Galveston is Houston's Playground

When Houstonian's want a day at the beach or a weekend getaway,  they often make the hour-long drive to Galveston.  There are luxury hotels, quaint motels,  and lot of cottages and beach rentals available.  After tomorrow there may not be so many of them.  Because the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico is so vulnerable,  almost a century ago Galveston built a seawall to establish a permanent coastline to form the water's edge of the city.  The seawall does not enclose the city,  so it can't prevent flooding,  it's just designed to keep the edge of the city from washing away.  It's an enourmous solid wad of concrete,  so it isn't something that can "fail" the way New Orleans levees can.  Look what happens when the huge waves ahead of the storm surge hit the seawall:

It looks like a million "Old Faithfuls" spouting every few seconds! It's sort of like nature's Bellagio!

Before 1900,  Galveston was the biggest city in Texas,  the cultural center of the western Gulf Coast. Back then, Houston was just a horse town, but Galveston boasted an opera house,  government offices,  and trade centers for shipping, banking,  and finance.  That all changed in 1900,  when an enourmous hurricane killed 7,000 people and washed much of the city out into the Gulf.  That bad luck for Galveston was the beginning of Houston's enourmous growth.

 

After the disaster,  Galveston developed the seawall plan as part of its recovery and long term strategy. 

Meanwhile,  Houston realized there would be a huge advantage for an inland port large enough to manage ocean-going vessels.  So,  as Galveston built it's seawall,  Houston dug a ship channel through Galveston Bay all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. 

This allowed the development of the Port of Houston, the nations largest port in terms of foreign waterborne tonnage, and the 2nd largest port in terms of total tonnage.  The intersection of the Houston Ship Channel and the Intercoastal Waterway,  and the proximity to large sources of crude oil production,  made the development of the city as the Petroleum Capital of the country a pretty natural evolution.  The development of the production faclities led to the development of management offices to support those industries,  and thus the Houston Skyline District rose in the flatlands north of Galveston Bay. 

Miss Ginger's downtown office is a 10 story building in the middle of all of the enourmous skyscapers.  When Alicia blew across Galveston Bay 25 years ago,  the winds blew gravel from the aggregate roofs off the buldings,  and as it peppered the adjacent buildings the glass shattered and filled the streets with shards.  Since that time,  building codes no longer allow loose aggregate roofing,  and all buildings were forced to comply,  so it will be interesting to see how the city holds up.

 

Tags: Houston, Galveston, Old Faithful, Bellagio, Hurricane Ike. Hurricane Alicia