Lifting Galveston

The dredge Texas was lost at sea on Christmas Eve, 1904. It was one of five vessels hauling sand from the harbor channel into a canal cut through the middle of Galveston. The grade-raising continued without it. The project absorbed its own disasters and kept going.

Here is what they built to save themselves. A canal, 20 feet deep and 200 feet wide, cut two and a half miles through the residential heart of the island. It started at 8th Street and Avenue A near the South Jetty, curved along the seawall, turned at 22nd Street, and followed Avenue P½ out to 38th. Three hundred and fifty houses were temporarily relocated just to dig it. Self-loading hopper dredges filled themselves with sand from between the jetties, steamed up the canal, and discharged their loads through pipelines into sections of the city enclosed by earthen dikes. The water drained away. The sand stayed. Fifteen million cubic yards of it, over eight years.

The work moved in quarter-mile-square sections, starting near the seawall and pressing inward toward the bay. Within each section, every structure had to be lifted before the fill arrived. Workers tunneled beneath buildings and placed jackscrews, hand-turned, one by one, then raised the structures slowly, evenly, while the city continued to function around them. 2,146 buildings went up on jacks: 1,226 cottages, 413 one-story houses, 162 stables, churches, schools. Water mains, gas lines, sewer pipes, streetcar tracks, sidewalks, fences, trees, gardens, outhouses. Everything that made a city a city had to be disconnected from the ground and reconnected at a new elevation.

St. Patrick's Church on 35th Street weighed 3,000 tons. Seven hundred jacks lifted it five feet. The church held services throughout.

While the work was underway, residents walked on catwalks eight to ten feet above the old ground level. The city existed in two planes at once: the one you remembered and the one being built beneath you. Streets you'd walked your whole life were now trenches. Your neighbor's house sat on stilts while yours was still at the old grade, depending on which section the crews had reached.

Some homeowners couldn't afford the raising. They moved to the second floor and let the first be filled in. Some abandoned their homes entirely. Taxpayers and individual property owners paid for the work. Renters lived through all the disruption. The new elevation their neighborhood gained was someone else's equity.

One family's movement through the city during this period survives in a genealogical record: they started on Avenue L near 38th Street and ended up on Avenue Q½ near 61st Street by the time the grade-raising concluded. Pushed outward, westward, past the seawall's original terminus. We don't know why they moved, or whether each move was voluntary. We know the direction.

What we don't know is larger. Galveston's African American community was substantial throughout the island during the grade-raising years. Black longshoremen and cotton screwmen had organized labor unions as early as 1857. African Methodist churches served congregations west of 25th Street. Black children attended the West District School at Avenue M½ and 35th. These communities were present, documented in church records and school rolls and union charters. But no source I've found records their specific experience of the grade-raising: whether their blocks were raised on the same timeline, whether they received the same engineering attention, whether the families who couldn't afford to lift their homes were disproportionately Black. The Rosenberg Library holds the photographic archive of the grade-raising, cataloged by street address and engineering phase, and a separate African American history collection organized by community institution and era. The grade-raising archive does not cross-reference race. The African American archive does not cross-reference the grade-raising timeline. The gap between them is the gap in the record.

The last cubic yard of sand was placed on August 8, 1910. Galveston had risen. The original island elevation averaged five or six feet above mean low tide. Afterward, it ranged from eight feet on the bay side to twenty-two feet at the seawall. The 1900 storm had killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people. When a hurricane as powerful struck in 1915, the death toll on the island was eight.

The triumph was real. The commitment it created was permanent.

Once you have raised a city, you cannot un-raise it. You have bet on that location with an irreversibility no vote can undo. Sea level at the Pier 21 tide gauge has risen 2.3 feet since 1909, with land subsidence from groundwater extraction accounting for most of it. Eight more inches in just the last fourteen years. On the bay side, where the grade was raised to just eight feet, 2.3 feet of relative sea level rise has erased nearly half the elevation the engineers added. The margin Galveston bought itself is shrinking back toward what it was before the storm.

In 1903, Galveston was raising itself to save a city. The Ike Dike is designed to protect the Houston Ship Channel and the petrochemical infrastructure lining Galveston Bay. Over a century, the thing being protected changed completely while the logic of escalating commitment deepened. Nobody announced the shift. The commitment absorbed it.

The 3,000-ton church is still standing on 35th Street. The sand is still beneath it. The bet is still running.