Sylvan Beach Pavilion, designed by Greacen & Brogniez, 1953. Photo by Hank Hancock.
The citizens of La Porte may be forgiven if they just can’t figure out what their elected officials have in store for the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, a significant work of civic architecture located at Harris County’s only public beach. For twenty years, the city of La Porte rented the structure for cheap from Harris County and operated the venue—a dancehall, a performance space, a banquet room, a conference hall—in just the way that a municipal government will do when it finds itself in the hospitality business, which is to say, reluctantly, negligently, and sporadically. Interested renters were turned away without explanation. The space often sat empty on weekend evenings, when one might expect it to turn some business. Once recognized across the region as one of the foremost entertainment venues, the pride of La Porte, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion withdrew into obscurity, a generational bookmark. The city put off making regular repairs, as required by its lease, so the place just got shabby.
Aerial image of Sylvan Beach Pavilion
The building was erected in 1953 (there had been two previous pavilions at that location since 1896, each destroyed by storms), designed by the firm Greacen & Brogniez. Raymond Brogniez graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Thomas Greacen’s best-known work in Houston is the First Unitarian Church (1952). The architects gave the pavilion its modernist sensibility. New materials like folded plate reinforced concrete allowed for unprecedented adaptation of space to reflect function. At the pavilion, this is reflected in the way separate parts of the building suit their separate roles: its tiered and multi-storied entranceway; its indoor/outdoor concessions that join together the lobby and deck areas; and its iconic 10,000 square-foot glass-walled ballroom overlooking Galveston Bay. The octagonal ballroom, a prize-winning example of mid-century modernist aesthetic, nevertheless recalls the 150-year tradition in Texas of polygonal dance hall spaces that consolidated and strengthened their communities.
Sylvan Beach and La Porte share their history and their origins in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Before the ship channel, before the incursion of the petroleum industries, La Porte was established as Houston’s beachside resort community, a classy Victorian retreat for harried urban recreationists. For 100 years, generations attended company picnics, live radio extravaganzas, big band dances, and traveling performances by national acts, as well as banquets, fund-raisers, and family celebrations of graduation, anniversary, and retirement. In some ways, the pavilion today is a victim of its past, ever recalling the golden years of the 1930s when a previous pavilion structure hosted the great bandleaders Rudee Vallee, Phil Harris, and Benny Goodman in a circuit that included Galveston’s Hollywood Club and the Rice Hotel. Desegregation in 1962 opened significant new opportunities for black performers and audiences in contemporary soul and R&B. In 1974 the headlining event was a nostalgic big band revue “Return to Sylvan Beach” hosted by the 70-year-old Phil Harris, remembering as always the old days at Sylvan Beach.
Finally in September 2008, Hurricane Ike inflicted some significant damage on the structure, so it was boarded up and left to rot. Citizens of La Porte and architectural scholars and enthusiasts had organized six months earlier to block a County Commissioner’s proposal to replace the pavilion with a hotel and convention center. (Again the curse of nostalgia: it would have a “retro theme dating to the 1920s.”) Now it looked as if Ike would provide them indisputable justification for a teardown.
Ted Powell, a chemical engineer and the most vocal organizer of efforts to preserve the Sylvan Beach Pavilion (he runs the site savethepavilion.com), disagrees with the grim assessments of city and county assessors, including that the building is “uninsurable.” He and his many allies in La Porte insist that the building is structurally sound, easily salvaged, and could be feasibly operated as it was originally designed. They have been assisted by the economic collapse over the last few months in 2008, which did much to the cool the heels of eager developers.
Ever since Ike, the city, the county, and preservationists have forwarded competing claims of insurance liability; costs for repair, restoration, or replacement; and eligibility for federal and state grants. One year after Ike, Powell submitted forms to nominate the Sylvan Beach Pavilion in the National Historic Register, effectively preventing federal money from being used to destroy it. Stephen Fox, a fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas, assisted Powell with the registration effort.
The city and county aren’t saying much now about what’s in store, though the pavilion’s historic register and its popular preservation campaign now make it politically risky to suggest knocking it down. The city of La Porte broke its lease with the county in October 2009, getting out of the dance hall business for good. County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia’s office still insists that it never made plans to demolish the pavilion, despite language in a November 2009 proposal to the state of Texas outlining plans for “clearance and reconstruction.” According to spokesman Mark Seegers, that language was only so much boilerplate to satisfy eligibility requirements, and no one should have taken it seriously.
Whatever the record may indicate about the County Commissioner’s practices and priorities, Sylvia Garcia apparently has no clear vision now for the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, insisting definite plans must wait to see how much funding can be secured. Garcia’s recent election to co-chair the H-GAC Ike Recovery Committee (responsible for distributing FEMA funding in the area) makes no difference at all. Just this week, Sylvia Garcia authorized the county to sue the insurer to recover money to make repairs and reopen the building.
For his part, Ted Powell sees the past two years of delay as part bureaucratic incompetence and part willful obstruction. He hopes to raise funds outside of the tax, grant, and insurance systems to keep the Sylvan Beach Pavilion alive and well and planning for its future. He wants the pavilion to be secure, and operating a viable business, by the time the economy regains its footing and developers in Texas again set their eyes on La Porte’s Sylvan Beach.
Selected Images from Romance of Old Sylvan Beach by Erna B. Foxworth
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