Go Fish Galvez

Rare and priceless as a pirate’s bullion, washed up on a modern shore—in my book, maybe more. And not just in Galveston.

A rare instance of residential Art Deco

And so it was, about a month ago, that Tip and I were on a walk and, on an impulse (mine), decided to take a leisurely side trip through a unique little neighborhood, just a smidgen northeast of us, known as Cedar Lawn.

Originally established in 1925, Cedar Lawn is a tiny enclave of roughly nine square blocks, distinctively shaped by an odd internal circular drive that is at once both its single entrance and exit. Cedar Lawn is one of the earliest examples of a “modern” planned neighborhood and now, having been fenced off at some later date by stately wrought iron, has become something of a gated community, deep in the heart of Galveston but somehow separate from it.

Just down the street, another Deco home

Cedar Lawn is an interesting, eclectic mix of imposing as well as more modest homes dating back to the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and ranging widely in architectural style, from English Tudor to Prairie to Early Colonial to…oh my gosh…ART DECO?!

Now, except for Tulsa, Oklahoma (yes, I said Tulsa, Oklahoma), Miami, and sections of Los Angeles not wholly overrun with California bungalows (which I also covet), it is very unusual indeed to find the Art Deco style expressed in residential construction, it being a form typically better suited to grander commercial and public structures—witness the Chrysler Building in New York, for example, or L.A.’s Union Station.

In fact, so seldom is Art Deco seen on a humbler scale befitting a quiet neighborhood of smaller homes that when Tip and I happened upon not one but two such examples, within a single block of each other in Cedar Lawn, I could hardly wait to run home and grab my digital camera so I could come back and capture these images for GFG. Wow, what a rush!

Fabulous Art Deco in Cedar Lawn

Palms were made for Deco!

Ah, Art Deco. Sleek. Minimalist. Elegant.

Low flat roofs, great sweeping curves, chiseled glass block, skinny chimney brick. Clean.

And those fabulous marquee-like front porches. Seeing them makes me instinctively dig around in my pocket for penny candy money and wonder what’s playing at the bijou tonight.

Why can’t all of architecture be this much fun?