A Legacy of Resilience

Galveston, the city that always rebuilds and the family and firm that have helped it rise for generations

From the 1900 Storm to the rebirth of the Strand, from a steamship in 1918 to a fifth generation in the drafting room — how one of Collaborate Architects’ principals came to serve Galveston Island and Galveston County

For more than a century, Galveston has answered every blow the Gulf could deliver with the same response: rebuild — higher, stronger, and with a deeper respect for what came before. It is a city defined not by what it has lost but by what it has refused to give up. This spotlight is about that city, and about a family whose own story has been bound up with the island’s for four generations — and whose senior members now lead Collaborate Architects’ work across Galveston Island and Galveston County.

A City That Refused to Give Up

At the turn of the twentieth century, Galveston was the largest and wealthiest city in Texas. Its port handled more cotton than almost any in the world, and the commercial blocks along the Strand — brick and cast-iron buildings designed by the finest architects of the day — earned the street its nickname, the “Wall Street of the Southwest.”

The Strand looking east from Bath Avenue (today’s 25th Street), 1894 — six years before the Great Storm. The Santa Fe Building at left was later replaced by today’s Shearn Moody Plaza. Courtesy Galveston & Texas History Center, Rosenberg Library (AW-26).

Then came September 8, 1900. The Great Storm pushed a wall of water over the entire island, destroying more than a third of the city and killing an estimated six to eight thousand people. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in American history. Many assumed Galveston was finished.

Galveston’s answer was one of the boldest public-works programs the nation had ever seen. Within two years, construction began on a seventeen-foot concrete seawall along the Gulf side of the island. Then, over the better part of a decade, the city quite literally raised itself: more than two thousand structures — homes, businesses, even churches — were lifted on jackscrews while dredged fill was pumped beneath them, lifting the grade of some five hundred city blocks by as much as seventeen feet at the seawall. A new causeway followed in 1912, binding the island to the mainland by road and rail. The seawall has since been extended to roughly ten miles and has stood between the city and the Gulf ever since.

It was infrastructure as an act of faith — a community investing everything in the belief that its future was worth building.

A Long Middle Century — and a Renaissance

The decades that followed tested that faith. The opening of the Houston Ship Channel drew commerce inland. Hurricane Carla struck in 1961. And by the 1960s and early 1970s, the Strand — once the pride of Texas — had become a district of vacant warehouses, boarded storefronts, and cast-iron façades rusting under the salt air. The buildings that had survived the 1900 Storm now faced a slower threat: neglect.

Galveston answered again — this time not by raising the ground, but by raising its own history. In 1973 the Galveston Historical Foundation established a revolving fund to purchase and protect endangered Strand buildings. Dickens on the Strand debuted in 1974, drawing visitors back to a street many had written off. In 1976, the Strand was designated a National Historic Landmark District. And that same year, George and Cynthia Mitchell purchased the 1871 T. Jefferson League Building and began what would become the restoration of more than twenty historic structures — the 1879 Leon & H. Blum Building, reborn in 1985 as the Tremont House; the Hutchings & Sealy Building; the 1871 Henry Rosenberg Building with its cast-iron front; Old Galveston Square; Hendley Row; and the historic Hotel Galvez. The Grand 1894 Opera House was restored and reopened in the same era. Even Hurricane Alicia, which struck in 1983 in the middle of this revival, did not stop it.

The 1980s were the culmination of Galveston’s century-long habit of rebuilding: the adaptive reuse and historic restoration of downtown proved that the island’s past could be its economic future. It is the Galveston that Collaborate Architects’ principals know best — because they were on the scaffolding when it was built.

A Steamship to Texas, 1918

For the Kay family — originally Theodoracopoulos, “Kapetanakis” — the story of Galveston isn’t just history. It’s family history.

It began when Chris Kay’s grandfather, Christos Theodoracopoulos, landed in Galveston in 1918 aboard one of the steamships connecting Greece to the Gulf Coast. He came ashore at what was then one of America’s great immigrant gateways — the port so many arrivals knew as “Texas’ Ellis Island” — onto an island that, less than two decades after the Great Storm, was still finishing the work of lifting itself out of the sand.

The Greek community he joined was already deeply rooted there. Galveston was home to the earliest Greek Orthodox church established in the United States — Saints Constantine and Helen, founded in 1862 by Greek sailors — where the first Greek immigrants worshiped alongside Russian and Serbian Orthodox faithful. In the decades that followed, the growing Greek colony established its own congregation, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church, and made its mark on the island through the maritime trades, groceries, cafés, and family enterprises tied directly to the Gulf. It was within this close-knit community that Christos put down roots, built a life, and raised his family.

Return, and Return Again

After the war, Christos returned to Greece to raise his daughters, who married there — but the pull of America endured. The family re-emigrated to the United States in 1966 and settled in Houston in 1979, reconnecting with the Galveston community that had first welcomed them decades before. The friendships forged in those years — with the Demeris, Mitchell, and Kostas families, fellow Greek American families with deep Galveston interests — became a lasting part of the family’s story, binding them to the island across generations.

1962: A Name in the Galveston Headlines

In a remarkable twist, the year Chris Kay was born the Theodoracopulos name was already making news on the island. On January 7, 1962, the Sports Car Club of America held its divisional races in Galveston, and among the competitors was Chris’s uncle, Theodoli Theodoracopulos, a driver from the racing circles connected to the extended family. At the same time, Panagiotis “Taki” Theodoracopulos — the Greek shipping heir, author, and longtime columnist for The Spectator — was a fixture of the international society pages, linked in the press to heiresses such as Charlotte Ford, who themselves appeared at coastal Texas events like Galveston’s famed Splash Days.

For a boy born that year in Greece, Galveston was already written into his name. Four decades after his grandfather stepped off the steamship, and four years before the family would return to America, the island was calling the Theodoracopulos family home once more — this time with a checkered flag.

Nik Kay and the Rebirth of the Strand

Chris’s father, Nikolas “Nik Kay” Kapetanakis, carried the family’s spirit of craftsmanship and enterprise forward. A skilled craftsman and entrepreneur, Nik founded a woodworking company specializing in historic restoration — and that work placed the family squarely at the heart of the Strand’s renaissance.

The restored 1871 Thomas Jefferson League Building (left) and the Strand today

That renaissance was led by a fellow son of the Galveston Greek community: George P. Mitchell, whose own father, Savvas Paraskevopoulos, had emigrated from Greece, taken the name Mike Mitchell, and settled in Galveston to raise his family. Nik’s craftsmanship contributed to the Mitchell restorations, and the family’s friendship with the Mitchells made the work personal — two Greek-Galveston families, a generation apart, helping bring new life to the very streetscapes that had greeted Christos Theodoracopoulos when he stepped off the steamship in 1918.

The 1879 Leon & H. Blum Building, before and after its adaptive reuse as the Tremont House Hotel, Galveston, Texas

On the Island Since the 1980s

For Chris — named after his grandfather, Christos Theodoracopoulos — growing up around these projects was formative. As a young man in the 1980s working alongside his father on the Strand’s Victorian iron-front buildings, he was immersed in the discipline of historic craftsmanship: learning how these buildings were made, and what it took to bring them back. It was there, amid the scaffolding and millwork of Galveston’s grandest restorations, that Chris was first exposed to the field of architecture and found the passion that would define his career — historic restoration and the adaptive reuse of historic buildings.

His brother Lee was on the island alongside him. Both brothers have worked in Galveston continuously since the 1980s — through the completion of the Strand’s revival, through the storms that followed, and into the present day. Lee lives and works in Galveston as a builder and construction manager, carrying on his father’s and grandfather’s tradition of building on the island: four generations of craftsmanship in one community.

Rebuilding Again: Ike and the Decade Since

On September 13, 2008, Hurricane Ike put the Strand under water again — the same buildings restored in the 1970s and 1980s took on feet of surge, and much of the island’s public infrastructure was damaged or destroyed. Once more, Galveston did what it has always done: it rebuilt, and it rebuilt better.

That rebuilding era is the one in which Collaborate Architects has done its work. For more than a decade, the firm has provided architecture, planning, and project and construction management services on Galveston Island and throughout Galveston County — serving the cities, county government, and public institutions charged with keeping the island’s infrastructure ready for the next century. It is work the firm approaches with the same conviction the city showed in 1902 and again in 1976: that Galveston’s buildings, old and new, are worth the investment.

The Next Generation

Chris’s proudest legacy is at home. He is the father of four boys — Nikolas, named after his grandfather Nik, Alexis, Stephano, and Andreas — all born in Houston and all raised closely tied to the Galveston community and the family legacy that began there more than a century ago. Andreas is now pursuing a career in architecture of his own at Texas A&M University — carrying the family’s craft into a fifth generation, and following a path that leads, as it always has for this family, back toward the island.

A Word from Collaborate Architects

Collaborate Architects is proud to have Chris Kay as a principal and partner of our urban planning, project, and construction management practice — and even more excited to have his youngest son, Andreas, join the firm as an architectural intern as he completes his studies in architecture and urban planning. Watching a fifth generation of this family’s Galveston legacy take shape within our own walls is a privilege.

Founded by Chris’s partners Saul Valentin and Martin Needle, Collaborate Architects is ranked among Texas’ most experienced architecture, planning, and construction management HUB-certified firms. Few firms can match the depth of our experience on Galveston Island and throughout Galveston County—more than a decade of continuous service to the island’s cities, county, and communities, led by senior members whose work on the island dates back to the 1980s and whose family ties reach back to 1918. That connection is rooted not just in our project portfolio but, as this story shows, in the history of the city itself.

Galveston has never stopped rebuilding. Neither have we. From city halls to historic districts, we serve cities, counties, and communities across Texas with the values this city taught us: craftsmanship, partnership, resilience, and an enduring commitment to the places we call home.

From the 1900 Storm to the Strand, from Greece to the Gulf Coast, Galveston’s story and the Kay family’s story are one and the same: a legacy of rebuilding, now passing to a fifth generation — and a deep, enduring commitment to the island where it all began.