Sylvan Beach & La Porte's Resort Past

Before there were freeways to Galveston, the Houston coast came to play at Sylvan Beach in La Porte. From the 1890s onward this shore on Galveston Bay was the most popular tourist destination in the Houston area — a Victorian resort of bathhouses, boating piers, a grand hotel, and one of the largest dance halls in the South, where Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo, and the Dorsey Brothers played to crowds under the sea breeze. This short walk traces the town that grew up around that beach: how developers platted La Porte in the 1890s, how the resort rose and fell to storms, how the old hotel became a seminary, and how a bold 1950s glass-walled pavilion carried the dancing into a new age. Bring comfortable shoes and imagine the music drifting out over the bay on a summer night.