Beyond the boardwalk
Town leaders want all of Kemah to be a destination
TWO large archways welcome visitors who drive into Kemah along Sixth Street. Four blocks to the left is one festooned in Vegasstyle glitz. Some 4 million people each year pass beneath its blinking lights and neon lettering on their way to the Kemah Boardwalk amusement park known for its roller coaster and chain restaurants.
But straight ahead is an arch of humbler design, announcing the lower-key Lighthouse District of fudge shops, clothing boutiques, artist studios and small bars and eateries. To encourage more people to take this less-traveled path, the bayside community of 1,800 is shelling out $2.2 million to landscape the main drag and otherwise spruce up an old shrimping village whose traditional draw has been its beachtown vibe.
“They bypass all this, and they go straight to the boardwalk,” D’Anna Travis, supervisor at the Kemah visitor center at the edge of the Lighthouse District, said one recent day as she looked out on the downtown area with pastel-painted bungalows shrouded in wispy palm trees.
Kemah’s plan to encourage some of the 35-acre boardwalk’s foot traffic to migrate into the city’s central business district includes renovating and landscaping the 176-spot parking lot around its visitor center, a repurposed schoolhouse from 1912, and installing tree-covered sidewalks and crosswalks leading down Sixth Street. Water fountains and benches in public areas also are in the plan.
Business leaders rattle off a list of Texas tourist spots whose ranks they hope to attain: Wimberley, Fredericksburg, Gruene and New Braunfels.
“We really want to make this a destination,” said Kemah Mayor Carl Joiner, who in April oversaw the rollout of an online advertising campaign promoting “baycations.”
The effort comes at a promising time for Kemah, as the Texas Department of Transportation prepares to break ground on an expansion of Texas 146, the main highway into Kemah, that
Top: Tilman Fertitta’s Kemah Boardwalk amusement park has put the town of 1,800 on the map. Above: Sandra Williams, owner of Boardwalk Fudge: “It’s a different crowd of people than it used to be.” Brett Coomer photos / Houston Chronicle
will include a second bridge over Clear Lake.
Business also is strong on this peninsular point, where sales tax revenue has grown by an annual average of 4.5 percent over the last six years, significant new retail developments have been announced and the city recently secured an expansion of its water supply, which had previously limited growth.
The planned renovations are designed to spread the bounty in the four-block downtown area by diverting more pedestrian traffic there. If all goes well, the city would like to eventually close off Sixth Street to car traffic on some weekend nights for events.
But some old-time merchants are at the same time concerned over whether the plans might accelerate the decline of older craft shops in favor of new bars selling craft beers.
“Will this help?” said Sandra Williams, 72, owner of a fudge and art store. “I hope with all my heart this helps. Because nothing would please me more than to see Kemah be what it used to be.”
Six decades ago, the town drew visitors from Houston to waterfront restaurants on crushedshell roads where kitchens cooked up the fresh hauls of local shrimpers daily, according to Pepper Coffey, a 1970 graduate of Clear Creek High School and author of “Images of America: Kemah.”
“There would be a line for seafood,” Coffey said, recalling a spate of hometown restaurants, now long departed.
The town also developed a reputation for such festive events as a Christmas boat parade and the annual blessing of the fishermen’s fleet.
Business picked up big time in 1983 when the old drawbridge on Texas 146 over the busy Clear Creek channel was replaced with the static bridge there today, dramatically improving accessibility. A few years later, as entire city blocks sank into the sea thanks to groundwater pumping, city officials had the space dredged into a marina that cut off First through Fifth streets from the bustling highway, leaving Sixth Street the de facto gateway to Kemah.
A local entrepreneur bought an old home at Sixth and Bradford and turned it into the Eagle’s Nest Gallery, a shop for coastalthemed artwork. Then a Dutch immigrant named Frans Gillebaard opened the Flying Dutchman in the mid-1980s and the Brass Parrot and Kemah Cantina a few years later.
Soon, Coffey said, Second Street became known as Restaurant Row. Then a multitude of artisanal shops followed the Eagle’s Nest and opened up.
One of them was Boardwalk Fudge, named for the boardwalk that used to connect Sixth Street to the bay. Sandra Williams opened the shop in 1990, the same year she arrived in Kemah from the Dallas area and felt like she’d stepped into a Jimmy Buffett song.
The fudge shop also gave Williams a place to sell her hand-cut eggshells — she’s a world champion eggshell cutter and former president of the International Egg Art Guild. She’s produced art for the king of Saudi Arabia and five U.S. presidents — and she also cooked up a line of jams and salsas.
In the early ’90s, she said, downtown was filled with a Christmas store, a candy shop and some quirky gift stores, and the owners created a merchants association to host and promote free festivals in Kemah. They put on Christmas in Kemah and the Kemah Pan Jam, a steeldrum festival.
The action was enough to draw the attention of local investor Tilman Fertitta, who made his first foray into grand-scale development with the Kemah Boardwalk, buying up the town’s Second Street and Restaurant Row, eventually building an aquarium, Ferris wheel, roller coaster and other attractions.
“It just totally changed the dynamic of Kemah,” said Keith Mercado, who owns the Kemah Coach custom printing shop.
The boardwalk put Kemah on the map, and it helped Williams’ business for several years. But the familiar feel began to change, Williams said, a process helped along by the destruction and reconstruction caused by Hurricane Ike in 2008. Old businesses closed; new ones opened.
“It’s a different crowd of people than it used to be,” Williams said. And it’s a crowd that doesn’t buy fudge or artisanal jam. She guesses she takes in about one-fifth of what she did in the early 2000s. She gets by mostly thanks to online sales, longtime customers and the high prices fetched by her expertly carved eggshells.
“Sixth Street used to be all shops. Now it’s become like Sixth Street in Austin,” Williams said. “The bars have taken over.”
In May, the Voodoo Hut opened at the former site of the Eagle’s Nest Gallery. It features a neon-backlit bar surface and eclectic tapestries and artwork on the walls.
“Five years ago there wasn’t anything here but Bud Light dive bar stuff,” said Andrew Moore, a native of La Porte and manager of the Voodoo Hut.
He once worked at a downtown Houston bar and said he’s introduced strawberry-infused tequila and other “cool stuff from inside the Loop” to Kemah. Next he hopes the city will relax regulations on food trucks so a few can park around the bar.
“I think they’re trying to build a nightlife of some sort, and I think we’re part of it,” co-owner Demetrios Kouloumoundras said.
Voodoo was the third bar project of Kouloumoundras, a local developer who bused tables at the Flying Dutchman as a high school student before the Kemah Boardwalk was built. Kouloumoundras opened his first Kemah bar and restaurant on Sixth Street, Bakkhus, in 2008, then opened Scallywag Suds N’ Grub across the street in 2013.
Those followed Palapas Bar and the Monkey Bar, which opened on Sixth some years earlier. Kouloumoundras considered them the origins of Kemah’s nightlife scene.
“I’m seeing a huge change in demographic,” he said. “I’ve been here a lot of years, and there’s a lot of times I don’t know half the people in the crowd. I don’t know where they’re coming from. Probably Houston.”
Kouloumoundras voiced optimism that the revitalization plans would give visitors new reasons to venture beyond the crowded Kemah Boardwalk.
“So far the plans for the scene are pretty exciting for everyone trying to conduct business here,” he said. “It’s a quaint little hub, and we’re tying to keep the charm here.”