in the early 1980s.

But looking at the street that day, Ann knew. It was familiar in her own way.

“We went downtown and that's when I got to see the baseball field,” Ann recalled when talking this month about that return visit. “I just had this real strong sense of I remember …”

THAT SPOT

Way back in the early 20th century, the Eastlake Park neighborhood of downtown Phoenix had its lines drawn, both officially mapped ones and culturally "known" ones. It was well known those in minority communities were welcome to settle south of Van Buren Street and nowhere else. Segregated real estate restrictions made sure of it.

A 2015 report from the city of Phoenix planning and development department looking at strategic urban revitalization practices offered historical perspective on the Eastlake Park neighborhood, dubbed “the first African American community in Phoenix.” Booker T. Washington even spoke at Eastlake Park in 1911.

“With limited funds and limited opportunities, members of the earliest African American community concentrated around Jefferson and Madison streets, between Central Avenue and Seventh Street,” the report found. “A less desirable area, African Americans were allowed to settle without much notice.”

A community grew there through professionals, teachers, business owners and families who worked and lived in Eastlake and especially along Jefferson Street, the report noted. The neighborhood was segregated, but also thriving, with schools, churches, newspapers, a hospital, homes, and hotels.

Right around the time Hughie Henry (H.H.) Rice moved to town.

This image depicts the former Rice Hotel in the same spot on Jefferson Street where Chase Field stands today.

(Independent Newsmedia illustration/Erik Maurer)

Thelma Evans in the Rice hotel diner, 1952.

(Courtesy of the Saunders family)

Born June 15, 1874, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Rice, a railroad worker, left Chicago around 1903, stopped in Kansas City, and by 1916 – just four years after Arizona was granted statehood – made his way to Phoenix seeking opportunity.

He opened the Rice Hotel in 1919 first at its original downtown location, 35 S. Second Ave., but after a fire there then opened up at 450 E. Jefferson St., and finally at its last spot, 535 E. Jefferson St. Eventually, the hotel expanded to include a café, a couple of offices, and even an adjacent home.

Rice’s daughter, Thelma Evans, moved from Chicago in 1945 to help run the family business, which by then needed all kinds of attention. Thelma spent three months just cleaning the place.

It was already a popular spot given its inclusion in The Green Book, that time period’s annual publication of Black-friendly hotels, restaurants, and gas stations for travelers passing through during the days of Jim Crow.

The Rice Hotel was the place to be.

WHO’S WHO

Thelma Evans never bothered asking famous guests of the hotel for their autographs. They were already signing the registry at check-in.

“Oh my register is nothing but a Black directory,” Thelma, then 80, laughed in an interview she gave in the early 1980s. “I have all the registers from way back.”

Louis Armstrong, bandleader Earl Hines, Dinah Washington.

Duke Ellington had three No. 1 hits by the time he stayed at the Rice Hotel while on tour in 1949. With his band in tow, that night’s Rice Hotel registry read like jazz royalty. Billy Strayhorn was there, the pianist and composer of jazz standards "Take the 'A' Train" and "Chelsea Bridge." Russell Procope and his saxophone and clarinet were in for the night, along with jazz trumpeter Cat Anderson.

Lionel Hampton and his band stayed at the Rice Hotel a couple nights a year – once heading through Phoenix for a gig on the way to Los Angeles and again on the way back. In October 1955, the bus taking Hampton and his 16-member traveling band was involved in a serious wreck in Socorro, New Mexico, one night after staying at the Rice.

“If it was a name band and they played Phoenix they had to stay here,” Thelma said. “A lot of the bands would play Las Vegas and then they would come into Phoenix and play two nights here because they had a separate dance for the Whites and then the Colored at Riverside Ballroom. They didn’t mix the two groups together dancing at that time.”

Athletes, too.

The Harlem Globetrotters stayed at the Rice Hotel with their traveling show. Even a young Jackie Robinson – then playing with the UCLA football team – wasn’t allowed at a downtown hotel during a 1939 visit to Phoenix, nor was his teammate Woody Strode. Both made the short trip to Jefferson and Fifth streets to the Rice Hotel instead.

Using mapping tools, the city of Phoenix’s planning and development department pinpointed that the Rice Hotel was located actually on the Chase Field grounds of today, noted by the red box.

(Illustration provided by city of Phoenix planning and development)

Duke Ellington's signature (seventh line down, left page) stands out on this 1949 register from the Rice Hotel.

(Courtesy of the Saunders family)

“They made reservations for these two Negroes to stay over here,” Thelma recalled of the famous pair, each of whom were soon to make integration history for sport and society.

It wasn’t just the biggest stars of the day caught by circumstance that forced guests into the Black-friendly hotel. Chauffeurs couldn’t stay at the same downtown Phoenix hotels as the bosses they were driving through town. Servicemen, part of segregated units while serving in the U.S. military, also needed segregated hotel rooms in town.

FAMILY

The 28-room Rice Hotel was an open space for all who came because at its heart was a family who accommodated visitors and fervently served its Phoenix community.

Thelma operated the NAACP Phoenix headquarters from inside the Rice Hotel and was chair of the campaign committee during membership drives. In the summer of 1950, a meeting took place a few blocks east of the Rice Hotel on Jefferson to lay plans for a campaign to support a proposed law to desegregate Arizona public schools. “For the first time in Arizona,” the Arizona Sun, an important newspaper in the Black community, wrote, “the Negro people have within their grasp a chance to end the segregation that exists in the public schools of the state.”

The measure soundly failed at the ballot box that November, but efforts never stopped. Tarea Pittman, director of the West Coast Region of the NAACP, who had worked to get fair employment practice laws passed in Arizona, among other states, in 1961 personally recognized Thelma as an “outstanding” leader in Arizona.

For Ann and her brother Vincent as kids, it wasn’t about civil rights or stargazing at celebrities when they were at the Rice Hotel.

Hughie Henry (H.H.) Rice, seen in this undated photo, opened the Rice Hotel in downtown Phoenix in 1919.

(Courtesy of the Saunders family)

The Valley Metro light rail platform at Washington/Central Ave features an art installation of photos from Phoenix history, including (at left) a picture of Doris Saunders and H.B. Daniels in front of the former Rice Hotel. Tucson artist Stephen Farley's porcelain enamel panels depict scenes of people living and working in Downtown Phoenix throughout history. Ann Saunders believes the photo used …

(Independent Newsmedia/Steve Stockmar)

“It's like visiting your grandmother’s. Visiting the hotel was visiting grandma,” she would remember, including the summer she and her brother stayed from April through September to spend extended time with their grandma, Thelma, and great-grandmother, Mattie Titus, who would pass away that October. “We were at the hotel quite a bit.”

The kids for fun flipped through the registers at the big check-in desk inside. There was the staircase up to the second floor with a banister where Ann “taught” her brother to slide down only to watch him fall on his face and lose his front teeth. A dime would get them a Coke from the lobby soda machine, and of course, as a functioning hotel with a busy occupancy, there was work to do, including washing and ironing sheets. Even the rear of the hotel had intrigue where there remained hitching posts for horses from the really old days.

Busy being kids, there wasn’t much talk at the time about the segregation that even made the bustling Rice Hotel necessary.

“I was probably not as aware of that, nor my brother,” Ann said. “We were younger, and whenever we started getting into anything like that it was like, ‘Stay out of grown folks business,’ that kind of thing.”

THE FINAL DAYS

Integration eventually had its impact on businesses like the Rice Hotel. The family business itself was drawing to an end, too.

Thelma would never have her daughter, Doris (Evans) Saunders, be forced to attend a segregated school in Phoenix (“Never. And I’m glad I didn’t because today she has got a very good rounded education.”), so Doris wasn’t staying in town and was about to embark on an historic career in education and publishing herself.

The last time Ann was at the hotel was the early 1970s.

“Everything pretty much looked as it had always looked,” she recalled. “It hadn't changed. It hadn't modernized.”

This photo from May 1981 shows how far back the Rice Hotel extended. The back corner of the Rice Hotel's main building on Jefferson Street is seen toward the upper left of the photo.

(Courtesy of the Saunders family)

The Rice Hotel’s property would have occupied part of the front lawn area along Chase Field’s north plaza near where fans enter through Gate K.

(Independent Newsmedia/Steve Stockmar)

But that portion of town was about to.

The growing Phoenix Convention Center, which opened in 1972, was ready for expansion out toward Jefferson and Fifth streets by the 1980s. And things were about to get worse.

Thelma suffered a heart attack in late April 1981. Doris was back in town by May to not only care for her mother, but there were tenants still living in the Rice Hotel at the time.

According to the family, Hughie Henry (H.H.) Rice owned the land outright from the beginning, and in 1944 when Thelma came out permanently to take over, Hughie – who not only earned his Phoenix real estate license in 1924 but worked out of his Realtor office inside the Rice Hotel – transferred ownership and responsibility of the hotel to Thelma, two years before he died.

The land across the street from the new convention center, some 66 acres south of Jefferson Street between Seventh and Fourth streets, precisely where the Rice Hotel and its sprawling grounds of buildings stood since the ’20s, had a whole different fate coming.

The area, which by all accounts offered little more than half-full businesses, rough looking chain-link fences, and literal desert dust, suddenly had something unheard of over previous decades when minorities were restricted there: location real state value, right in the heart of downtown Phoenix.

Developers eyed the spot for what media reports in August 1986 would call “potentially the city’s largest venture with private business.” Phoenix council members toured the site, noted its available parking and access to freeways, and the city officially opened negotiations to build a downtown sports stadium there.

At the time, it wasn’t even certain if it would house baseball or football, but the numbers were eye-popping. Developers were proposing a $150 million retractable domed stadium, plus another $150 million in office, retail, hotel, and residential development.

Those 66 acres, according to media reports at the time, were owned by “about 20 different companies and individuals.” As part of the deal with the private investor group, the city would condemn the land if the landowners failed to agree on a selling price.

Declaring the land condemned had a distinct advantage for developers: owners of the land would involuntarily receive fair market value for their spots. They could battle “value” in court, but the writing was on the wall. Their days of owning land in that spot were numbered and they were being shown the door.

“While the owners would be compensated for furnishings, etc., the land was lost,” Doris wrote in her memoirs.

After relocating the displaced residents, the Rice Hotel closed in May 1981 and was razed shortly after.

“I can tell you that my mother did not feel that the city of Phoenix provided just compensation,” Ann said. “She did not feel she received fair market value for the land.”

The Maricopa County Stadium District formed in September 1991 and ground broke for the new ballpark four years later. Taxpayers contributed $238 million toward the construction of Chase Field, owned today by Maricopa County, which leases the stadium to the Diamondbacks. County records show the full cash value of Chase Field today is about $502 million.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

While the Rice Hotel’s street address was 535 E. Jefferson St., Jefferson in those days didn’t have the curve it now does approaching Seventh Street – it ran straight through.

Using mapping tools, the city’s planning and development department pinpointed that the Rice Hotel was located on the Chase Field grounds of today. Not only do today’s Valley Metro light rail tracks go through the middle of the old hotel’s configuration, the Rice Hotel’s property also would have occupied the front lawn area along Chase Field’s north plaza near where fans enter through Gate K.

The family has photos of the Rice Hotel, both inside and out, though not much else remains. Those registers with the Rice Hotel’s famous guests’ signatures are housed today at the largest African American history and literature collection in the Midwest, the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, in the Chicago Public Library.

After Thelma’s heart attack, Doris concluded her business with the city and with relocating the hotel’s tenants, and on the day Thelma was released from the hospital Doris took Thelma directly to the airport and to Jackson, Mississippi, to live out her days with her daughter.

This undated family photo shows, from left, Thelma Evans; her daughter Doris Saunders; Doris' young son Vincent Ellsworth Saunders III; and Doris' daughter, Ann Saunders. They are in front of the family's house on Jefferson Street, adjacent to the Rice Hotel.

(Courtesy of the Saunders family)

This photo from October 1927 shows Doris Saunders as a young child with unnamed hotel guests taken in front of the Rice Hotel on Jefferson Street. The car belonged to Hughie Rice.

(Courtesy of the Saunders family)

Doris had already gone on to a remarkable career. By the time she was 27 and working with the Chicago Public Library, she was the highest-ranking minority librarian in the city. Later, she was an educator and chair of the mass communications department at Jackson State University, where under her leadership Jackson State became home to the first accredited journalism program in Mississippi.

As the founding librarian for the Ebony Magazine corporate library, Doris later became director of the book publishing division for the Johnson Publishing Company. She died in 2014.

Vincent Saunders continues to make his home in Chicago these days, and Ann, who gives presentations about her mother’s innovative life and career, lives in Jackson.

That return visit to the site of the former Rice Hotel in 2019 made its impact.

“I was devastated because I think you feel like you know these things that are part of your life and part of your history aren’t going to be there forever, and even though I knew it was gone, I still, you know … it was just so completely different,” she said. “But it was a real lesson at the same time in terms of how things change. There are little bits and pieces that remain the same. But there are other things that disappear.”

Even Jackie Robinson made it back.

To this day, on the site of the former Rice Hotel where decades earlier he was forced to stay due to segregation, his retired No. 42 hangs in celebration inside Chase Field on that very spot.

*

Please send your comments about this article to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.

At left, Thelma Evans in the Rice Hotel lobby in 1971 is sitting at Hughie Rice’s original desk. At right, that same desk is in the home today of Hughie’s great-granddaughter, Ann Saunders, in Jackson, Mississippi.

(Courtesy of the Saunders family)

This photo from May 1981 shows a courtyard at the back end of the Rice Hotel. In the hotel's earliest days, this is where horse troughs and a hitching post were placed.

(Courtesy of the Saunders family)

An undated look at the Rice Hotel, which also shows May’s Café, the hotel’s front door, Hughie Rice’s on-site Realtor office, an NAACP credit union (white building, second from right), and the family’s home at right.

(Courtesy of the Saunders family)

Thelma Evans with grandbaby Ann Camille Saunders in the Rice Hotel diner in this undated photo.

(Courtesy the Saunders family)

Fans arrive at Chase Field in Phoenix for Opening Day back on April 4, 2016. The 2025 season’s Opening Day is Thursday at Chase Field against the Cubs.

(AP Photo/Matt York)

Steve Stockmar
News Editor | Sun Life Magazine & Arts & Entertainment YourValley.net

sstockmar@iniusa.org

Meet Steve
Steve Stockmar joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2017, and has been an Arizona journalist for almost 30 years. He serves as editor of Sun Life Magazine and contributes to West Valley communities where he focuses mostly on arts & culture, education, and profiles of neighbors making a difference.

Community: Every season Steve serves as a “buddy” with the Miracle League of Arizona in Scottsdale, has volunteered his time with Family Promise in Glendale, and previously served on the Ghostlight Theatre board in Sun City West.

Education: Graduated from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff with a Journalism major and English minor.

Random Fact: Steve once won a 50-player live Texas Hold ’Em poker tournament.

Hobbies: Anguishing over his beloved Chicago Cubs and Bears; listening to Beatles and Grateful Dead music.