Washington Hotel
Galveston, Galveston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This building is a reconstruction of a structure built in 1873 for prominent Galveston merchant John Parker Davie and named the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Davie sold the business in 1878 to John Summers, who renamed it the Washington Hotel after an earlier inn by that name which was destroyed in the Galveston fire of 1877. The J. P. Davie Wholesale Builders' Hardware store occupied the first and fourth floors of the east end of the building. The ground floor of the west end provided space for the hotel restaurant and retail shops. Hotel guest rooms filled the remaining floors of the structure. Located among a number of fashionable inns and shops in the Strand district, the Washington Hotel remained in business for one hundred years. After a number of changes in ownership, renovation of the building began in the early 1980s. A devastating fire on August 25, 1983, however, destroyed much of the historic structure. With only the east wall left intact, the building was rebuilt based on early photographic documentation and surviving architectural elements.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This building recreates a structure raised in 1873 for Galveston merchant John Parker Davie and first called the Cosmopolitan Hotel. After Davie sold it in 1878, new owner John Summers renamed it the Washington Hotel, and it operated among the fashionable inns and shops of the Strand district for a full century. A hardware store, a restaurant, and retail shops shared the ground floors below the guest rooms until a 1983 fire gutted the historic structure, which was then rebuilt from photographs and surviving details.
Why it matters
The Strand was one of the great commercial districts of the nineteenth-century Gulf Coast, and this hotel embodies Galveston's boom years as Texas's leading port city.
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Related people
- · John Parker Davie
- · John Summers
Themes & tags
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