The front section of this wooden building opened as the eight-room Clarksdale Colored Hospital and became the Ancient Order of Watchmen Hospital in 1929, before physician G. T. Thomas took over in the early 1930s and renamed it the G. T. Thomas Afro American Hospital. Vocalist Bessie Smith died here in 1937 following a car accident on U.S. 61. The building became entrenched in blues mythology after 1944 when Mrs. Z. L. Ratliff converted it to the Riverside Hotel, bricking the original front section and expanding to the rear for twenty-one guest rooms. Ratliff only rented to males, and among her many guests were Sonny Boy Williamson, Duke Ellington, Ike Turner, Robert Night-hawk, and Jackie Brenston. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the hotel appeared in The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, a travel guide listing places where African Americans could stay. The rear 1944 wing drops steeply to two stories into the bank of Sunflower Bayou and is now covered with Masonite clapboards. The interior remains mostly intact, its small lobby leading to an axial hallway with rooms on either side.