Galveston

Before the 1900 hurricane, Galveston was poised to become the great port city of Texas, richer and busier than the young town of Houston up the bayou. The storm killed an estimated six thousand people in a single night, and the city’s response — raising the entire grade of the island by several feet and building a seventeen-foot seawall — remains one of the most audacious engineering feats in American history. Lia and I learned all this on our first evening, wandering the Strand Historic District’s cast-iron Victorian storefronts, and the knowledge changed how we saw everything after: not as simple charm, but as survival dressed up in ornament.

The Strand and downtown

The Strand itself, once nicknamed the “Wall Street of the South,” is now a stretch of restored 1800s commercial buildings housing galleries, oyster bars, and the sort of gift shops that sell hurricane-themed postcards without irony. We spent a morning at the Bishop’s Palace a few blocks away, a turreted 1892 Romanesque mansion that somehow survived the storm relatively intact, its stained glass and hand-carved staircases untouched while much of the surrounding neighborhood was leveled. Nearby, the Broadway Historic District’s row of restored mansions — the “Broadway Beauties” — gave us a sense of just how wealthy this island once was, and how much of that wealth simply left after 1900 and never fully returned.

The seawall and the beach

Galveston’s ten-mile seawall runs along the Gulf-facing side of the island, and we rented bikes to ride its length one warm afternoon, the water a murky green-brown typical of this stretch of Gulf coast, nothing like the turquoise postcards of Florida but somehow more honest for it. Below the seawall, Stewart Beach and the pier at Pleasure Pier draw families with amusement rides jutting out over the water, while further west the beaches thin out into quieter, dune-backed stretches near San Luis Pass. We ended one evening watching the sun drop into the Gulf from a bar stool at a restaurant built out over the water, plates of fried shrimp between us, the seawall’s floodlights just beginning to flicker on behind us.

Getting There

Galveston has no major commercial airport; most visitors fly into Houston, either William P. Hobby Airport (about fifty minutes away) or George Bush Intercontinental (closer to an hour and fifteen minutes), then drive south on I-45, which runs directly onto the island. The drive itself is unremarkable — flat coastal plain and refinery skylines — but the payoff at the causeway, when the Gulf opens up ahead, makes the trip feel worthwhile. A car is essential for reaching the seawall’s quieter western stretches, though downtown and the Strand are easily walkable once you’ve parked.