Broadway's Gilded Mansions: Bishop's Palace & Moody Mansion

Broadway is Galveston's grand boulevard — a wide, oleander-lined avenue that runs the length of the island, and in the golden decades before the 1900 storm it was where the city's richest families raised palaces to rival any in America. This drive rolls past the finest of them: a congressman's turreted castle of stone and steel that is often called the most beautiful house in Texas, an Italianate villa that flew both Confederate and Union flags, and a forty-two room mansion a family bought and furnished in a matter of weeks after the storm. These were homes built by cotton kings, bankers, and shippers at the height of Galveston's power, when the island moved more money than any city in the state. Drive slowly, pull over where you safely can, and picture the boulevard in its prime — carriages on the shell road, oleanders in bloom, and mansions glittering behind their iron gates.