National Register Listing
La Porte, Texas was developed in 1890-92 as a resort community on Galveston Bay linked to Houston, twenty-five miles to the west, by the La Porte, Houston & Northern Railroad. The development company laid out an ambitious town plan on the west shore of Galveston Bay south of Bay Ridge, an elite resort community developed in 1893-94 (Morgan's Point Historic District, NRHP 1994). The La Porte town plan consisted of 990 blocks organized in two grids that collided near the town's Bayshore.
Two streets (today E. Fairmont Parkway and San Jacinto Ave.) converged on a tier of blocks adjacent to the Bayshore configured as circles and half circles, resulting in the tightly curved alignment of what became Bayshore Drive, an undulating profile also visible in the layout of Lake Shore Drive in another Texas coastal resort town, Port Arthur, developed beginning in 1896. The La Porte, Houston & Northern Railroad tracks approached this bayfront zone along Kansas Ave. and it is where the development company built the four-story Sylvan Hotel. Because the onset of the Panic of 1893 bankrupted the development company, the railroad link it had begun to build to Houston was not completed until 1895. The hotel end of the wooded bayfront tract, Sylvan Grove, was sold to the Catholic Diocese of Galveston in 1901 and became, for fifty-three years, the site of what is now St. Mary's Seminary. The southern twenty-one acres remained Sylvan Park, a privately operated amusement park and campground that between 1932 and 1941 reached its peak of popularity as a bayshore resort easily accessible to Houston.
Because the Bayshore at La Porte is low-lying, tropical hurricanes in 1900, 1915, 1930, and 1943 extensively damaged Sylvan Beach Park. After the 1932 development was damaged by the hurricane of 1943, when wartime restrictions curtailed non-defense related construction and leisure travel, the park was not rebuilt. In 1954, Harris County bought the property for use as a public park. The opening of the Houston Ship Channel in 1914 and of the Humble Oil & Refining Company's Baytown Refinery across Galveston Bay from La Porte in 1919, as well as the construction of a petrochemical industrial complex along the Houston Ship Channel during and after World War II, profoundly changed the economy and demography of eastern Harris County. Replacement of a ferry by the La Porte-Baytown highway tunnel beneath the ship channel in 1953, the opening of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Manned Space Craft Center (now Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center) at Clear Lake in 1964, the opening of the Bayport Industrial District in 1964 and of the Barbour's Cut Container Terminal of the Port of Houston in 1977, reconstruction of State Highway 146 as a freeway along the east edge of the original La Porte townsite in the mid-1970s, and completion of the Fred Hartman Bridge replacing the La Porte-Baytown Tunnel in 1995 caused La Porte to become a year-round residential community rather than a bayside resort. Although Sylvan Beach Park remains a major regional attraction for residents of eastern Harris County as the only public park in the county along the west shore of Galveston Bay, it is no longer the destination of Houstonians seeking to escape summer heat and humidity.
In the 1890s the town of La Porte set aside 22 acres along Galveston Bay as a town park, named Sylvan Grove. The next year, 1893, the park's first dance pavilion was built. It was a small open-air structure with a thatch roof. In 1896 the park became privately owned and the name was changed to Sylvan Beach. Its popularity increased with the opening of a new rail line to west La Porte the same year. Shortly thereafter a large Victorian-style hotel was built at a location near the present St Mary's church. The great 1900 Hurricane destroyed the open-air pavilion and resulted in the hotel being closed and transformed into the St Mary's Seminary, a La Porte landmark for many years. A new larger pavilion was built before the Park was sold to Houston Investor G.D. Samuels & Associates in 1909. The new owner improved the pavilion dance floor and built a new park entryway. He also built numerous cottages to attract weekend visitors from Houston. 1914 saw the train depot located at the Parks entrance. The Humble Oil Company held its first of many company picnics at the park.
The 1915 hurricane destroyed the pavilion and many cottages. The park was subsequently sold to Ed Eisemann, a Houston businessman. He hired Cecil Sisson and Frank Baker as managers. The Pavilion was rebuilt with a 'smooth ballroom floor' and over 100 cottages were constructed. 1924 saw the first of many Sylvan Beach Bathing Girl Revues. The first concrete road to La Porte (Spencer Highway) was completed in 1926 allowing many patrons to arrive by automobile. During the late 1920s, the Rice Institute Architectural Department held its first Archi-Arts Ball at the Pavilion which continued until the late 1980s. A 3rd hurricane struck in 1930 damaging the Park and facilities. As with the previous hurricanes, this led to the Park changing hands.
E.L.Crain & Associates purchased the park and added more prefabricated housing, a new entrance marquee, an outdoor movie theater, and a 500-person palm-studded dining room adjacent to the pavilion. In 1932 the 'big band' dance era began with "Dance Sunday" as a standard venue. Performers included singers Phil Harris and Rudy Vallee and bandleader/clarinetist Benny Goodman. La Porte's economy was driven by Sylvan Beach, supplemented by refineries, chemical plants, and shipyards springing up in the area. During the 1930s the popularity of Sylvan Beach peaked. The city of Houston began holding its employee picnics there and architect Albert Finn even designed a new grander pavilion. Unfortunately, the war and the 1943 hurricane resulted in the park's closure and removal of many of its structures. In 1954 Harris County Commissioners purchased Sylvan Beach for $1M and opened a then 50 acre park with a new pavilion and boat launch facility. The new modern Pavilion, designed by the Houston architectural firm of Greacen and Brogniez, opened with a dance hosted by former 1920s Park manager Cecil Sisson.
In 1962 the park was desegregated along with other public places. This opened the pavilion for use by African-American performers. Houstonian Don Robey was the first African American to own a highly successful record label in the U.S., predating Motown's Berry Gordy by more than a decade. Many of his artists, signed under the BackBeat record label, played at the Pavilion during the 60s and 70s. Robey also signed white musicians, including the group 'The Coastliners' in the mid-60s who also played at the pavilion. Big Band orchestras continued to play at the pavilion including Ed Gerlach, and performances were often hosted by Paul Berlin, a well-known Houston radio disc jockey. Other musicians who played at the Pavilion were Tex Beneke, Manny Green, Micky Gilley, and Ray McKinley. In 1974 actress and vocalist Alice Faye and band leader Phil Harris teamed up for a "Return to Sylvan Beach" evening at the Pavilion. Long-time Houston radio personality Ronnie Renfrow was the Master of Ceremonies. In 2005 the pavilion hosted a summer concert by the Houston Symphony. The pavilion continued to host dances, concerts, weddings, quinceañeras, school proms, and banquets until it closed following Hurricane Ike in September 2008.
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is significant as a work of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture. It was recognized at the time of its completion with an Honor Award for Design from the American Institute of Architects, Houston Chapter, in 1957. In January 1957 it was published in the Los Angeles-based architectural journal Arts + Architecture. In the statewide context of Architecture in Texas, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion meets National Register Criterion C as a civic building constructed for social purposes that embodies the distinctive typological characteristics of a shore-side recreational building configured as an octagonal pavilion. It additionally meets Criterion C because it embodies the distinctive characteristics of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in the U.S. and Texas, a method of construction that was especially associated with modern architecture in Texas in the 1950s and 1960s, and artistic values associated with the reception of modern architecture and engineering during the mid-twentieth century in the U.S. and Texas.
The architects of the Sylvan Beach Pavilion were Thomas E. Greacen II (1907-1994) and Raymond H. Brogniez (1918- 2008), who practiced together as partners in the Houston firm of Greacen & Brogniez from 1953 to 1958. Thomas Edmund Greacen was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received his architectural training at Princeton University (1928) and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Americaines de Fontainebleau in France (1931). Greacen worked for the distinguished New York architects York & Sawyer and Delano & Aldrich before beginning his own practice in New York in 1932. Between 1940 and $45, Greacen served in the U.S. Army Air Force in Washington, D.C., attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1944 he came to Houston and worked for five years with the Houston architect Kenneth Franzheim, who had also been involved in wartime projects in Washington. Greacen began independent practice in Houston in 1949. He designed the Sugarland Shopping Center in Sugar Land, Texas (1952) for a subsidiary of the Imperial Sugar Company, the Elephant House of the Houston Zoo (1953), and the First United Methodist Church in La Marque, Texas (1953). His best-known independent work is the First Unitarian Church of Houston (1952). In 1962, Greacen and Richard Evans established what in 1968 became Greacen, Evans & Rogers, which specialized in the design of public school buildings. They were also architects of the First Congregational Church of Houston. Greacen retired from practice in 1987.
Raymond Hector Brogniez was born in Houston and received his architectural training at the Rice Institute in Houston (1940) and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (1941). From 1942 until 1945 he served in the U.S., Army Air Force. Before beginning his practice in Houston in 1946, Brogniez had worked for the Houston architects Claude E. Hooton and Wilson & Morris and as a staff architect for the William G. Farrington Company. For the Farrington Co. Brogniez designed the River Oaks-Lamar Shopping Center in Houston (1947). During his partnership with Greacen, their best-known buildings were the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, the Eldridge Memorial Hospital in Sugar Land (1957), and the Gibraltar Savings & Loan Association Building in Houston (1959, with J. V. Neuhaus III), the first multi-story office building in Houston with an all-glass curtain wall. Brogniez was the architect of Strake Jesuit College Preparatory School in Houston (1961-63). From 1965 until 1979 he was a professor of architecture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Robert L. Reid (1915-1990) was the structural engineer for the Sylvan Beach Pavilion. A native of Missouri and a graduate of Kansas State University, Reid established his engineering consulting practice in Houston in 1947. From 1959 until 1971 he served as a member of the Texas State Board of Professional Engineers, the state agency that licenses engineers to practice in Texas. Reid served one term as chairman of the board. Ralph Ellis Gunn (c. 1909-1976) was the landscape architect for the pavilion. With Ruth London and C. C. Pat Fleming, Gunn was one of the three founders of the profession of landscape architecture in Houston. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts and Harvard University, Gunn came to Houston in 1940 and was active as a designer of residential and institutional landscapes in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. He is best known for his design of the grounds of the Shamrock Hotel (1949, demolished); Rienzi, an estate garden that is now a property of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1954); and his restoration of the historic plantation gardens at Rosedown near St. Francisville, Louisiana (1960; National Historic Landmark, 2005). None of Gunn's landscape work at Sylvan Beach Park remains.
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is significant as a distinctive Texan building type: an octagonally planned dance hall. It is additionally significant for being a modern architectural interpretation of this type of social/civic building. The pavilion is significant because it exemplifies the architectural practices characteristic of modern architecture at the mid-point of the twentieth-century period. Its reinforced concrete construction, shore-side location, and recreational use affiliate it with a series of international works of modern nautical architecture. The elevation of the pavilion on concrete columns, the architectural prominence of ramps, stairs, walls of glass overlooking the water, and open decks are elements associated with the published international examples. Even the undulating canopy above the exterior portion of the concession bar evokes the scalloped profiles of the concession bar at Regent's Park Zoo and the sinuous canopy at the Casa do Baile in Pampulha. The spatial experiences of visitors arriving at the pavilion's original ground-level entrance, then moving up a half ramp and side-lit stair into the second-floor foyer and concession bar to process to the ballroom or the water-side deck are materialized in the exterior configuration of the pavilion, bespeaking the impact of Functionalist architectural practices on Greacen & Brogniez's design. That Brogniez had been a student of Gropius and Breuer further contributes to the pavilion's association with distinctive artistic values characteristic of mid-twentieth-century modern architectural planning.
The architects' use of a thin shell reinforced concrete vaulted roof structure, employing post-tensioned cable components, demonstrates the principles of cantilevered construction and makes the Sylvan Beach Pavilion significant for embodying the distinctive characteristics of a method of construction associated with mid-twentieth-century modern architecture and engineering. That this demonstration took form as an octagonal structure enabled Greacen & Brogniez to affiliate state-of-the-art modern engineering and construction practices with the Texan vernacular tradition of octagonal dance halls. The use of thin shell vaulted concrete construction additionally affiliates the Sylvan Beach Pavilion with a series of Texan pavilions designed to accommodate social/civic, recreational, and sporting activities which brought mid-century modern architecture in Texas recognition in the national architectural press.
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is a mid-century modern interpretation of the freestanding, octagonally planned building type that in Texas was especially associated with recreational and cultural activities. The Garten-Verein Dancing Pavilion in Kempner Park in Galveston (1880) is an early and well-preserved example. The twelve-sided Bellville Turn-Verein Pavilion in Bellville (1883), the octagonal Cameron Park Pavilion in Cameron (1890), the Virginia Field Park Pavilion in Calvert (1895), Liedertafel Hall in Sealy (1914), and the Buckholts SPJST #15 Hall in Buckholts (1936) are other extant Texan examples cataloged by Texas Dance Hall Preservation, Inc. that demonstrate the chronological span of this building type. The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is additionally significant as a mid-twentieth-century successor to such shore- side recreational pavilions as the Galveston Pavilion in Galveston (1881; burned 1883); the octagonal Palacios Pavilion, built in Trespalacios Bay just offshore from Palacios-by-the-Sea, Texas (1904, 1935; destroyed 1961, reconstructed 2006); Pleasure Pier in Galveston (1943; destroyed 1961), a modernistic style entertainment complex built into the Gulf of Mexico; and a modern companion to the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, the Cameron County Park Pavilion on South Padre Island (c. 1961; demolished). Although a work of modern architecture, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion was related to a historical sequence of octagonally planned Texan buildings that served comparable social and civic functions.
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion relates to the influence of Modern Architecture and Modern Engineering in Texas in its construction and planning. Modern movement architecture was introduced to Texas in the mid-1930s with the construction of the Magnolia Pavilion at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas (1936), designed by the Swiss-born modern architect William Lescaze, who practiced in New York, and the George Kraigher House in Brownsville, Texas (1937), designed by the Austrian-born modern architect Richard J. Neutra, who practiced in Los Angeles. Regionally based publications indicate that young Texan architects were aware of the Modern Movement in European architecture by the early 1930s, which was promoted in the U.S. by the Museum of Modern Art in New York through exhibitions and such publications as the book The International Style (1932) by the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the museum's architecture curator, Philip Johnson. In the second half of the 1930s, the first modern architecture practices were formed in Austin, Texas, by Arthur Fehr and Charles T. Granger, Jr. (1938) and Chester E. Nagle (1941); in Dallas by Howard R. Meyer (1936) and O'Neil Ford and Arch B. Swank, Jr. (1937); and in Houston by Frederick J. MacKie and Karl Kamrath (1937) and Donald Barthelme (1940). Charles Granger had worked for Neutra in Los Angeles; Meyer and Kamrath were strongly influenced by the Usonian modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright. Chester Nagle graduated from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1940, where he studied under the German émigré modernists Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and Marcel Breuer, who both studied and taught at the Bauhaus. Harvard's GSD in the late 1930s and early 40s was an important training ground for the mid-century generation of American modern architects. Among the school's graduates during these years was Thomas M. Price (41), who would practice in Galveston, Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr. ('42), who would practice in Houston, and Raymond H. Brogniez ('41), the architect of the Sylvan Beach Pavilion. At the GSD Neuhaus and Brogniez overlapped the tenure of the museum curator-turned-architect Philip Johnson ('43).
During Gropius' tenure at the Bauhaus in Germany (1919-26), modern movement architecture became identified with the doctrine of Functionalism, the proposition that architecture was generated from a rational response to the way people used buildings, the expression of new construction technologies, and the promotion of social democracy. Gropius and Breuer strongly identified with the Functionalist ethos during the years they taught at the GSD. In the influential American buildings they designed in the late 1930s and 40s after emigrating from Germany to the U.S. in 1937, Gropius and Breuer explored new patterns of spatial organization and new construction technologies. A subset of modern buildings whose designs are reflected in the Sylvan Beach Pavilion were Social/Civic buildings constructed for leisure purposes. Hitchcock and Johnson's International Stylebook illustrated the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, UK. (1931), a three-story concrete building raised above its riverside site on concrete piers and faced with pipe-rail lined open-air decks. Hitchcock wrote the text for the Museum of Modern Art's Modern Architecture in England exhibition catalog of 1937, which illustrated another shore-side Social/Civic building, the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, U.K. (1935) by the émigré architects Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff (like Gropius and Breuer, both would also immigrate to the U.S.). Expression of the pavilion's concrete framed structure, the juxtaposition of curvilinear and rectilinear geometry reflecting patterns of movement and spatial uses within the building, and walls of glass facing expansive terrace decks and the English Channel were identifying features of this much-publicized recreational building. Another building featured in the exhibition was the North Gate, an entrance and concession pavilion at Regent's Park Zoo in London (1936) designed by the Tecton Group, headed by the Russian émigré modernist Berthold Lubetkin. A freestanding concrete canopy with an undulating roof plate above the North Gate's long concession bar gave this small structure a jaunty presence. A third Museum of Modern Art catalog, documenting the 1943 exhibition, Brazil Builds, illustrated a complex of buildings designed by the Rio de Janeiro architect Oscar Niemeyer at Pampulha outside Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. Niemeyer's Casino, Casa do Baile, and Yacht Club (1942) were built with lyrical curvilinear canopy structures of exposed concrete; his Church of São Francisco de Assis at Pampulha (1943) was constructed of thin shell concrete vaults that comprised both its roof and walls. In contrast to the image of Functionalist modern architecture as dour and industrial, these modern Social/Civic buildings projected images of buoyancy, spontaneity, and conviviality. The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is significant for translating the material characteristics and cultural associations of these Functionalist Social/Civic buildings to the shore of Galveston Bay. The pavilion's most distinctive modern architectural elements identify it with the historical context of twentieth-century modern architecture as it was disseminated in the U.S. and Texas through such cultural and educational institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and Harvard University's Graduate Design School and attest to the pavilion's descent from a series of publicized modern social/civic buildings constructed on shore-side sites for popular recreational uses. Within the context of these recreational buildings, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion stands out because of its thin shell vaulted concrete roof structure.
The use of thin shell vaulted concrete construction also affiliates the Sylvan Beach Pavilion with a series of mid-twentieth-century Texan buildings that, beginning in the late 1940s, incorporated new construction technologies to advertise their modern identity. This distinctive constructional characteristic additionally relates the pavilion to the context of modern engineering in Texas and emphasizes the role that new construction technologies played in the design of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in Texas. Donald Barthelme first used thin shell concrete vaults in his design for St. Rose of Lima Catholic School in Houston (1948). The Youtz-Slick concrete lift slab, which was developed by the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio (1949), facilitated the rapid casting and installation of horizontal floor and roof plates. It was first applied by O'Neil Ford at Trinity University in San Antonio (1951) and by the Corpus Christi architect Richard S. Colley. Ford, Colley, and the Mexico City engineer-architect Félix Candela, a Spanish émigré, collaborated on the design of folded plate and hyperbolic paraboloid thin shell concrete structures in the mid-1950s, especially at the Crossroads Club Restaurant at the Great Southwest Industrial District in Arlington Texas (1957) and the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Building in Dallas (1958). Ford's La Villita Assembly Building in San Antonio (1959) is a sixteen-sided auditorium roofed with a radial network of steel cables suspended from a peripheral compression ring and supporting a central tension ring. These technologies were employed because they optimized the structural performance of roofs. Thin shells, folded plates, cable-stayed structures, and glue-laminated wood beams and arches could span long distances without the support of intermediate interior columns. Consequently, buildings using such structural systems could be built more rapidly and economically than a conventionally framed structure. These systems also produced dramatic architectural profiles that vividly materialized the modern architectural identity of the buildings they roofed. This was evident in such Social/Civic buildings as the auditoriums or gymnasiums of Central High School in San Angelo, Texas (1957, Caudill Rowlett Scott and Max D. Lovett), the McAllen Civic Center in McAllen, Texas (1958, Zeb Rike and Edwin W. Byers with Caudill Rowlett Scott), Pharr-San Juan-Alamo High School in Pharr, Texas (1960, O'Neil Ford, Alan Y. Taniguchi, and Max Burkhart, Jr., altered), St. Joseph Academy in Brownsville, Texas (1960, Caudill Rowlett Scott), Island Elementary School in Galveston (1960, Thomas M. Price), and the Casa del Sol in Harlingen, Texas (1961, Taniguchi & Croft, altered).
These systems were also applied to industrial and commercial buildings requiring long interior structural spans, such as the Hemispherical Meeting Hall at the R. G. Le Tourneau plant in Longview, Texas (1953), a geodesic domical structure, and the Lew Williams Chevrolet City showroom in Corpus Christi, Texas (1965, Donnelly & Spear, altered). Like the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, many of these buildings were published in the national and regional architectural press and they won national, state, and local design awards from the American Institute of Architects, thereby representing what could be construed as an authoritative image of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in Texas. Within this context, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion was an early example of the use of thin shell concrete roof vaulting in Texas and, in engineering terms, a structural design that was relatively complex in its combination of cable-stayed and cantilevered tensile design.
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is a part of Sylvan Beach Park, owned by Harris County since 1954. Under the lease, the City of La Porte provided maintenance and made the property available for rental. "Friends of Sylvan Beach Park and Pavilion," a non-profit preservation group, was formed in early 2008 to advocate for rehabilitation of the pavilion and non-commercialization of the park. As Hurricane Ike approached Galveston Bay in September 2008, the City of La Porte boarded all public buildings except the Sylvan Beach Pavilion. After the hurricane struck La Porte on September 13, the city did not secure and repair the pavilion, which experienced the loss of only four windows in the ballroom and several smaller windows. The City of La Porte closed the Pavilion for public use at that time. The city never re-opened the pavilion, and the city-county lease terminated in February 2010. The county is presently undergoing studies for various ways to preserve the pavilion. Harris County Precinct Two began initiating plans for the renovation of Sylvan Beach Park in 2008 and has overseen the recent re-establishment of the historic sand beach at the park. In addition, current plans have proposed the stabilization of the pavilion as a landmark within the original Sylvan Beach concept. Plans for park improvements include the pavilion as an integral part of the shoreline landscape. The plan includes the development of an amphitheater at the far northern position of the county property.
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is worthy of preservation because it perpetuates the social/civic, recreational use of a site that, since the development of La Porte, has been devoted to such uses. It is the most distinguished work of civic architecture in La Porte and for its distinction-recognized from the time of its completion as a work of modern architecture and engineering. It is worthy of preservation because of the durability of its construction, which has successfully resisted the impact of such extremely destructive tropical hurricanes as Carla, Alicia, and Ike. Finally, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion is noteworthy as a publicly accessible recreational complex, associated with the lives of three generations of Bay Area residents who participated in events in Sylvan Beach Park. Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
Sylvan Beach Pavilion
554 N Bayshore Dr, La Porte, TXThe 1956 Sylvan Beach Pavilion, in La Porte, Harris County, Texas, is named for the public park in which it was built and succeeded two previous buildings on the site used for the same purpose. It embodies the distinctive characteristics of the Texas dance hall type employing a method of construction (thin shell concrete vaulting) and the artistic values (modernist Functionalist planning and spatial organization) especially associated with the mid-twentieth-century period in American and Texan architecture. The pavilion was recognized for the singularity of its design by the American Institute of Architects, Houston Chapter, in its design awards program, and through publication in the nationally circulated architectural journal, Arts and Architecture. The pavilion meets Criterion C, significant at a local level in the area of Architecture, as one of the most outstanding examples of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture built along the west shore of Galveston Bay, and as a distinctive work of its architects Greacen & Brogniez of Houston. It serves as an early example of the application of modernist construction practices to the problem of designing a glass-walled, long-span pavilion in a vulnerable location exposed to storm surges and violent wind gusts of periodic tropical hurricanes.
Development of La Porte, Texas
La Porte, Texas was developed in 1890-92 as a resort community on Galveston Bay linked to Houston, twenty-five miles to the west, by the La Porte, Houston & Northern Railroad. The development company laid out an ambitious town plan on the west shore of Galveston Bay south of Bay Ridge, an elite resort community developed in 1893-94 (Morgan's Point Historic District, NRHP 1994). The La Porte town plan consisted of 990 blocks organized in two grids that collided near the town's Bayshore.
Two streets (today E. Fairmont Parkway and San Jacinto Ave.) converged on a tier of blocks adjacent to the Bayshore configured as circles and half circles, resulting in the tightly curved alignment of what became Bayshore Drive, an undulating profile also visible in the layout of Lake Shore Drive in another Texas coastal resort town, Port Arthur, developed beginning in 1896. The La Porte, Houston & Northern Railroad tracks approached this bayfront zone along Kansas Ave. and it is where the development company built the four-story Sylvan Hotel. Because the onset of the Panic of 1893 bankrupted the development company, the railroad link it had begun to build to Houston was not completed until 1895. The hotel end of the wooded bayfront tract, Sylvan Grove, was sold to the Catholic Diocese of Galveston in 1901 and became, for fifty-three years, the site of what is now St. Mary's Seminary. The southern twenty-one acres remained Sylvan Park, a privately operated amusement park and campground that between 1932 and 1941 reached its peak of popularity as a bayshore resort easily accessible to Houston.
Because the Bayshore at La Porte is low-lying, tropical hurricanes in 1900, 1915, 1930, and 1943 extensively damaged Sylvan Beach Park. After the 1932 development was damaged by the hurricane of 1943, when wartime restrictions curtailed non-defense related construction and leisure travel, the park was not rebuilt. In 1954, Harris County bought the property for use as a public park. The opening of the Houston Ship Channel in 1914 and of the Humble Oil & Refining Company's Baytown Refinery across Galveston Bay from La Porte in 1919, as well as the construction of a petrochemical industrial complex along the Houston Ship Channel during and after World War II, profoundly changed the economy and demography of eastern Harris County. Replacement of a ferry by the La Porte-Baytown highway tunnel beneath the ship channel in 1953, the opening of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Manned Space Craft Center (now Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center) at Clear Lake in 1964, the opening of the Bayport Industrial District in 1964 and of the Barbour's Cut Container Terminal of the Port of Houston in 1977, reconstruction of State Highway 146 as a freeway along the east edge of the original La Porte townsite in the mid-1970s, and completion of the Fred Hartman Bridge replacing the La Porte-Baytown Tunnel in 1995 caused La Porte to become a year-round residential community rather than a bayside resort. Although Sylvan Beach Park remains a major regional attraction for residents of eastern Harris County as the only public park in the county along the west shore of Galveston Bay, it is no longer the destination of Houstonians seeking to escape summer heat and humidity.
Development of Sylvan Park and the Sylvan Beach Pavilion
In the 1890s the town of La Porte set aside 22 acres along Galveston Bay as a town park, named Sylvan Grove. The next year, 1893, the park's first dance pavilion was built. It was a small open-air structure with a thatch roof. In 1896 the park became privately owned and the name was changed to Sylvan Beach. Its popularity increased with the opening of a new rail line to west La Porte the same year. Shortly thereafter a large Victorian-style hotel was built at a location near the present St Mary's church. The great 1900 Hurricane destroyed the open-air pavilion and resulted in the hotel being closed and transformed into the St Mary's Seminary, a La Porte landmark for many years. A new larger pavilion was built before the Park was sold to Houston Investor G.D. Samuels & Associates in 1909. The new owner improved the pavilion dance floor and built a new park entryway. He also built numerous cottages to attract weekend visitors from Houston. 1914 saw the train depot located at the Parks entrance. The Humble Oil Company held its first of many company picnics at the park.
The 1915 hurricane destroyed the pavilion and many cottages. The park was subsequently sold to Ed Eisemann, a Houston businessman. He hired Cecil Sisson and Frank Baker as managers. The Pavilion was rebuilt with a 'smooth ballroom floor' and over 100 cottages were constructed. 1924 saw the first of many Sylvan Beach Bathing Girl Revues. The first concrete road to La Porte (Spencer Highway) was completed in 1926 allowing many patrons to arrive by automobile. During the late 1920s, the Rice Institute Architectural Department held its first Archi-Arts Ball at the Pavilion which continued until the late 1980s. A 3rd hurricane struck in 1930 damaging the Park and facilities. As with the previous hurricanes, this led to the Park changing hands.
E.L.Crain & Associates purchased the park and added more prefabricated housing, a new entrance marquee, an outdoor movie theater, and a 500-person palm-studded dining room adjacent to the pavilion. In 1932 the 'big band' dance era began with "Dance Sunday" as a standard venue. Performers included singers Phil Harris and Rudy Vallee and bandleader/clarinetist Benny Goodman. La Porte's economy was driven by Sylvan Beach, supplemented by refineries, chemical plants, and shipyards springing up in the area. During the 1930s the popularity of Sylvan Beach peaked. The city of Houston began holding its employee picnics there and architect Albert Finn even designed a new grander pavilion. Unfortunately, the war and the 1943 hurricane resulted in the park's closure and removal of many of its structures. In 1954 Harris County Commissioners purchased Sylvan Beach for $1M and opened a then 50 acre park with a new pavilion and boat launch facility. The new modern Pavilion, designed by the Houston architectural firm of Greacen and Brogniez, opened with a dance hosted by former 1920s Park manager Cecil Sisson.
In 1962 the park was desegregated along with other public places. This opened the pavilion for use by African-American performers. Houstonian Don Robey was the first African American to own a highly successful record label in the U.S., predating Motown's Berry Gordy by more than a decade. Many of his artists, signed under the BackBeat record label, played at the Pavilion during the 60s and 70s. Robey also signed white musicians, including the group 'The Coastliners' in the mid-60s who also played at the pavilion. Big Band orchestras continued to play at the pavilion including Ed Gerlach, and performances were often hosted by Paul Berlin, a well-known Houston radio disc jockey. Other musicians who played at the Pavilion were Tex Beneke, Manny Green, Micky Gilley, and Ray McKinley. In 1974 actress and vocalist Alice Faye and band leader Phil Harris teamed up for a "Return to Sylvan Beach" evening at the Pavilion. Long-time Houston radio personality Ronnie Renfrow was the Master of Ceremonies. In 2005 the pavilion hosted a summer concert by the Houston Symphony. The pavilion continued to host dances, concerts, weddings, quinceañeras, school proms, and banquets until it closed following Hurricane Ike in September 2008.
The Architecture of Sylvan Beach Pavilion
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is significant as a work of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture. It was recognized at the time of its completion with an Honor Award for Design from the American Institute of Architects, Houston Chapter, in 1957. In January 1957 it was published in the Los Angeles-based architectural journal Arts + Architecture. In the statewide context of Architecture in Texas, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion meets National Register Criterion C as a civic building constructed for social purposes that embodies the distinctive typological characteristics of a shore-side recreational building configured as an octagonal pavilion. It additionally meets Criterion C because it embodies the distinctive characteristics of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in the U.S. and Texas, a method of construction that was especially associated with modern architecture in Texas in the 1950s and 1960s, and artistic values associated with the reception of modern architecture and engineering during the mid-twentieth century in the U.S. and Texas.
The architects of the Sylvan Beach Pavilion were Thomas E. Greacen II (1907-1994) and Raymond H. Brogniez (1918- 2008), who practiced together as partners in the Houston firm of Greacen & Brogniez from 1953 to 1958. Thomas Edmund Greacen was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received his architectural training at Princeton University (1928) and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Americaines de Fontainebleau in France (1931). Greacen worked for the distinguished New York architects York & Sawyer and Delano & Aldrich before beginning his own practice in New York in 1932. Between 1940 and $45, Greacen served in the U.S. Army Air Force in Washington, D.C., attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1944 he came to Houston and worked for five years with the Houston architect Kenneth Franzheim, who had also been involved in wartime projects in Washington. Greacen began independent practice in Houston in 1949. He designed the Sugarland Shopping Center in Sugar Land, Texas (1952) for a subsidiary of the Imperial Sugar Company, the Elephant House of the Houston Zoo (1953), and the First United Methodist Church in La Marque, Texas (1953). His best-known independent work is the First Unitarian Church of Houston (1952). In 1962, Greacen and Richard Evans established what in 1968 became Greacen, Evans & Rogers, which specialized in the design of public school buildings. They were also architects of the First Congregational Church of Houston. Greacen retired from practice in 1987.
Raymond Hector Brogniez was born in Houston and received his architectural training at the Rice Institute in Houston (1940) and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (1941). From 1942 until 1945 he served in the U.S., Army Air Force. Before beginning his practice in Houston in 1946, Brogniez had worked for the Houston architects Claude E. Hooton and Wilson & Morris and as a staff architect for the William G. Farrington Company. For the Farrington Co. Brogniez designed the River Oaks-Lamar Shopping Center in Houston (1947). During his partnership with Greacen, their best-known buildings were the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, the Eldridge Memorial Hospital in Sugar Land (1957), and the Gibraltar Savings & Loan Association Building in Houston (1959, with J. V. Neuhaus III), the first multi-story office building in Houston with an all-glass curtain wall. Brogniez was the architect of Strake Jesuit College Preparatory School in Houston (1961-63). From 1965 until 1979 he was a professor of architecture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Robert L. Reid (1915-1990) was the structural engineer for the Sylvan Beach Pavilion. A native of Missouri and a graduate of Kansas State University, Reid established his engineering consulting practice in Houston in 1947. From 1959 until 1971 he served as a member of the Texas State Board of Professional Engineers, the state agency that licenses engineers to practice in Texas. Reid served one term as chairman of the board. Ralph Ellis Gunn (c. 1909-1976) was the landscape architect for the pavilion. With Ruth London and C. C. Pat Fleming, Gunn was one of the three founders of the profession of landscape architecture in Houston. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts and Harvard University, Gunn came to Houston in 1940 and was active as a designer of residential and institutional landscapes in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. He is best known for his design of the grounds of the Shamrock Hotel (1949, demolished); Rienzi, an estate garden that is now a property of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1954); and his restoration of the historic plantation gardens at Rosedown near St. Francisville, Louisiana (1960; National Historic Landmark, 2005). None of Gunn's landscape work at Sylvan Beach Park remains.
Distinctive Characteristics of a Type: Non-orthogonal Dance Halls
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is significant as a distinctive Texan building type: an octagonally planned dance hall. It is additionally significant for being a modern architectural interpretation of this type of social/civic building. The pavilion is significant because it exemplifies the architectural practices characteristic of modern architecture at the mid-point of the twentieth-century period. Its reinforced concrete construction, shore-side location, and recreational use affiliate it with a series of international works of modern nautical architecture. The elevation of the pavilion on concrete columns, the architectural prominence of ramps, stairs, walls of glass overlooking the water, and open decks are elements associated with the published international examples. Even the undulating canopy above the exterior portion of the concession bar evokes the scalloped profiles of the concession bar at Regent's Park Zoo and the sinuous canopy at the Casa do Baile in Pampulha. The spatial experiences of visitors arriving at the pavilion's original ground-level entrance, then moving up a half ramp and side-lit stair into the second-floor foyer and concession bar to process to the ballroom or the water-side deck are materialized in the exterior configuration of the pavilion, bespeaking the impact of Functionalist architectural practices on Greacen & Brogniez's design. That Brogniez had been a student of Gropius and Breuer further contributes to the pavilion's association with distinctive artistic values characteristic of mid-twentieth-century modern architectural planning.
The architects' use of a thin shell reinforced concrete vaulted roof structure, employing post-tensioned cable components, demonstrates the principles of cantilevered construction and makes the Sylvan Beach Pavilion significant for embodying the distinctive characteristics of a method of construction associated with mid-twentieth-century modern architecture and engineering. That this demonstration took form as an octagonal structure enabled Greacen & Brogniez to affiliate state-of-the-art modern engineering and construction practices with the Texan vernacular tradition of octagonal dance halls. The use of thin shell vaulted concrete construction additionally affiliates the Sylvan Beach Pavilion with a series of Texan pavilions designed to accommodate social/civic, recreational, and sporting activities which brought mid-century modern architecture in Texas recognition in the national architectural press.
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is a mid-century modern interpretation of the freestanding, octagonally planned building type that in Texas was especially associated with recreational and cultural activities. The Garten-Verein Dancing Pavilion in Kempner Park in Galveston (1880) is an early and well-preserved example. The twelve-sided Bellville Turn-Verein Pavilion in Bellville (1883), the octagonal Cameron Park Pavilion in Cameron (1890), the Virginia Field Park Pavilion in Calvert (1895), Liedertafel Hall in Sealy (1914), and the Buckholts SPJST #15 Hall in Buckholts (1936) are other extant Texan examples cataloged by Texas Dance Hall Preservation, Inc. that demonstrate the chronological span of this building type. The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is additionally significant as a mid-twentieth-century successor to such shore- side recreational pavilions as the Galveston Pavilion in Galveston (1881; burned 1883); the octagonal Palacios Pavilion, built in Trespalacios Bay just offshore from Palacios-by-the-Sea, Texas (1904, 1935; destroyed 1961, reconstructed 2006); Pleasure Pier in Galveston (1943; destroyed 1961), a modernistic style entertainment complex built into the Gulf of Mexico; and a modern companion to the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, the Cameron County Park Pavilion on South Padre Island (c. 1961; demolished). Although a work of modern architecture, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion was related to a historical sequence of octagonally planned Texan buildings that served comparable social and civic functions.
Distinctive Characteristics of a Period: the International School in the Mid-20th century
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion relates to the influence of Modern Architecture and Modern Engineering in Texas in its construction and planning. Modern movement architecture was introduced to Texas in the mid-1930s with the construction of the Magnolia Pavilion at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas (1936), designed by the Swiss-born modern architect William Lescaze, who practiced in New York, and the George Kraigher House in Brownsville, Texas (1937), designed by the Austrian-born modern architect Richard J. Neutra, who practiced in Los Angeles. Regionally based publications indicate that young Texan architects were aware of the Modern Movement in European architecture by the early 1930s, which was promoted in the U.S. by the Museum of Modern Art in New York through exhibitions and such publications as the book The International Style (1932) by the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the museum's architecture curator, Philip Johnson. In the second half of the 1930s, the first modern architecture practices were formed in Austin, Texas, by Arthur Fehr and Charles T. Granger, Jr. (1938) and Chester E. Nagle (1941); in Dallas by Howard R. Meyer (1936) and O'Neil Ford and Arch B. Swank, Jr. (1937); and in Houston by Frederick J. MacKie and Karl Kamrath (1937) and Donald Barthelme (1940). Charles Granger had worked for Neutra in Los Angeles; Meyer and Kamrath were strongly influenced by the Usonian modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright. Chester Nagle graduated from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1940, where he studied under the German émigré modernists Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and Marcel Breuer, who both studied and taught at the Bauhaus. Harvard's GSD in the late 1930s and early 40s was an important training ground for the mid-century generation of American modern architects. Among the school's graduates during these years was Thomas M. Price (41), who would practice in Galveston, Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr. ('42), who would practice in Houston, and Raymond H. Brogniez ('41), the architect of the Sylvan Beach Pavilion. At the GSD Neuhaus and Brogniez overlapped the tenure of the museum curator-turned-architect Philip Johnson ('43).
Artistic Value: Modern Design Applied to Social/Civic Buildings
During Gropius' tenure at the Bauhaus in Germany (1919-26), modern movement architecture became identified with the doctrine of Functionalism, the proposition that architecture was generated from a rational response to the way people used buildings, the expression of new construction technologies, and the promotion of social democracy. Gropius and Breuer strongly identified with the Functionalist ethos during the years they taught at the GSD. In the influential American buildings they designed in the late 1930s and 40s after emigrating from Germany to the U.S. in 1937, Gropius and Breuer explored new patterns of spatial organization and new construction technologies. A subset of modern buildings whose designs are reflected in the Sylvan Beach Pavilion were Social/Civic buildings constructed for leisure purposes. Hitchcock and Johnson's International Stylebook illustrated the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, UK. (1931), a three-story concrete building raised above its riverside site on concrete piers and faced with pipe-rail lined open-air decks. Hitchcock wrote the text for the Museum of Modern Art's Modern Architecture in England exhibition catalog of 1937, which illustrated another shore-side Social/Civic building, the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, U.K. (1935) by the émigré architects Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff (like Gropius and Breuer, both would also immigrate to the U.S.). Expression of the pavilion's concrete framed structure, the juxtaposition of curvilinear and rectilinear geometry reflecting patterns of movement and spatial uses within the building, and walls of glass facing expansive terrace decks and the English Channel were identifying features of this much-publicized recreational building. Another building featured in the exhibition was the North Gate, an entrance and concession pavilion at Regent's Park Zoo in London (1936) designed by the Tecton Group, headed by the Russian émigré modernist Berthold Lubetkin. A freestanding concrete canopy with an undulating roof plate above the North Gate's long concession bar gave this small structure a jaunty presence. A third Museum of Modern Art catalog, documenting the 1943 exhibition, Brazil Builds, illustrated a complex of buildings designed by the Rio de Janeiro architect Oscar Niemeyer at Pampulha outside Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. Niemeyer's Casino, Casa do Baile, and Yacht Club (1942) were built with lyrical curvilinear canopy structures of exposed concrete; his Church of São Francisco de Assis at Pampulha (1943) was constructed of thin shell concrete vaults that comprised both its roof and walls. In contrast to the image of Functionalist modern architecture as dour and industrial, these modern Social/Civic buildings projected images of buoyancy, spontaneity, and conviviality. The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is significant for translating the material characteristics and cultural associations of these Functionalist Social/Civic buildings to the shore of Galveston Bay. The pavilion's most distinctive modern architectural elements identify it with the historical context of twentieth-century modern architecture as it was disseminated in the U.S. and Texas through such cultural and educational institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and Harvard University's Graduate Design School and attest to the pavilion's descent from a series of publicized modern social/civic buildings constructed on shore-side sites for popular recreational uses. Within the context of these recreational buildings, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion stands out because of its thin shell vaulted concrete roof structure.
Distinctive Characteristics of a Method of Construction: Thin Shell Concrete
The use of thin shell vaulted concrete construction also affiliates the Sylvan Beach Pavilion with a series of mid-twentieth-century Texan buildings that, beginning in the late 1940s, incorporated new construction technologies to advertise their modern identity. This distinctive constructional characteristic additionally relates the pavilion to the context of modern engineering in Texas and emphasizes the role that new construction technologies played in the design of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in Texas. Donald Barthelme first used thin shell concrete vaults in his design for St. Rose of Lima Catholic School in Houston (1948). The Youtz-Slick concrete lift slab, which was developed by the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio (1949), facilitated the rapid casting and installation of horizontal floor and roof plates. It was first applied by O'Neil Ford at Trinity University in San Antonio (1951) and by the Corpus Christi architect Richard S. Colley. Ford, Colley, and the Mexico City engineer-architect Félix Candela, a Spanish émigré, collaborated on the design of folded plate and hyperbolic paraboloid thin shell concrete structures in the mid-1950s, especially at the Crossroads Club Restaurant at the Great Southwest Industrial District in Arlington Texas (1957) and the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Building in Dallas (1958). Ford's La Villita Assembly Building in San Antonio (1959) is a sixteen-sided auditorium roofed with a radial network of steel cables suspended from a peripheral compression ring and supporting a central tension ring. These technologies were employed because they optimized the structural performance of roofs. Thin shells, folded plates, cable-stayed structures, and glue-laminated wood beams and arches could span long distances without the support of intermediate interior columns. Consequently, buildings using such structural systems could be built more rapidly and economically than a conventionally framed structure. These systems also produced dramatic architectural profiles that vividly materialized the modern architectural identity of the buildings they roofed. This was evident in such Social/Civic buildings as the auditoriums or gymnasiums of Central High School in San Angelo, Texas (1957, Caudill Rowlett Scott and Max D. Lovett), the McAllen Civic Center in McAllen, Texas (1958, Zeb Rike and Edwin W. Byers with Caudill Rowlett Scott), Pharr-San Juan-Alamo High School in Pharr, Texas (1960, O'Neil Ford, Alan Y. Taniguchi, and Max Burkhart, Jr., altered), St. Joseph Academy in Brownsville, Texas (1960, Caudill Rowlett Scott), Island Elementary School in Galveston (1960, Thomas M. Price), and the Casa del Sol in Harlingen, Texas (1961, Taniguchi & Croft, altered).
These systems were also applied to industrial and commercial buildings requiring long interior structural spans, such as the Hemispherical Meeting Hall at the R. G. Le Tourneau plant in Longview, Texas (1953), a geodesic domical structure, and the Lew Williams Chevrolet City showroom in Corpus Christi, Texas (1965, Donnelly & Spear, altered). Like the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, many of these buildings were published in the national and regional architectural press and they won national, state, and local design awards from the American Institute of Architects, thereby representing what could be construed as an authoritative image of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in Texas. Within this context, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion was an early example of the use of thin shell concrete roof vaulting in Texas and, in engineering terms, a structural design that was relatively complex in its combination of cable-stayed and cantilevered tensile design.
Summary of Preservation Efforts
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is a part of Sylvan Beach Park, owned by Harris County since 1954. Under the lease, the City of La Porte provided maintenance and made the property available for rental. "Friends of Sylvan Beach Park and Pavilion," a non-profit preservation group, was formed in early 2008 to advocate for rehabilitation of the pavilion and non-commercialization of the park. As Hurricane Ike approached Galveston Bay in September 2008, the City of La Porte boarded all public buildings except the Sylvan Beach Pavilion. After the hurricane struck La Porte on September 13, the city did not secure and repair the pavilion, which experienced the loss of only four windows in the ballroom and several smaller windows. The City of La Porte closed the Pavilion for public use at that time. The city never re-opened the pavilion, and the city-county lease terminated in February 2010. The county is presently undergoing studies for various ways to preserve the pavilion. Harris County Precinct Two began initiating plans for the renovation of Sylvan Beach Park in 2008 and has overseen the recent re-establishment of the historic sand beach at the park. In addition, current plans have proposed the stabilization of the pavilion as a landmark within the original Sylvan Beach concept. Plans for park improvements include the pavilion as an integral part of the shoreline landscape. The plan includes the development of an amphitheater at the far northern position of the county property.
The Sylvan Beach Pavilion is worthy of preservation because it perpetuates the social/civic, recreational use of a site that, since the development of La Porte, has been devoted to such uses. It is the most distinguished work of civic architecture in La Porte and for its distinction-recognized from the time of its completion as a work of modern architecture and engineering. It is worthy of preservation because of the durability of its construction, which has successfully resisted the impact of such extremely destructive tropical hurricanes as Carla, Alicia, and Ike. Finally, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion is noteworthy as a publicly accessible recreational complex, associated with the lives of three generations of Bay Area residents who participated in events in Sylvan Beach Park. Local significance of the building:
Architecture
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
About National Register Listings
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.