Seashore Apartments (Beach Hotel)

At the foot of E. Main Street, facing out to Lavaca Bay, the former Beach Hotel, constructed by real estate promoter C. U. Yancy, represents Texas coastal tourism of the railroad era. As was true of other Texas coastal communities at the end of the nineteenth century, Port Lavaca took advantage of railroad connections to promote itself as a tourist resort. As the hotel's downtown location implies, this was an urban tourism, facilitated by a transportation technology that concentrated travelers rather than dispersing them, as cars would do in the twentieth century. The hotel monumentalizes its presence with a three-story, hipped-roof corner tower, which is framed on its E. Main and S. Commerce streets elevations by double galleries and symbolizes the civility that ambitious towns, such as Port Lavaca, once possessed. Across from the hotel, at 315 E. Main Street, is the Port Lavaca Theater of 1936, restored as a performing arts center in 1994. Its modernistic illuminated sign is especially energetic.