Isle Dauphine Club

In 1957, Mobile architects Arch R. Winter and T. Howard Ellis built something unusual on Dauphin Island — a three-story social club where the main room on each floor curved in a circle, the windows facing the Gulf. The Isle Dauphine Club was the centerpiece of a development by the Dauphin Island Property Owners Association, part of a larger complex that would grow to include a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a golf operation. The building's Mid-century modern lines — intersecting arcs and circles — spoke to a particular postwar optimism about what a barrier island in the Gulf could become.

The golf clubhouse arrived in 1962, and the course itself followed in 1963. The full picture was a social club, a golf club, and a restaurant, all anchored by that circular building with its Gulf-facing windows. The island had other plans. Dauphin Island is a barrier island — the eastern end helps define the mouth of Mobile Bay, while the western part narrows to scrub and sand. Storms come through. What was built as a private social club now operates as a restaurant, the building listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.

The reason to go is not nostalgia. It's to see what Mid-century optimism looked like when it tried to take root on a shifting sandbar, and what remains after the island reminded everyone who was really in charge.