![]() ![]() ![]() It was today, he said, like Austin had once been: human-scale and unself-consciously eclectic, a place where you could fall into conversation with a stranger about the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein or the relative merits of early versus contemporary opera. The retired newspaper editor was uninhibited in his praise for Galveston. And thanks to federal funding, the city’s absurdly cumbersome land development regulations-“which had been written in twelve different volumes, and you had to go back and forth through each one to figure out how you could actually develop,” said Joe Rozier, a member of the Downtown Galveston Partnership-have been recodified, making the island far more business friendly. Since Ike, Galveston has become the nation’s fourth-biggest cruise line port. In 2012 the BOI-that’s “Born on the Island”-restaurant mogul Tilman Fertitta opened Galveston’s newest mega–tourist attraction: the Pleasure Pier, an amusement park stretching from Seawall Boulevard out into the Gulf, on the site where an earlier park bearing the same name was annihilated by Hurricane Carla, in 1961. The city’s biggest employer, the University of Texas Medical Branch, has not only rehabilitated itself after nearly a billion dollars in damages but has added a new hospital and storm-proofed buildings that were devastated by the flood. Tourism and hotel occupancy now exceed pre-Ike levels. “I think we’re better than we were before the storm.” The statistics bear out his assertion. “Galveston has recovered,” Taylor told me. And now today, in spiteful heedlessness of the floods consuming the mainland, downtown Galveston glimmered like a halo on the coast.Ī view of Galveston looking toward the Gulf of Mexico, with traffic from the Houston Ship Channel in the distance. Its streets, its buildings, and much of its medieval infrastructure were replaced with materials that conformed to twenty-first-century standards. Meanwhile, FEMA and HUD poured money into the island’s recovery. The coffeehouse’s patrons rallied and rebuilt the furniture, in some cases using reclaimed wood from the city’s shattered houses. Ike had roared through downtown like a 110-mile-per-hour threshing machine, submerging MOD and its neighbors in eight feet of floodwater, ravaging its interior and whisking away every item that had not been bolted to the floor. Taylor recounted this as we sat on the patio of MOD Coffeehouse, a languid institution situated in a 157-year-old brick building in the historic downtown Strand District whose habitués-academics, firemen, wealthy retirees in shambling beach attire, and artists with fluorescent hair-reflect the island’s hierarchical nonchalance. Ike gave us this tremendous opportunity to rebuild the city, with all this federal money.” That’s when I realized how everything underneath this beautiful old city had long been neglected and was now decaying. Someone had put it there in the 1800’s, and it had survived all this time. That line was literally a wooden log that was connected with wooden pegs. They’d been working on the East End with a backhoe, and they’d accidentally cut into a water line. “One of the first stories I did when I got here, in 1991,” Taylor recalled, “happened one night when a city crew called me. One of these was Heber Taylor, a man not given to hyperbole, a result of having spent the previous 23 years at the Galveston County Daily News, the state’s oldest operating newspaper, before retiring last December as its editor. Instead, in this season of elemental havoc, I encountered an island of absolute calm-as well as inhabitants who argued, quite seriously, that Ike had done Galveston a favor. I had fully expected to see Galveston still in disarray seven years later. Of course, there has been a vicious succession of storms since that first one, and in its own way, 2008’s Hurricane Ike was especially brutal, in that it all but destroyed the city a second time. Before that calamitous hurricane laid waste to the dazzling port city and killed at least six thousand residents, to date the deadliest natural disaster in American history, it was commonly held that violent weather preyed only on large territory and would forever spare the unsinkable island. Arriving in Galveston the morning after Memorial Day from flood-stricken Houston-part of a weather tirade that had left more than twenty dead and thousands displaced-I found the island in a state of sunny, even smug, tranquillity, as if history had reversed itself and we had returned to the halcyon days before the Great Storm of 1900, when the island ruled the Gulf Coast. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |