$9.7 million renovation bringing Eldorado Ballroom, the 'heart' of Third Ward, back to life

Jewel Brown was just 12 years old when she took the stage to sing Charles Brown’s “Driftin’ Blues” at the Eldorado Ballroom in Houston’s Third Ward. The year was in 1949, but Brown, considered one of the greatest blues and jazz vocalists to come out of Houston, remembers it like it was yesterday. “You might say it was the first big performance of my life,” Brown said. “I had been playing all of the juke joints — Black and white. The man who ran the Eldorado heard me in the juke joints and he called me in.” In Brown’s long career she performed many times at the Eldorado — sometimes called “the ’Rado” — and in concert halls all over the world. She was a headliner in Las Vegas and sang for nearly eight years with Louis Armstrong’s band. “I liked to sing songs that were goo-o-o-d and deliver goo-o-o-d messages. Songs that give me a dri-i-i-ve,” Brown purred in her sultry voice. “I wanted to make my audience feel good. They’ve gotten dressed up and spent their money to come in and have a good time, and that’s what I tried to give them.” Now 84, she still lives in Third Ward and sat outside the Eldorado Building on a recent breezy Saturday morning, reminiscing about what once was as others — donors, architects and workers — reviewed plans for the $9.7 million restoration and rehabilitation project that will bring it back to life. Work began in March as crews with Forney Construction began peeling away the layers of time, removing paint, wallpaper, sheetrock and paneling that have changed with each tenant since 1939. By the end of this year, they’ll have stripped the 10,000-square-foot building down and installed new wiring, plumbing and mechanical systems. They’ll build a 5,000-square-foot annex next to the Progressive Amateur Boxing Association, with a cafe and green rooms for bridal parties and bands. By early 2023, the Eldorado Building and its upstairs ballroom will be back in business, its heart beating again for Third Ward. A gathering place Back in 1939, when Anna and Charles Dupree hired architect Lenard Gabert Sr.to design the Eldorado Building, Third Ward was a thriving Black neighborhood and Dowling Street — now Emancipation Avenue — was a busy commercial street during segregation. Gabert designed a sleek Art Moderne building with a white stucco exterior and a bit of brick at the corner entrance. The lower level had glass window storefronts while on the second floor, a strip of huge windows ran along Elgin Street, then turning the curve in the corner of the building and continuing along Dowling, evoking the image of an oceanliner sailing across the seas. The first floor had space for five small businesses that changed through the years — a pharmacy, furniture store, tailor, dry cleaners, barber and other entrepreneurial efforts — and upstairs, accessed by a steep wooden staircase, was the Eldorado, the soul of Third Ward. Many afternoons, children and young adults participated in talent shows in the ballroom, where they hoped to hone their craft and impress the local music industry. At night, Black middle- and upper-class residents dressed to the nines and headed out for some of the best blues, jazz and rock music in the city. Back before air conditioning, they’d open the windows and those who couldn’t get in would sit outside, listening to the music that wafted out. Brown got her start there, but others who came through were the great musicians of the day: Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Etta James, and even Elvis Presley, who came to Houston to play in white venues, then headed over to the Eldorado to sing until dawn. By the late 1960s and early ’70s, Black residents and visitors could go elsewhere for entertainment, and the ’Rado faltered. The Eldorado Building still stands, but the ballroom as Brown and other musicians remember it closed some 50 years ago. Every now and then someone uses the ballroom for a wedding reception or family reunion, grandmothers navigating the stairs as they regale their grandchildren about the good old days. “The Houston Swing Dance Society and Black stepping clubs had functions here. Texas Southern’s Black fraternities and Jack and Jill groups have had events here,” said Eureka Gilkey, executive director of Project Row Houses. “It represents the entire diaspora of Black people in Houston, despite the fact that the bathrooms were from back in 1939.” There’s no doubt that gentrification is under way in Third Ward; old houses are coming down, replaced by apartment buildings and townhomes. Project Row Houses hopes preserving the Eldorado will be a reminder of the neighborhood’s history. “Third Ward has changed, but historic preservation the way Project Row Houses approaches it is the architectural manifestation of ‘what’s past is prologue,’” Gilkey said. “The Eldorado reflects a spectacular era of Black music and culture, as well as a pivotal and painful moment in American history. We are making a promise with this restoration — that in Third Ward, there will always be a space created by Black people that centers around art, culture, community and joy.” Community support Project Row Houses, reviving under-resourced neighborhoods through arts and culture, acquired the Eldorado Building in 1999, but by then the upstairs windows had been covered over. At least two major fires in the 1940s and 1950s caused serious damage, but the building was repaired, and the charred walls covered in one more layer of gypsum board. In 2012, Project Row Houses brought in David Bucek, a principal at Stern & Bucek Architects, to devise a plan for installing an elevator, though they all knew going into it, that the long game for the Eldorado would be much larger. Hines is donating its time to lead the project, with Forney Construction doing the work. Philanthropist Anita Smith, Hines vice chairman Hasty Johnson and Lucille’s chef/owner Chris Williams are co-chairing the fundraising campaign that has drawn a $4.25 million donation from the Kinder Foundation, plus donations from the Houston Endowment, Brown Foundation, Cullen Trust, Elkins Foundation, individual donors and Project Row Houses’ own board of governors. Fundraising isn’t over, and an anonymous donor has promised to match new donations up to $500,000. Rich Kinder, a billionaire and co-founder of the energy and pipeline company Kinder Morgan, founded the Kinder Foundation with his wife, Nancy, in 1997. Since then, they’ve given many millions of dollars to Houston area parks projects and to cultural and revitalization efforts in Third Ward. Kinder’s love of music goes back to his days playing trombone in high school and college band. Though he’s long given up performing, he still enjoys being in the audience and supporting Houston’s music scene, he said. “The Eldorado Ballroom is such a special place and the heart of Third Ward, and that’s enough for Nancy and me to support it,” Kinder said. “It will be a real center, not just for Third Ward, but for music in general. Emancipation Park is across the street and a new building is catty-corner to that. With this project, you’re adding a whole new dimension to Third Ward.” The hard work Bucek’s firm is known for major historic restoration projects such as NASA’s original Mission Control and the Heritage Society’s 1847 Kellum-Noble House, Houston’s oldest structure still on its original foundation. Bucek will lead the charge to take the Eldorado building back to what it looked like in the 1940s, before the second fire that caused considerable damage and prompted repairs that changed the building’s exterior. He and workers from Forney have demolished much of the interior, where they’ll turn the first floor into a community center, meeting space and an art gallery and return the second-floor ballroom into a music and events venue. Windows are being custom made to restore the unique, original aesthetic of the upper level, re-created from a single old photo they could find that showed those details. That photo also shows brick along the base of the front exterior and at the doorway at the building’s corner entrance, so that will be restored, too. “One of the mysteries we tackled early on was that we only had one great photo of the outside,” Bucek said. “Through that one image, we could see there were columns on the exterior that were brick, but now there’s no brick. They’re plastered. We believe after one fire those elements were rebuilt and instead of brick, they used concrete. We also had historic finishes analysis commissioned by Jhonny Langer in Galveston. He can look at layers of paint finishes and ... understand parts of the building we didn’t have in photos or any record of. Jhonny is helping recreate what it looked like.” They’ll create new millwork to match original trim inside and preserve as much of the original heart pine flooring as they can. “When you’re rehabbing a structure ... for the National Park Service, you put back things that, largely, you could prove were there. We call it ghosting. When you can’t prove what was there, you make your assertions very much an assessment of the time,” Bucek said. “You wouldn’t introduce something that you know wasn’t there. That’s why this research is so important, because you have to base it on how it actually was. That’s what true preservation work is about, trying to get the story right.” diane.cowen@chron.com

$9.7 million renovation bringing Eldorado Ballroom, the 'heart' of Third Ward, back to life

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