BOARDWALK BEACH CLUB

Photo by Peter J. Cooper

I can remember hearing my brother talk about it with his friends when he was home from college for the summer. The Boardwalk Beach Club was the best bar in Houston, and all the cool kids were going there to hang out. Further evidence was found in the kitchen sink every Saturday and Sunday morning as we’d find a couple yellow plastic to-go cups with a green logo of ocean waves, a palm tree and a big moon over the water that came straight from the bar - a collection of these cups would grow considerably over the next few weeks. It was a madras and seersucker summer as I saw these two fabrics rotated out among my older siblings and their friends, along with Bermuda shorts, Lacoste polos, and Polo oxford button-downs. On their feet you’d see Tretorns, K-Swiss, Kaepas, Polo loafers and Sperry Topsiders all without socks of course. This was a time when preppy was the style, and the Boardwalk Beach Club was as preppy as it gets.

In the very early 80s in Houston, I was too young to go to bars, but I kept tabs on all the places the older kids were going – Strawberry Patch, Birraporetti’s on West Gray, Kay’s Lounge, the Hofbrau, the Cadillac Bar and of course the Boardwalk Beach Club. The Boardwalk opened on Washington Avenue in the summer of 1982 at 4216 Washington Avenue in a small classic 1936 somewhat art deco-style retail building, originally built as a small grocery store. For the past 30 years, people in Houston have known Washington as a thoroughfare filled with bars and restaurants that come and go every few years. But in 1982, it was relatively quiet at night except on this particular block that quickly began to fill with cars parking all over the place, kids running across the street, and the Four Tops’ music pumping out the front door. It was a room with a long bar on one side, and a deejay booth on the other – and I have a fuzzy memory of bamboo throughout the place. All around the bar, and out on the back patio, is where all the fun was happening while Sam Cooke, the Drifters, the Supremes, the Platters, Otis Redding and of course the Animal House soundtrack could be heard all over the place. All the cool prep school graduates were there from Strake Jesuit, St. Thomas, St. John’s, Kinkaid and St. Agnes, drinking cocktails and beer out of the large yellow plastic cups.

After the summer came to an end, I entered my sophomore year – a time when some of my friends were getting their drivers licenses. And when they got their parents’ cars, we hit the town – trying to do whatever the older kids were doing. And for those of us with older siblings, we knew we had to go to the Boardwalk Beach Club. Life was different in the early 80s back when the drinking age was 18. It was still a time when the doormen and bartenders didn’t worry too much about how old you were, as long as you looked like you belonged there. If you were shaving, then you easily looked like you could be 18 – and if you weren’t shaving by then, you stayed out of the light and kept your head down. Fortunately for us, my best friend’s older brother was the bartender at the Boardwalk – so we got in without any hassle. The bar ebbed and flowed in popularity while I was in high school, peeking during my senior year. By that time, Washington Avenue’s bar scene was expanding beyond this singular block, and the days of doormen and bartenders looking the other way at underage drinkers had come to an end.

The Boardwalk Beach Club expanded its brand as they opened bars in Austin and Dallas, but by 1986 the music stopped, and the Houston bar closed for good. To this day, there’s always been a bar in the original Boardwalk space – but I’ve never set foot in there. It remains a memory of the 80s for me, and whenever I hear Sam Cooke, particularly the song Twistin’ the Night Away, I think of summer, madras and seersucker, yellow to-go cups and the Boardwalk Beach Club.  PJC