Galveston almost went under in the hurricane of 1900, but city leaders saved it, and a new economy reshaped it
Monday, December 19, 2005
By Rebecca Mowbray
Staff writer

GALVESTON, TEXAS -- The business elite who ruled this island city wasted no time. Within two years of the 1900 hurricane, the deadliest in U.S. history, they had begun work on a storm-surge defense that is considered one of the great 20th century engineering feats. The Galveston headland facing the Gulf was buttressed by a sea wall nearly 20 feet high and now more than 10 miles long.

Housing in the adjacent residential districts, including mansions along Galveston's equivalent of St. Charles Avenue, were jacked up, anywhere from a foot to 13 feet, and the lots filled with dredged sand topped with soil.

Having taken steps to ensure its physical survival, Galveston assumed it would forever remain the pre-eminent Texas port city. But it made one grave miscalculation: It neglected to consider that post-hurricane Galveston would emerge in a different economy.

While the island was rebuilding, the 1900 storm also gave new urgency to the nascent effort to dig a deepwater shipping canal to the dusty railroad junction of Houston. Galveston survived but never regained its former prominence as a major port and financial capital.

"I don't think there was ever a sense that it wouldn't come back and be the center of commerce again," said Christy Carl, director of the Galveston County Historical Museum.

Today, while cruise ships anchor along Galveston's tourist district of the Strand, the once-thriving commercial center where local power brokers traded fortunes in cotton and sugar, oil tankers and cargo ships steam up the Houston Ship Channel to acres of manufacturing complexes. Economic power in the region resides safely in Houston, where one in three jobs is tied directly to the port. Galveston's economy is largely based on tourism, augmented by a medical research and treatment center.

But the sea wall remains a proud monument to Galveston's resilience. "It's what enabled the city to come back after the 1900 storm," said Dianna Puccetti, chairwoman of the Galveston Island Park Board of Trustees, which manages the municipal beaches and promotes tourism. "It's a symbol of the growth that's been able to occur."

In Katrina's aftermath, no one doubts that New Orleans needs reinforced storm protection as urgently as Galveston ever did. But the faded fortunes of the Texas city serve as a reminder that meeting an environmental challenge, however stunning that achievement may be, won't single-handedly restore a community.

"The more severe the devastation, the greater the need for fresh, innovative, unusual thinking," said Casey Greene, head of special collections at Galveston's Rosenberg Library and editor of a book on the 1900 storm. "This is an opportunity to talk about where the city needs to go."

A close relative

If 19th century New Orleans was the Queen City of the Gulf Coast, Galveston was its first cousin.

Initially used by pirate Jean Lafitte as a haven for smuggling, Galveston was dubbed "the best natural harbor the colony of Texas has to offer" by state founding father Stephen F. Austin. Because of its natural port, Galveston grew into a major banking center and point of immigration for the Southwest during the 19th century. In 1867, it started its own Mardi Gras. By 1900, the city was neck and neck with New Orleans as the nation's top cotton port and boasted the country's second-highest number of millionaires per capita. Residents had every reason to believe the island possessed a "marvelous destiny," as one pre-hurricane booster put it.

"The city was destined for some time to be not only the major port of Texas, but of the Gulf Coast," said Marsh Davis, executive director of the Galveston Historical Foundation. "Of course, that never came to be."

With such a fabulous existence, Galvestonians didn't worry much about storms. When a rival port about 85 miles to the southwest, Indianola, was pummeled by a hurricane in 1875 and obliterated by another in 1886, a fleeting effort by a group of Galveston businessmen to build a sea wall never gained traction.

"There were some who believed that because of Galveston's good fortune in the 19th century, there was actually some geographic advantage to the location," Davis said. "There were some who felt they were invulnerable."

So when the water began rising around the Victorian bathhouses that dotted the shore of this barrier island on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900, curious residents came to the beach to play in the surf.

When the rising tide began to flood the town by the afternoon, it was too late for people to seek refuge in the brick and stone buildings of the Strand on the bay side of the island. That night, the city's 37,778 residents huddled in peril as their wood-frame homes were toppled by the wind or battered from their foundations by the tidal surge. Some spent the night clinging to floating timbers, watching family members drown. Others were killed by pieces of roof slate that turned into flying guillotines.

When the water receded on Sunday morning, entire city blocks had disappeared, 3,636 buildings were reduced to matchsticks, and some 6,000 to 8,000 people -- about one-sixth of the city's residents -- had perished. Had the same proportion of New Orleans residents died in Katrina's wind and waters, the death toll would stand at 77,000. The exact number of Galveston victims is unknown because, fearing an outbreak of disease, survivors burned the bodies where they washed up on the beach after a failed effort to weight the corpses and drag them out to sea.

The hurricane was estimated to be a Category 4 on the modern Saffir-Simpson scale, about the same as Katrina when it hit New Orleans, with sustained winds of about 120 to 140 mph. But that, too, will never be known for sure because the weather station anemometer blew away at 5:15 p.m., well before the peak of the storm. The last speed it recorded was 100 mph.

City leaders took charge

As survivors sorted through the rubble, they decided a sea wall was necessary after all.

City leaders quickly commissioned a study by the Army Corps of Engineers on how to protect the island. The corps proposed building a 17-foot sea wall because the hurricane storm surge had been 15.7 feet. The corps also suggested filling in the land behind the sea wall to raise the grade of the island -- and most of the buildings that remained -- so that the land would rise one foot every 1,500 feet from the bayside to the sea wall at the Gulf, making the sea wall the highest point on the island. Before the storm, the highest spot on the island was 8.7 feet.

But back in 1900, there was no model for the federal government to swoop in and provide disaster relief. If Galveston wanted to rebuild, it would need to find a way to do it itself. And doing so, modern residents say, is the city's greatest legacy.

"Because the devastation of the city was so complete, it took local leaders to use their own good faith and credit to convince the federal government or banks out of state to either sell bonds or loan money to the community," said Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas, whose grandfather, cotton broker and sugar magnate I.H. Kempner, coordinated the financing of the sea wall and the grade-raising. "It was the leadership from the private sector that refused to walk away from the devastation. The families were determined to rebuild Galveston."

To rebuild the devastated community, Kempner and representatives from other leading families with major investments on the island traveled to see politicians in the state capital of Austin and bankers in New York to get the support they needed.

Their efforts paid off, and Galveston is proud it paid for the lion's share of the hurricane protection work locally.

"Just look what we did technologically," said Greene, whose library is the primary repository for documents related to the storm. "It was principally a private relief effort."

All in all, the county built 4.5 miles of the initial stages of the sea wall at a cost of $3.6 million, according to "History of Galveston, Texas," a 1931 book that describes the sea wall and grade-raising financing as patriotic, and calls it "the most remarkable achievement connected with the restoration of the city of Galveston."

The first three miles of the wall, built between 1902 and 1904, were paid for with $1.5 million in bonds issued by the county with voter approval and sold mostly to city residents to raise money to pay contractors. In 1926 to 1927, the county was able to pay for extensions to the wall with regular operating money.

In between, the federal government, seeking to protect a military installation and other property on Galveston, built 2.8 miles of sea wall in 1904 to 1905 and in the 1920s at a cost of $2.6 million.

To help pay for the grade-raising, the Texas Legislature agreed to rebate to the city treasury nearly all state taxes collected on Galveston. In a controversial plan that made construction firms queasy, city leaders in turn used some of the state tax money to back new city bonds and forced contractors to take a portion of their payment in those city "grade-raising" bonds.

The original legislative act was extended three times, costing Austin 37 years of Galveston tax revenue. The sacrifice by lawmakers attested to the widespread view that Galveston was too important to the state's economy to be denied.

"Seldom has a community suffered such a calamity as befell the city in September 1900, and much more seldom have any people exhibited, under such distressing circumstances, so much courage, self-reliance and civic pride," reads a 1903 entry in the Journal of the Texas House of Representatives when the initial tax dedication was extended. "The safety and prosperity of this port is of incalculable value to the entire West and Southwest . . ."

'Galveston Plan'

Money flowing into hurricane-ravaged Galveston also brought about governmental reforms of the type being urged upon New Orleans and Louisiana in Katrina's aftermath.

With Galveston city finances in disarray, a group of wealthy businessmen worried that the city council wasn't up to the rebuilding task and pushed for reform to make sure the money flowing from Austin would be well-spent.

Under the reform eventually adopted, voters elected a small governing commission on an at-large basis, with one commissioner designated as mayor. Each commissioner was responsible for an area of municipal affairs, such as finance, public works or public safety.

The idea of government by commission was widely copied. At its peak of popularity, in 1920, about 500 cities across the country had adopted "the Galveston Plan," according to the Handbook of Texas Online, a joint project of the University of Texas and the Texas State Historical Association.

Eventually the commission form of government fell out of favor amid concern that it created a leadership vacuum and diluted minority voting rights, but in its day it was hailed as a progressive reform.

"The idea was there were professional city administrators with experience running their departments instead of politicians," said Greene, the librarian. "They had the city's best interests at heart."

Another school of thought holds that the interests most closely at heart were those of the business leaders who had pushed through the shake-up by overstating the problems at City Hall. "They controlled pretty much everything," said Carl, the museum director.

A defining feature

In 2001, the American Society of Civil Engineers, which has been involved in investigating the levee failures in New Orleans in recent weeks, designated the Galveston sea wall and grade-raising as National Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks. A century after it was built, the sea wall still proves its mettle.

The wall itself is a series of huge concrete forms curved like skateboard ramps so that waves fall back on themselves, and a pile of granite slabs sits in front of the sea wall to help break the impact of the waves.

"It's amazing what they did in a period of a few years with the technology they had," said Steven Cernak, an engineer who is Galveston's port director.

Stretching for 10.4 miles along the Gulf, the sea wall shields about one-third of the island that faces the Gulf. It was gradually extended to cover new development until it reached its current length in 1962, but a growing amount of beach home development now sits beyond the protection of the rampart.

Today, the sea wall is a defining feature of the local landscape, separating the island's major hotel row from the beaches down below, where guests sunbathe, fish or surf. The wide, flat top of the wall forms a major traffic thoroughfare and recreation path for runners and cyclists.

"Our memorial is that sea wall," said Mike Doherty, chairman of the 1900 Storm Commemoration Committee. "That's the legacy."

The other portion of the hurricane protection plan, the grade-raising, left the island a muddy mess from 1904 to 1910, and demanded great sacrifices from its residents.

In a 500-block area, 2,146 structures were raised at the owners' expense, including commercial buildings and a 3,000-ton church. Area by area, houses were jacked up so dredge fill could be poured underneath. Most residents continued to live in their homes while the work was being done, and navigated the city from a series of boardwalks that snaked above piers sunk in the mud.

Curbside trees and plantings died during the grade-raising, as did lawns and gardens. To this day there are few trees on the island from before 1904.

To raise the grade, engineers dug canals where the streets once stood. Dredges picked up sand from Galveston Bay, steamed up the canals, and dumped their loads into a network of pipelines that transported the sand to work sites around the island. Canal beds were drained and filled as sections of the grade-raising were completed. All in all, 10.6 million cubic yards of fill were added to the island.

As the grade increased from the leeward side of the island to the sea wall, some houses were raised as much as 13 feet, but most stood 4 to 6 feet higher than before. Still ahead was the arduous task of raising the levels of the streets, lights, water pipes and electric streetcar tracks to match the new heights of the house lots. When the work was completed, residents planted fast-growing oleanders in dirt brought in from the mainland, giving Galveston its nickname, the Oleander City.

Today, the grade-raising is evident in some of the odd ways that houses stand on their lots. The Ashton Villa, a three-story brick mansion, is surrounded by an iron fence that's only two feet high because its owners simply filled in the yard and lower level of the house. The grand staircase to the verandah of the Creole plantation-style Samuel May Williams house is too short for the same reason.

Completed in 1911, the construction of the Hotel Galvez announced that Galveston was back and destined for a return to greatness. The faux Spanish palace stood on the sea wall near the site that had been occupied by the Victorian bathhouses before the storm.

Local lore holds that when the next major hurricane threatened in August 1915, Galvestonians danced the night away in the Galvez ballroom, confident that their sea wall would hold -- as indeed it did. City leaders trumpeted the lack of damage as proof that they had mastered a threat as grave as the 1900 cyclone.

In truth, although the sea wall spared Galveston decimation in 1915, that year's storm was nowhere near as strong, scientists have concluded.

Meanwhile, in Houston . . .

While Galveston was busy with the sea wall and governmental reforms, entrepreneurs in Houston, Galveston's nearest rival, were consumed with an engineering feat of their own: building a channel that would let oceangoing vessels reach its more protected port along Buffalo Bayou, 50 miles inland.

The push for a deepwater Houston Ship Channel dates at least to 1870, when a survey was commissioned. Galveston's misfortune with the 1900 hurricane became Houston's gain -- an event that "added fuel to the simmering flame of Houston's ambitions," according to the 1977 book "Custodians of the Coast," a history of the Galveston District of the Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1902, the same year that construction began on the sea wall, Congress appropriated $1 million for digging the channel 25 feet deep, and it opened a dozen years later.

Today, cruise ships anchor at a Galveston passenger terminal that once offered steamship service to New Orleans and New York. The oil tankers and cargo ships that are the regional economy's lifeblood bypass the island and sail through the protected waters of the Port of Houston.

The discovery of oil at Spindletop, Texas, in 1901 further tilted development toward Houston, and today the Houston Ship Channel is flanked by the world's largest petrochemical refining complex. The port is the world's sixth largest and leads U.S. rivals in foreign tonnage, according to the port.

But history is not necessarily a prelude. Gary LaGrange, chief executive of the Port of New Orleans, says he's been telling shippers who ask about the legacy of Galveston that the 1900 storm is not a prophecy for post-Katrina New Orleans.

With its chokehold on Mississippi River traffic, New Orleans commands a waterway that leads to 62 percent of American consumers. Moreover, 70 percent of the port escaped storm damage, as did New Orleans' main attractions for tourism, the other irreplaceable pillar of the local economy.

"If you go back to the Louisiana Purchase 202 years ago, it was no accident. It was all about the port," LaGrange said.

Perhaps inevitable

As the power shift was occurring, Galveston society wasn't concerned with the activities of the ruffians and real estate speculators in Houston, which had already grown to about the same size as Galveston.

"Houston was called 'the mudhole to the north,' " scoffed Thomas, Galveston's mayor.

Many believe that Houston eventually would have triumphed over Galveston because of its superior network of railroads. Galveston's manufacturing potential was constrained by geography, and shipping was expensive, in part because limited rail service meant that goods needed to be transferred several times to reach or leave the island.

"The fact that Houstonians were so intent on having a ship channel and having a port is what made it work," said Tom Kornegay, executive director of the Port of Houston. But the one-two punch of the hurricane and the ship channel made that economic shift occur much faster. "Houston probably would have eclipsed Galveston, but not right away," Carl said.

Another theory is that without the storm, industrial development would have migrated inland from Galveston more gradually, rather than breaking its traces and bolting 50 miles away. Like Manhattan in relation to the sprawling industrial flatlands of New Jersey, Galveston might have remained the financial capital and population center while manufacturing moved onto the mainland.

If it weren't for the storm, Carl said, "Galveston probably would have been more prominent and taken Houston under its wing."

Ironically, the prominent families of the island who went to such great lengths to save it also contributed to the city's economic decline through their business practices.

The Galveston Wharf Company had long been criticized for operating as good monopolists do, charging high dockage fees and being more concerned with dividends than re-investing in facilities. After the storm, Galveston didn't lower its fees, making it easy for Houston to undercut the competition and sell shippers on its transportation connections and room for expansion.

"The people who called the shots here had it made for a while," the historical foundation's Davis said. "The fees charged by the wharves here were ultimately part of their demise."

A city in decline

Without a vision beyond the hope that Galveston would return to pre-storm greatness, the island fell upon hard times.

As the port declined, Galveston turned to gambling and prostitution as the primary draw of its tourism industry. Gangsters, oil tycoons and Hollywood stars mingled in card-sharp meccas such as the famed Balinese Room, on a pier jutting out from the sea wall near the Hotel Galvez.

Herbert Cartwright had a rejoinder for crusading moralists who sought to clean up his city: "If God couldn't stop prostitution, why should I?" the former mayor quipped famously.

The island's difficulties only deepened after gambling was outlawed in 1957. By the 1960s, some of the mansions on Broadway, the island's equivalent of St. Charles Avenue, were being torn down to make room for gas stations.

"Every time we'd go down Broadway, and we'd see those beautiful structures on Galveston being torn down to build a darn strip center, it just made us ill," said George Mitchell, a Galveston native who founded Mitchell Energy & Development Corp. and designed the acclaimed master-planned community near Houston, The Woodlands.

In 1966, publication of "The Galveston that Was," a book written by a local architect and photographed by the renowned Henri Cartier-Bresson, drew attention to what remained one of the nation's premier assemblages of Victorian architecture.

Galveston's history, city leaders realized, could become the basis of a new tourism industry. Mitchell and his wife went on to invest millions restoring the rat-infested Strand.

"The community really embraced the idea of its own heritage as an economic asset," said Davis, head of the historical foundation, which got its start saving opulent tear-downs, then helped the community articulate a historic vision for the island. "The timing was critical because so much could have been lost."

After many decades of floundering, Galveston shed its skid-row doldrums and is again thriving.

A new convention center and a portfolio of family attractions have fed a growing tourism industry. Wealthy Houstonians are buying and renovating historic homes on the island's East End or building beach houses on the sandy West End as part of the nation's second-home craze. In recent years, Galveston has surpassed New Orleans and Tampa, Fla., as the Gulf Coast's top port for cruise ships, an industry that has helped support a growing number of restaurants. Quality of life on Galveston is high.

As in New Orleans, tourism in today's Galveston is complemented by a vigorous medical research establishment that is now the island's largest employer.

But the University of Texas Medical Branch was nearly lost after the 1900 storm, just as questions swirl in Louisiana today about whether Louisiana State University should resume medical instruction in New Orleans or consolidate with the university in Baton Rouge.

The medical branch of the University of Texas was originally located in Galveston in 1891 at the urging of the city's powerful medical establishment, but after the storm, some University of Texas officials described the decision as a "regrettable mischance" and argued to move it to Austin, according to "Saving Lives, a History of UTMB." The only reason it stayed in Galveston is that Austin couldn't come up with a benefactor who could match the prominent Sealy family's financial support for UTMB's hospital and medical school.

Over the years, the university has played a growing role in Galveston's economy and helped ensure that high-paying salaries would remain on the island. These days, the island is getting a lift from a growing stream of federal research money as UTMB parlayed research on AIDS, SARS, West Nile virus and avian flu into a designation as one of two National Biocontainment Laboratories.

Over the past 10 years, money from the National Institutes of Health has increased from $27.9 million to $104.3 million -- more than double the amount the NIH has given to either Tulane or LSU.

University President John Stobo said that UTMB's recent success was a simple matter of setting priorities.

"The university said, 'These are the programs that represent our strengths,' and we put our resources in those projects," Stobo said. "You cannot underestimate the impact a major academic health center can have on a community. A vigorous academic health center like Tulane would be vital in the recovery of New Orleans."

100 years later

Galveston celebrated its storm centennial five years ago, an event that was marked by a celebration of the resiliency, ingenuity and resourcefulness of this community of 60,000. Houses that pre-date the storm were marked with metal plaques declaring them 1900 Storm Survivors.

"It was going to be a celebration of the fact that Galveston did rebuild," said Doherty, storm centennial chairman and executive director of the Sealy & Smith Foundation, which supports UTMB. "It didn't become a murky little backwater city. Certainly, Houston passed it up, but it was thriving as it went. I think the attitude was it was going to be as healthy as it could be."

What Galveston teaches New Orleans, residents say, is that disaster survival is about leadership. "It's going to take somebody with a very dominant personality to say, 'This is where we're going,' " said Greene, who believes that his community exhibited those qualities. "It's going to call for people with vision, for people with free thinking."

Of course, the troubling point of comparison is that Galveston was at its zenith when the great storm hit, while New Orleans has been losing population since 1960 and is one of the poorest major metropolitan areas in the country. And New Orleans doesn't have the fourth-largest city in the country to help pull it along.

Had Galveston been less dominant in 1900, the momentum to rebuild it might not have been as strong. "At that time, there was every economic reason to rebuild Galveston. It was the port," said Davis, of the historical foundation. "If the storm had occurred later, I doubt there would have been the commitment to build the sea wall."

"Like most things, it's largely economics," Davis said.

But the point is, Galveston eventually thrived, on a different scale and in a different way than it did before. And so will New Orleans, with the hard work and dedication of its people, and a vision from its leaders.

"It may mean a shift in New Orleans, but it won't mean the death of New Orleans," Carl said.

Rebecca Mowbray can be reached at rmowbray@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3417.

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