The Strand: Wall Street of the Southwest

For a few decades after the Civil War, this five-block stretch of brick and cast iron was one of the richest streets in America. They called it the Wall Street of the Southwest — and the boast wasn't empty. Galveston was the great port of Texas, and nearly everything the state bought and sold passed through here: bales of cotton stacked on the wharves, coffee and hardware from a hundred ships a year, and the money that financed it all, run out of the state's largest banks just steps apart on a single avenue. The merchants who got rich hired Galveston's finest architects to build temples to their trade, fronting their warehouses and counting houses with ornate iron and carved stone meant to telegraph permanence. Then came the 1900 Storm, the deadliest natural disaster in American history, which drowned the island and broke the city's reign as Texas's commercial capital. The buildings survived where thousands of people did not, and today they make up one of the largest collections of Victorian iron-front commercial architecture in the country. This short walk runs the heart of it from east to west — past the cotton houses, the banks, and the railroad station that tied it all together. Look up above the storefronts: the best of it is in the cornices.