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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The crumbling, empty monoliths along the Strand of my childhood have been restored and occupied by shops, restaurants, offices, and even a few apartments. At one end of the Strand the imposing white railway station, eleven stories tall including a tower, which I remember as the terminus of the Texas Chief, is empty no more; the long-vacant Santa Fe offices have been filled by a junior college. At the other end, the UT Medical Branch, which as late as the forties was on the verge of moving to Houston, has exploded into an 85-acre complex with seven hospitals and $113 million in recent construction. In the historical district between downtown and the medical school, more and more of the old homes bear fresh coats of paint to protect their gingerbread woodwork against the corrosive salt air. On East Beach, a new high rise is taking shape on the ocean side of the seawall where, undaunted by Alicia, Houstonians like James Elkins, the chairman of First City Bancorporation, and Kenneth Schnitzer, the developer of Greenway Plaza, have purchased condominiums at prices well up into six figures — a far cry from the dirty-shirt and $5-bill days.
On the west end of the seawall, a company owned by Houston oilman George Mitchell, who developed the Woodlands, north of Houston, is building a fifteen-story hotel and condominium atop an old gun embankment at Fort Crockett. Next door is an almost completed Holiday Inn that is nearly as large. For an old Galvestonian, though, perhaps the greatest sign of change is the very existence of Hornbeck Offshore Services, in an unprepossessing building a few blocks down Broadway from the Moody family home. Two years ago Larry Hornbeck quit his job as president of the Moodys’ offshore servicing company and did three things that would not have been possible in the old days: get a loan from a Galveston bank to go into business, take on the Moodys, and succeed.
But it is one thing to say that Galveston is changing and quite another to say that it is different. Galveston is still a place preoccupied with its past. No event, no matter how trivial, is without context, and no case, no matter how old, is ever closed. Last summer a local octogenarian replaced a pink oleander bush in front of his house with a red one, and it was town talk for weeks: the bush was part of a two-block stretch pink oleanders planted decades ago by a long-dead member of the Kempner family, so the shrubicide was regarded as a defiant political act. Gambling has been gone from the Island for 26 years, but enough people yearn for the old days that they successfully petitioned the city council to put a legalized gambling referendum on a ballot coming up in January. Earlier this year a developer caused a sensation by erecting a billboard near the beach with the message “Hotel and Casino Sites Available.” It has been thirty years since Ball High and Kirwin played a football game, but hardly a morning passes at Gaido’s coffee shop that the town sages who gather there for breakfast don’t debate which school’s college board scores or teachers or 1949 football team should be judged superior. There is progress, though: occasionally someone will refer to Kirwin as O’Connell, as the Catholic school has been known for fifteen years now.
Galveston is still a provincial place, hard for outsiders to crack. There is even an acronym to set natives apart — BOI, short for Born on the Island. The Galveston Daily News has been known to use BOI without further definition. Local jewelers offer BOI charms, drops, and lapel pins in silver or gold.
George Mitchell understands. He is often cited as the personification of the “new” Galveston — a Houstonian who has invested more money in Galveston in a few short years than the old families did in a generation. Mitchell personally owns ten old buildings on or near the Strand, including an 1871 structure housing his Wentletrap restaurant, the only place in town where you can get a sauce more sophisticated than tartar. Behind the restaurant, in the building from which Leon Blum once managed his million-acre empire, Mitchell is putting in a new Tremont Hotel, where the 125 rooms will have ceiling fans, brass beds, and a black-and-white décor that is at once modern and nostalgic. Mitchell has more than $20 million of his own money in Galveston, but he also has a string of complicated financial concessions from city officials — tax freezes, federal grant assistance, and access to capital at rates far below prime. One reasons Mitchell has had unprecedented success for an outsider is that he is no outsider. He is BOI, and although he hasn’t lived there since 1940, he retains the privileges of his nativity. What’s more, he plays the part. On most weekends he joins the Gaido’s breakfast group of old and apprentice codgers. I saw him one Sunday morning at the Wentletrap, greeting by first name old Galvestonians dropping in for brunch. So much for the “new” Galveston.
Galveston is still a place where Houstonians without pedigree fare less well. When the Galveston Wharves began showing signs of life in the late seventies, Houston port officials proposed a merger. Well, you can imagine how far that got. The resentment over the dirty-shirt and $5-bill crowd grew so strong that in 1980 the city eliminated free parking on the beach and substituted a limited number of paid parking spaces, many of them near remote beaches; the unmistakable message was that Galveston no longer cared if the one-day tourist came at all.
Galveston is still a place where the family dynasties wield immense influence. The families don’t feud anymore, and only the Moody bank remains family-held, but the old order is sustained through family foundations that continue to shape Galveston’s destiny. Sealy money is restricted to the medical school, but the Moody and Kempner foundations, under no such limitation, funded the renaissance of historic Galveston. They provided capital to save old buildings on the Strand, underwrote costly restorations like that of a $4 million sailing ship, and even paid the salaries of professional preservationists. But that was before Robert Moody’s recent coup won him effective control of the bank, ANICO, and the Moody foundation. Moody, whose oldest son was severely injured in a 1980 automobile accident, is more interested in physical rehabilitation than in history, and that’s where more and more of the foundation’s money is going. Can the historic preservation movement survive the loss of Moody money? It may not have to: a fierce struggle has developed within the Moody empire over whether Mary Moody Northen, the 91-year-old daughter of the Old Man, will leave her Croesian estate to the Moody foundation or set up an independent foundation of her own.
Galveston is still a place where the biggest battles are over image rather than power — another legacy of the families. Even if the Moodys and the Kempners no longer fight over what kind of place Galveston ought to be, everybody else does. Nothing has aroused passions as much as the upcoming gambling referendum, even though it is only a nonbinding popularity contest. Another old debate — port versus playground — has resurfaced twice in recent years, once over a port scheme to eject the shrimp fleet, a minor tourist attraction, and once over a proposal for an oil superport on Pelican Island. The playground won the first battle, the port the second, and in both cases the town divided roughly along old-timer-newcomer lines, with the newcomers — the medical school crowd, historical buffs, and broken people who come to Galveston to heal — taking up the old Moody position that Galveston is just fine the way it is.
Maybe it is, at that. Sure, Galveston is still a place with serious problems. It is poor (it has a higher percentage of residents in subsidized housing than any other city in the country) and old (the median age is almost four years higher than the state average, and nearly a third of the population is over 55). The middle class has left the Island for the mainland, where houses are cheaper and taxes lower. The demographics are so dismal that Steak and Ale, a somewhat upscale restaurant chain, recently decided not to locate there. But through all the setbacks — in part because of all the setbacks, because the boom passed it by — Galveston remains a city of culture, character, and grace. Its public library has one of the highest ratios of books to population of any city in Texas. (Midland, a bigger city, with the third-highest per capita income in the nation, has less than half the books.) Galvestonians live the way people used to live. They read, they go visiting just to sit in parlors and talk, they eat in dining rooms rather than at kitchen tables. Galveston stands for values that are largely missing from the rest of Texas — values that make it a worthy rival to Houston even today. Galveston may not have a boom, but it still has its past.
Hurricane
There is nothing like a storm in the Gulf to affirm just how different Galveston is and how much gravitational force it exerts on the mind of people who have lived there. On the day Alicia grew from a tropical storm to a hurricane, I left the city where I live to go to the city I will always be from. It had been 22 years since Carla, Galveston’s last storm, but my first glimpse of the ocean awakened all the old instincts. When a storm is in the Gulf, a Galvestonian needs no weather report to convey the news. He knows it intuitively: the entire ocean seems to be lifted up; the horizon is wrong. There is too much water and too little sky.
The rituals, too, were familiar. Taping windows, closing storm blinds, plotting the latest latitude and longitude, buying candles and batteries and canned goods, driving out to inspect the ocean every hour or two, standing on top of the seawall to lean into the wind and feel the salt spray, and, most of all, talking of the past, of Carla and the 1900 storm and 1915 and 1943, when the storm hit from the bay side, and which one Alicia would be like, and how much the weather bureau was calling Alicia a small hurricane but it was moving real slow, just like Carla, and wasn’t it too much speed that killed Hurricane Allen back in 1980, and whether to stay on the Island or leave.
There was something totally reassuring about it all — not a mitigation of the immediate danger but rather a feeling that the essence of Galveston will always be the same. Hurricanes have done terrible things to the Island, but then they have also given something in return: no matter how many condominiums line the beachfront, no matter how far Houston creeps down the Gulf Freeway, Galveston will never be a subordinate culture. Houston has taken Galveston’s port, its people, its appellate court, its businesses, its railroads, its destiny, but it will never take Galveston’s hurricanes or its soul. Oh, Houston tried to claim Alicia, and the national media made it sound like Houston’s storm, but if you aren’t surrounded on at least three sides by salt water, you haven’t really been through a hurricane.
Galveston is proof of a basic law of biology: Island species evolve in a manner so specialized that they find it difficult to do more than subsist. When outside species are introduced, like swine in Hawaii or Houstonians in Galveston, the indigenous species cannot compete. That is why the tankers laden with oil sail past the Island up the Ship Channel, while Galveston looks beyond them to the sea, so wickedly peaceful, and the sky that will bring the next storm.
My Library
