Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [104]
The city fathers vowed to rebuild. They created an elaborate exhibit for the World’s Fair of 1904 to tell the world of the city’s great plans to build a seawall and behind it a shining new Galveston. The Galveston Flood concession quickly became one of the most popular exhibits at the fair. An artificial wave machine threw a tidal wave across a tableau of Galveston. The sun rose upon a ruined city. Night fell. The new day saw the ruin replaced by a great gleaming metropolis protected from the sea by a giant wall.
This time Galveston built the wall. It rose seventeen feet above the beach, and stood behind an advance barrier of granite boulders twenty-seven feet in width. McClure’s Magazine called it “one of the greatest engineering works of modern times.” But the city’s engineers, among them Colonel Robert, knew a seawall alone was not enough. They raised the altitude of the entire city. In a monumental effort, legions of workmen using manual screw jacks lifted two thousand buildings, even a cathedral, then filled the resulting canyon with eleven million pounds of fill. The task, completed in 1910, had an unintended benefit: It ensured that all corpses still buried within the city remained well interred.
There were moments of brightness. The city built a grand new opera house to replace the one destroyed in the storm. Al Jolson came. So did Sarah Bernhardt and Anna Pavlova. To signal the city’s faith in itself, several of its leading citizens built an immense new hotel, the Galvez, right inside the seawall, as if taunting the Gulf with the city’s new resolve. Galveston’s Relief Committee evolved into a new form of city government, in which the mayor became, in effect, chairman of a board of elected commissioners who each managed a different city function. Reformers saw it as a way of defeating Tammany-style politics, which tended to concentrate power in the hands of a single boss. Hundreds of cities across the country adopted the form. It caused Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, to proclaim the dawn of “a brighter day” for America. “We have got down very low in regard to our municipal governments, and we have got dark days here now, but we can see a light breaking, and one of the lights broke in Galveston.”
But the great hurricane—call it Isaac’s Storm—had struck with abysmal bad timing. Just four months later, an event occurred nearby that changed the history of the nation, arguably the world. The ranchers of Beaumont, Texas, had long heard how gas and greasy water sometimes bubbled to the surface of a strange knoll in the prairie outside town. A few men hunted oil there and gave up, but others followed, drawn by the stories. On January 10, 1901, a crew working for an Italian immigrant named Antonio Francisco Lucich, self-named Tony Lucas, ran for their lives as thunder roared from their drill tower. Oil had already made a few fortunes in America, but this was different. The place was Spindletop. Lucas had punctured a vast underground basin of oil. The rig spouted America’s new gold—but showered the wealth on Houston, not Galveston.
As Galveston grieved and struggled to regain the world’s confidence, Houston dredged Buffalo Bayou. Houston was inland, therefore safer, and it was closer to the big cross-country rail corridors. Oil eclipsed cotton. Great ships in black, red, and white glided quietly past Galveston, bound for the wharves of Buffalo Bayou.
A silence settled over Galveston. Its population stopped growing. It acquired all the sorrows of modern urban life, but none of the density and vibrance. It became a beach town for Houston.
Joseph
SOON AFTER THE storm, Willis Moore promoted Joseph to section director, with an increase in salary to $1,500 a year from $1,200, and ordered him to Puerto Rico to take over the island’s weather station. Joseph dreaded the assignment, claiming his health was not good enough for a tropical climate. On November 3, 1900, two days before Joseph was scheduled to leave Galveston, Isaac notified Moore that Joseph “is unable to leave his room. He has been under medical