The last great house Clayton designed in the Broadway castle district was built for second-generation members of Galveston's elite, Nellie Ball and John Charles League. The League House reflects the impact of the Sealy House ( GV17) on Clayton's sensibilities. It is a brick house, soberly faced with gray stucco and decorated with white Colonial Revival detail. Raised above grade on an arched basement, it contains a colonnaded first-floor gallery that pivots around what now appears to be a residual corner turret but was originally an open, second-floor piazza. Clayton retained his basic towered villa plan format but emphasized horizontal continuity instead of vertical extension, and compositional integration rather than picturesque variety. By the early twenty-first century, this was the last grand late-nineteenth-century house on Broadway still occupied as a single-family residence. Set in an enclosed park, unair-conditioned, with its green louvered blinds drawn shut, the League House appears like a fragment of uptown New Orleans displaced to the Texas Gulf shore.
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Nellie and J. C. League House
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