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(Photograph by Gerald Moorhead )
In 1993 Cynthia and George Mitchell bought the Hotel Gálvez (named for Bernardo de Gálvez, former governor of Spanish Louisiana and viceroy of New Spain in 1785 when Spanish naval officer and cartographer José Antonio de Evia named Galveston Bay in his honor) and had it rehabilitated and its grounds reconfigured. They restored the simplicity and generosity of the hotel's ground-floor spaces and accommodated car access, parking, and a swimming pool in its broad front yard with an ingenuity and discretion missing since the 1950s.
The six- and eight-story, two-hundred-and-fifty-room hotel occupies a full block front on the seawall, although set back behind a broad forecourt and driveway heavily planted with palm trees and oleanders. It was designed by St. Louis architects Mauran and Russell, who had an extensive Texas practice in the 1910s, in the Spanish Mission style, the better to evoke romantic associations with the island's purely mythical Spanish past.