Physician Felix Dunn’s one-and-a-half-story modernist house sheltered under a shed roof features a prominent brick chimney, an off-center entrance, and a picture window. It is similar to others by Raleigh builders and developers Currie and Corley. Along with Biloxi physician Gilbert Mason, Dunn organized the Biloxi Civic League and later, as president of the Gulfport branch of the NAACP, worked with Mason on voter registration and the desegregation of Harrison County’s beaches. Dunn’s clinic, next door to his house, was firebombed, and members of the Longshoremen’s Union (the union hall is at 2223 29th Avenue) afterwards stood night watches for his protection. The clinic is a simple front-gabled asbestos-shingled and Masoniteclad structure, its current facade installed after the firebombing.
Dunn’s neighborhood, known as “The Quarters,” was Gulfport’s largest African American district and may have acquired its name from a now-demolished frame building on 20th Street marked on a 1929 map as the “Great Southern Hotel Servants’ Quarters,” which housed many of the hotel’s workers.
Near Dunn’s house, St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church (3521 19th Street) was established in 1932 by the Josephite Fathers and Brothers and the Sisters of the Holy Spirit, both orders devoted to African American ministry. John T. Collins employed rough white stucco and polychrome accents to unite three detached 1930s buildings, a church with bell-cote, a cubic two-story rectory, and a one-story four-classroom school. Other neighborhood institutions include the two-story frame Rectitude Masonic Lodge No. 323 (c. 1920; 1905 32nd Avenue), damaged by Hurricane Katrina and renovated in 2013.