Galveston: A History of the Island

Chapter 13

13 THERE WAS an idyllic quality about Galveston in the last quarter of the ninteenth century, a sort of Toy Town mystique that suggested that life was a party that went on forever. It had grown into a distinctly cosmopolitan city, tropical in appearance like New Orleans , but smaller and less southern. From the time of Jean Lafitte, Galveston had absorbed its laissez-faire culture, and some of its population, from the old French-speaking port. In true New Orleans style, Galvestonians tolerated, even appreciated, wickedness. They lived according to their own rules, their own values, their own interpretations of morality. But there were important differences between the two cities. However unique its heritage and tradition, New Orleans was part of the mainland. Galveston was first and always an Island, a place apart. The birthright of every Islander was blessed isolation, a condition to be ardently defended, but one that extracted a price. The isolation did strange things to the psyche, fostering a conceit that Galveston was not part of the whole, that it could deny the obvious and escape the universal. At the same time, there was a claustrophobic perception of limits. Crowded together as they were, Islanders understood that there was little room for error, and that tolerating that which would be intolerable in other circumstances was a precondition of existence. Though the fabric of Galveston society was a blend of nearly every thread in the world, Islanders found it fashionable to thumb 142 Gary Cartwright their noses at outsiders. When it was necessary to mention Houston at all, they called it Mudville. The story went that an Islander attempting to cross one of Houston's boggy streets observed a sign that read NO BOTTOM! There had been a time, to be sure, when pedestrians attempting to negotiate the Strand sank ankle-deep in sand, but by the 1890s the Strand had elevated sidewalks and was paved with wooden blocks-an impressive civic improvement, except during times of high tides when the Strand's pavement had an annoying tendency to float away. Many Island homes stood on stilts and looked as fragile as grasshoppers ready to scatter. But this was the age of Nicholas Clayton, too, and the churches, cathedrals, and synagogues were oversized and wonderfully ostentatious. Even the warehouses had a touch of Victorian Gothic so that they looked like crypts rather than simple storage places. The famed architect was a compulsive Christianizer: his doodles were sketches of church windows, altars, and steeples. His first day on the Island, Clayton headed directly for St. Mary's Cathedral, stopping along the way to purchase a ceramic Madonna and Child from a pawn shop on Market Street. As though it were his primary duty, Clayton checked in with the local bishop, and in the course of their conversation convinced the bishop that what the cathedral needed was a central tower to balance the two towers at the front of the basilica. After the hurricane of 1876, the church agreed and Clayton was allowed to build his tower. He crowned it with a statue of Mary, Star of the Sea, positioned to look out over the Island and protect it. There was an ongoing battle among the new elite to see who could build the grandest mansion, and the winner was Colonel Walter Gresham, lawyer and lobbyist for the Deep Water Committee . The mammoth structure that Clayton designed for Gresham and his wife at the comer of 14th and Broadway was a gray sandstone and granite fortress, with four four-story turrets, topped with the winged horses of Assyria, a trio of tiled cones, and numerous chimneys and balconies. In today's dollars it would have cost about $5 million. Most of Galveston's elite lived on Broadway. One notable exception was Colonel William L. Moody, who lived at 23rd and Avenue M, in a pre-Civil War mansion. But Broadway was the place to be and be seen, a street of elegant homes set along a wide esplanade planted with oaks, oleanders, and palms imported from the West GALVESTON 143 Indies. Streetcar tracks ran along the esplanade, between these borders of tropical foliage, and at night people sat on their galleries or gathered on street comers and watched the so-called "pretty cars" strung with multicolored electric lights and filled with young people singing and laughing. Mardi Gras parades and balls got more elaborate every year. The...