Resort hotel · Galveston, Texas · Built 1910–1911
Hotel Galvez
Listed on the National Register as Galvez Hotel
A six-story stucco Spanish Colonial Revival hotel of 1910–11 on Galveston's Seawall Boulevard, built by the city's bankers and merchants to bring tourists back after the 1900 hurricane and named for Bernardo de Gálvez.
History
In the late nineteenth century Galveston was the leading port of Texas and a busy beach resort, but its one big beach hotel, Nicholas Clayton's frame Beach Hotel, burned in 1898. Plans to replace it were swept away by the hurricane of September 8, 1900, which killed about 6,000 people. The city then built its seventeen-foot seawall and raised the grade behind it by many feet, finishing in 1910. That February, local business leaders, including I.H. Kempner, John Sealy, Bertrand Adoue and Joseph Lobit, met to finance a resort hotel overlooking the new wall and pledged more than $500,000 within weeks. They hired the St. Louis firm of Mauran & Russell, rejected any name with "beach" in it for fear of suggesting exposure to storms or a summer-only season, and named it for Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spanish governor for whom the island was named.
Demand, helped by the new Houston–Galveston interurban, was strong enough that the 275-room hotel opened in June 1911 before work was finished. Franklin D. Roosevelt stayed during a 1937 Texas trip. The financier W.L. Moody Jr. bought it in 1940; the Coast Guard occupied it during the Second World War, and it prospered again in the late-1940s heyday of Galveston's illegal gambling before declining when the Texas Rangers shut that down in the 1950s. Owners including the heart surgeon Denton Cooley and, from 1995, the developer George P. Mitchell renovated it, Mitchell restoring its 1911 appearance. Hurricane Ike flooded its lower floor in 2008.
“The Galvez Hotel stands as the oldest large beach hotel in Galveston.”
Architecture
The hotel is a six-story building of stuccoed brick on a U-shaped plan, its two five-story wings reaching toward the Gulf around a courtyard planted with palms and oleanders. Low red-tile roofs with broad bracketed eaves are broken by mission-parapeted wall dormers. The central section rises eight stories to a hipped roof, framed by four hexagonal corner towers with ribbed metal vaults, and its top windows are set between pilasters under round arches. One-story circular bays project from the wings, one for the ballroom and the other for the restaurant. The original entrance faced north, away from the water, under a porte-cochère whose parapet bears the hotel's name and Gálvez's coat of arms. The walls were first painted pink.
What to look for
- Mission parapets breaking the red-tile roofs
- Hexagonal corner towers on the central block
- Gálvez coat of arms on the north porte-cochère
- Round-arched windows along the west side
- The seawall directly across the boulevard
Setting
The hotel occupies the block between 19th and 21st Streets on Seawall Boulevard, facing south across the seawall to the beach and the Gulf of Mexico, on the site of the old Beach Hotel and bathhouses. Behind it lies Galveston's grid of raised streets, with the Strand and the East End's Victorian houses a short drive north.
Timeline
- 1898Fire destroys the Beach Hotel
- 1900Hurricane devastates Galveston
- 1910Seawall and grade raising completed; hotel financed and begun
- 1911Hotel Galvez opens in June
- 1937Franklin D. Roosevelt stays during a Texas visit
- 1940Bought by W.L. Moody Jr.
- 1995Bought and restored by George P. Mitchell
Where sources differ
- The opening date is June 11, 1911, in the nomination and June 12 by Wikipedia.
- Ghost stories about room 501 are legend.
