Grande Dame of the Gulf
A belle among the roughneck cities of Texas, Galveston is caught between a relentless ocean and an imperious past. If one doesn’t get it, the other will.
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All that ended on September 8, 1900, the fulcrum moment in Galveston’s history. No one will ever know what really happened that day — how many people died (it was at least six thousand, almost one fifth the population) or what freakish circumstance of nature compelled the storm surge to rise an additional four feet in a single instant at the height of the fury. Half the buildings on the Island were demolished. The waves turned the debris from one fallen structure into a battering ram to fell the next. The entire Island, even at its highest point, must have been at least ten feet underwater; I can remember as a child seeing the watermark in my grandmother’s parlor, impossibly, absurdly high above the piano. On the southern and western parts of the Island, nothing and no one was left. In its dispatch after the storm, the Associated Press reported, “The city of Galveston is wrapped in sackcloth and ashes. She sits beside her unnumbered dead and refuses to be comforted. Her sorrow and her suffering are beyond description.”
Physically, at least, Galveston recovered from the storm. Moving quickly to silence a minority who advocated rebuilding on the mainland, Galveston’s leading families reorganized the city government, put themselves in charge, and set about fortifying their sandbar against the sea. U.S. Army engineers interposed a massive concrete barrier between the Island and the Gulf; sixteen feet thick at the base and seventeen feet high, it still rates as one of the world’s great seawalls. Then, in a feat of astonishing civic will, the elevation of the entire city was raised by as much as thirteen feet to coincide with the top of the seawall. Every building in town was jacked up and the space underneath filled. Dredges sailed into the heart of the city down newly dug canals, spewing out sand from the floor of the sea, burying all vegetation. The grade-raising took six years, during which the only means of getting around town was temporary elevated boardwalks. By the next census, the city had regained the population it lost in one night. Port activity actually exceeded pre-storm levels; in the years just before World War I, Galveston was the leading cotton port in the world.
But if engineers could keep the ocean out of the city, no seawall could keep it out of people’s minds. The nineteenth century article of faith that Galveston was destined for greatness could not compete with the memory of the storm. In the future, those who had made their fortunes on the Island would be slow to risk them there and those who hoped to make new ones would place their bets in Houston. The great era of building was over; Nicholas Clayton survived the storm by sixteen years but never again designed a major structure in the city. Invaded by self-doubt, a cancer that never afflicted its inland rival, Galveston came to have an entirely different concept of itself.
Galveston’s loss was Houston’s gain. The storm cinched Houston’s case for an inland deepwater port; by 1914 the deed was done. Ten thousand Galvestonians left the Island for Houston in the first decade of the century, swelling Houston’s population, which had already surpassed Galveston’s before the storm. The exodus from Galveston was numerically balanced by immigrants from Eastern Europe. They added to the city’s traditional polyglot character (in 1860, 40 per cent of Galvestonians were German-born), but the migrations of the storm’s aftermath hastened the transformation of the city from rich to poor. By 1920 Houston was four times bigger than Galveston. The nineteenth century had belonged to Galveston, but the twentieth was Houston’s.
A Dirty Shirt and a $5 Bill
For their city to lose its commercial preeminence was bad enough for Galvestonians, but to lose it to Houston was intolerable. Two things were particularly galling. First, Galvestonians considered Houston to be without grace or culture (many still do). Second, with a declining commercial base, Galveston could only turn to the economic activity it hated most, tourism. The proud dowager was reduced to peddling her physical assets.
To old Galvestonians, Houston was barely removed from savagery. A Galveston matron, returning from Houston in 1864, reported to her family that men didn’t dare to venture out without a gun by day or a lantern by night. The gun referred to Houston’s propensity for sudden violence, which could break out at any time on Main Street; the lantern, to the city’s paludal streets, which could swallow a man up to his waist in mud. On the Island, where the streets had been paved and free of gunplay for years, Houston was derisively known as Mudville and its citizens as mudcats. A Galvestonian on his first visit to Houston in 1872 reported seeing a sign in front of a Main Street bog that read, “No Bottom.” The elegant, European-style living in Galveston had no parallel in Houston, where men put their money into business, not architecture.
Alas for Galveston, Houston never knew its place. Aided by geography, it outmaneuvered Galveston before the Civil War to become the railroad hub of the Gulf Coast. It connived to weaken Galveston by declaring a quarantine on commerce to and from the Island every time there were rumors of yellow fever outbreaks. It forced a statewide election in 1881 to make Texans choose whether they wanted their new medical school to be located in Galveston or Houston. For once Galveston won. Worst of all, Houston coveted its own outlet to the ocean. Galvestonians hooted at the idea, especially when a cargo of salt sent by a Galveston merchant to a Houston warehouse in 1886 washed away in a bayou flood. Houston at Last a Saltwater Port, chortled the Galveston Daily News.
Since the 1900 storm, though, such satisfactions have been all too rare. As a winner, Houston had not been humble either; Galveston Wharves officials still fume over the Houston port director who liked to needle his Galveston competitors, “I love to see Galveston busy because that means Houston is loaded.” But I remember one triumph for Galveston. In 1963 the Houston Post bought the Galveston papers, the morning Daily News and the afternoon Tribune, and embarked upon what in any other city would have been a profitable business venture. The Post folded the Tribune and transformed the once-proud Daily News, the oldest newspaper in Texas, into a chatty afternoon paper with modern typography. The idea was that Galvestonians would turn to the Post for a morning paper and real news. Ha! Instead they flocked to the Houston Chronicle — even though it was strictly an afternoon paper in those days — as a sort of mass protest. After four years of this guerilla warfare, the Post capitulated and sold out. The new owners returned the Daily News to its morning slot and its traditional type, and on the first day of the new regime my mother got a call from an old friend. “Well,” said the friend. “we sure showed them a thing or two.”
Galveston’s historic distaste for Houston was reflected in its posture toward tourism. Galvestonians were never very comfortable with the idea of soliciting the patronage of boorish Houstonians, and their halfheartedness showed up in dirty beaches and unairconditioned hotels. The beachfront never did become an economic bonanza — mainly because, Galvestonians said, people from Houston brought a picnic lunch to the beach, stayed all day, and returned without buying so much as a gallon of gas. “They come down with a dirty shirt on their back and a $5 bill in their pocket and never change either one” has remained a local refrain.
Galveston made a brave show of things for a while. Bathing beauty contests in the twenties, which promoters called the International Pageant of Pulchritude, attracted throngs that haven’t been matched since. The Galvez Hotel opened in 1911, and the new Galveston-Houston interurban rail line ferried Houstonians down. Where Twenty-fifth Street met the seawall, the city put up a sign sixty feet high spelling out “Galveston, the Treasure Island of America, Port and Playground” with three thousand electric light bulbs.
But the intended marriage of port and playground never consummated. Old Galvestonians hated the slogan, which was still around when I was growing up. At one of the first what’s-wrong-with-Galveston conversations I participated in — a rite of passage on the Island — I remember someone’s saying, “They ought to forget the playground and concentrate on the port.” The city split between those who had a direct stake in tourism and the rest of the town, which, as in the case of the Houston Post, kept up a rearguard resistance. Galveston ceded the beach and the seawall to the invaders — like many Galvestonians, I went years (seven, to be exact) without setting foot to sand — and did little to make it more attractive. The beach-town division still endures in Galveston, where old attitudes change slowly, if at all. On a warm day last spring, I was riding in a car driven by a high school friend — the grandson of the owner of the long-defunct Tremont Hotel — when he suddenly spun into a U-turn as we approached the seawall. “Sorry,” he said, “but I never go down the boulevard when the tourists are in town.”
No matter how strongly Galveston resisted the city’s descent into tourism, the old guard was powerless to arrest it. Evidence of decline was everywhere, even on the menus of the city’s finest restaurants. On Christmas Day, 1907, the Tremont Hotel offered suckling pig with baked apples, filet de bouef pique aux champignons, roast canvasback duck, and Spanish mackerel au beurre Montpelier; on Christmas Day, 1934, the Hollywood Dinner Club featured chicken and spaghetti, sirloin steak, fried and broiled trout, and a variety of chop sueys. In the early twenties, around eighty steamship companies had offices in Galveston; one by one they moved to Houston. The Tremont Hotel closed in 1928; its downtown business was gone. Around 1930 mapmakers switched from putting Galveston in big print and Houston in small to the other way around. As the truth sank in that the past was hopelessly beyond recapture, Galveston followed the path of many a fallen derelict: it turned to gambling.
South of the Maceo-Dickinson Line
In the twenties and thirties Galveston wasn’t the only place in Texas where you could put down a bet. If you knew where to look, you could gamble in Victoria, Beaumont, Port Arthur, Corpus Christi, and Fort Worth, among other cities. But Galveston was different in two ways. In Galveston gambling lasted well into the fifties And you didn’t have to know where to look: it was everywhere, it was open, and it was celebrated.
Galveston’s gambling impresarios, brothers Sam and Rosario Maceo, were born in Palermo, Sicily, late in the nineteenth century and arrived on the Island in the teens, just before Galveston ceased to be an immigration port. By the early twenties they had switched from barbering to bootlegging, and in 1926 they opened the Hollywood Dinner Club, their first casino. In the late forties, when reform-minded war veterans were cleaning up vice in other parts of the state, the Maceos remained sacrosanct. Their domain eventually covered the whole county — the Chili Bowl in Kemah, the Silver Moon in Dickinson, and the Streamline Dinner Club in Algoa. To cross from Harris into Galveston County was to go south of the Maceo-Dickinson line, as Houstonians called it. On the Island, the Maceos had slot machines in three hundred establishments as late as 1950 — restaurants, barbershops, corner groceries, everywhere.
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