Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [28]
The blame for this he laid entirely at the boots of Private Chase. “This man should be discharged for his miserable work while in charge here,” Lieutenant Weber wrote. “He is not fit to remain in the service.”
AND THEN CAME Monday, March 12, 1888: The Signal Corps’s forecast for New York City predicted “colder, fresh to brisk westerly winds, fair weather.”
What New York got was the Blizzard of ’88. Twenty-one inches of snow fell on the city. Two hundred New Yorkers died. Nearly four feet covered Albany. The storm killed four hundred people throughout the Northeast.
This did not help. Not at all.
ISAAC CLINE WAS twenty-seven years old. He had a kind smile and welcoming manner, but a backbone like a frigate’s mast and a capacity for heroic amounts of work. He was exactly the kind of man the Signal Corps saw as its salvation. In March 1889, General Greely ordered him to take over the failing Galveston station and, further, to establish the first Texas-wide weather service.
Isaac stepped from his train into a neat, well-ordered place, with alphabet streets running east and west, numbered streets running north and south. He had grown accustomed to the stark greens and grays of the sagescape that surrounded Abilene. The sudden blue of Galveston cooled his mind. He was struck, as all visitors were, by how flat the city was, so close to sea level as to produce the illusion that ships in the Gulf were sailing on the streets.
Avenue B, he quickly learned, was more commonly called the Strand. The Wall Street of the West. It sliced across the northern edge of the city just below the arc of wood and iron that formed the wharf front. The downtown streets were paved with flush-hammered wooden blocks and walled by knee-high curbs. Drays, sulkies, landaus, and victorias, with calash tops raised against the sun, eased along behind cautious head-down horses picking their way among the uneven seams. Each hoof struck the pavement with the thud of a mallet against wood, evoking the earscape of a building under construction. The clatter reinforced the aura of enterprise and industry.
Where Abilene had been a rude new town still redolent of fresh-cut wood, Galveston had substance. The size of its buildings and the obvious care invested in their construction betrayed the city’s ambition to become something much bigger. Even in its hedonic infrastructure, Galveston displayed grand aspirations. The city had five hundred saloons, more than New Orleans, a city not exactly known for banking its fires. Galveston’s poshest whorehouse was situated right behind its richest men’s club, the Artillery Club, which barred women except for an annual ball and the occasional coming-out party of a member’s daughter. The city’s most disreputable block was Fat Alley, between 28th and 29th. In Galveston alcohol was blood, but one could also gamble, acquire love, and lose oneself in an opium mist.
The city exhibited a rare harmony of spirit. Blacks, whites, Jews, and immigrants lived and worked side by side with an astonishing degree of mutual tolerance. Through the Negro Longshoremen’s Association, Galveston’s black population controlled wharf labor and enjoyed a standard of living higher than almost anywhere else in the country. The immigrant influence was obvious. At the heart of town, Isaac found the Garten Verein, or Garden Club, built with money pooled by the city’s German residents, who accounted for one-third of the population. It was a large, octagonal dance pavilion with pilasters, balustrades, and a central cupola, set in a park that included a bowling green, tennis courts, even a small zoo. Women could not smoke or wear rouge or lipstick on its grounds. But they could dance. In this staunch, straight-backed time when a man could not weep and a woman could not smoke, there was always dancing.
Galveston was too pretty, too progressive, too prosperous—entirely too hopeful—to be true. Travelers arriving by ship saw the city as a silvery fairy kingdom that might just as suddenly disappear from sight, a very different portrait from that which