Wells'Built Hotel: Orlando's Chitlin' Circuit Address
Near Orlando, Florida
On South Parramore Avenue in the historically Black west side of Orlando, Dr. William Monroe Wells built a hotel in the early nineteen twenties that became one of the anchor stops on the Chitlin' Circuit, the network of Black-owned venues across the Jim Crow South where African American performers could travel without being turned away at the door.
Wells was a physician and civic leader who understood that his community needed not just medical care but a gathering place. The Wells'Built Hotel offered Black travelers a safe, respectable place to stay when the rest of Orlando's hotels were closed to them. The entertainers who performed at the South Street Casino next door and slept at the Wells'Built included Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, and James Brown. The hotel closed in the nineteen sixties as desegregation opened other doors, but the building survived and later reopened as a museum dedicated to the history of Parramore and the Black community it served.
