East End Historic District: Galveston's Painted Ladies

Step off Broadway and into the leafy grid of the East End, and you enter one of the best-preserved Victorian neighborhoods in America. When Galveston was the richest city in Texas — a cotton port that fancied itself the Wall Street of the Southwest — its merchants, bankers, and sea captains built their homes here, hiring architects like the great Nicholas Clayton to lace their porches with turned spindles, angular dormers, and towers you'd expect on a Danish castle. Many survived the terrible storm of 1900, and today they wear fresh coats of ice-cream color that give them the nickname 'painted ladies.' This walk winds the shaded blocks between 14th and 19th, past a fairy-tale cottage a father built for his daughter, a working man's home hauled here to be saved, and a solid brick 'castle' that has shrugged off a century of Gulf storms. Take your time and look up: the finest work is always in the details above the porch.