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The Gulf Coast: Road To Renewal -- Galveston

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A Tale Of Two Other Cities -- Galveston

For this segment of NBR's special "The Gulf Coast: Road To Renewal," Paul Burka, Senior Executive Editor, Texas Monthly magazine, writes about the experience of Galveston, TX, in rebuilding after a devastating hurricane.

Before the hurricane, Galveston was the premiere city in America between New Orleans and San Francisco. It was the gateway to the great interior of the southwest. In fact the main street, the main business street, which is then and now called The Strand, was the Wall Street of the southwest so Galveston was the financing capital of the interior.

The hurricane basically destroyed the entire island. There wasn’t a building there that did not have damage, but the entire front half, the Gulf side, was wiped out. There was a tremendous storm surge which jumped up about four feet in a single moment and it tore up a railroad trestle that just took out tremendous amounts of housing and buildings. This built up a huge wall of debris, behind which the houses that were there-- including my great grandparents house-- were safe, thanks to the debris from the houses that had been destroyed. That’s why I am here today.

Two things happened to Galveston that prevented it from coming back. One of them was of course a sixth of its population died, a little over six thousand people of a population of thirty nine thousand, and others were missing. It just was hard to build back the infrastructure. Then at the same time that this happened, Houston was beginning to rise as a competitor to Galveston and when oil was discovered at Spindle Top and Beaumont in 1901, Houston became the financing capital for the oil industry and not Galveston. So while Galveston was recovering, its perfidious rival Houston swept in and took our destiny—
and that’s how people in Galveston feel about it.

Well if I tell the truth, I may get driven out of Galveston forever, but the truth was Galveston was at the end of the line. It was an island and as long as water transportation was the main means of transportation Galveston was going to be the premiere city, but when rail took over-- and that was happening by the turn of the century-- Houston was on the main transcontinental route. So I think it’s a little bit of Galveston mythology that we would have been as great as Houston, there just wasn’t enough land. We were a little off the main track, but it’s still a wonderful place that has a tremendous amount of character and a lot of people from Houston are moving there now, to be closer to Galveston civility and culture.

In that part of the town where the debris protected it from destruction, the old houses of Galveston still stand and they are wonderful museums today… the Opera House of 1894 has been restored… the buildings on The Strand, the great business buildings have been redone and so you can see Galveston in its old state. So it’s not far removed from perhaps Charleston and Savanna, but still between the beach and the back part of the city, Galveston hasn’t changed very much.

Oh yes… right… there’s virtually no port business anymore… there’s some but certainly Houston has far-eclipsed it as a port…Galveston was the leading cotton port of the world though into the 1920s… it did recover to that extent, but when cotton left east Texas and moved west, Galveston really is down to having the state medical school, big hospital and tourism, insurance--that’s about what’s left of the Galveston economy.

Well, I think what Galveston did that was probably a mistake was rebuild on the island. There were a lot of people who wanted to rebuild on the mainland where there was more safety and that has kept Galveston from growing because people did not want invest there… and I think the problem for new Orleans is going to be not the amount of the government aids it gets, but the amount of private capital its going to be able to get to invest in housing, to invest in office buildings and infrastructure…