Hotel Galvez, the Balinese Room & the Free State of Galveston

For a few roaring decades in the middle of the twentieth century, Galveston lived by its own rules. Locals half-jokingly called it the 'Free State of Galveston' — a place that shrugged off the liquor laws and gambling bans of Texas and the nation and turned itself into a wide-open resort of casinos, nightclubs, and cold drinks by the Gulf. At the center of it all were the Maceo brothers, two Sicilian barbers who built a bootlegging and gambling empire and crowned it with the legendary Balinese Room, a supper club perched at the end of a long pier over the sea, where big bands played and high rollers gambled a step ahead of the law. This drive follows that jazz-age chapter along the seawall, from the grand Hotel Galvez to the site of the Balinese Room, tracing how a proper Victorian port became, for a while, the sin city of the Gulf Coast — and how the good times finally ended.