Battered Galveston ready to rebuild after Ike

Last week on The Strand, a trendy boulevard of shops and restaurants a couple of blocks from the harbor, Isaac Bennett, an arthritic 69-year-old, peddled his bicycle past the brick and wrought-iron facades. He was towing a wagon crammed with a crushed aluminum tub and twisted aluminum chair frames.

"I do it every time they have a storm," he said, flashing a nearly toothless grin. He'd sell the load, he said, figuring it would fetch $18, maybe $20.

Shotgun shacks and million-dollar beach homes felt Ike's wrath.

At Ashton Villa, an Italianate antebellum brick mansion with cast-iron balconies, 3 feet of water invaded. (In 1900, the surge was even worse, reaching the tenth step of the grand staircase.) By Thursday, fuzzy white mold had already begun sprouting on a Victorian settee that had floated to rest on its velvet back. Workers ripped up Oriental carpeting and scraped up the sodden padding to save the warping wooden floors.

"Heartbreaking," Denise Alexander said as she pushed aside her dust mask with a rubber-gloved hand. "There's not a lot else to say about it."

Everything has changed
Murdoch's Bath House — which once housed a ballroom, bingo parlor, arcade and portrait studio — succumbed to the pounding surf.

"We lost a lot of things on this island," William Cottingham said in a choked voice as he stood on the seawall and peered at the tattered remains of the Balinese. "And I'm really sorry to say that it ain't going to be the same."

Residents have been told that it may be months before power and other services are restored, and Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas has asked those who stayed behind to leave the city. But she is eager for the world to know that Galveston's future is secure.

"The city of Galveston is not in ruins," she said. "It is recovering according to a well-established plan."

Some don't plan to be a part of that recovery. Click says two business owners have already told him they won't rebuild. But new blood will come in, the fourth-generation islander insists.

"We're not out. We're down," says Click. "And it'll be picked up and cleaned up and scraped off, and we'll rebuild something that's not exactly what it was, but something that might be better."

'They'll make it come back'
After the 1900 storm, wealthy families like the Moody mercantile clan poured large sums into rebuilding the city. Leocadi expects the same to happen this time.

"There's money here — monied people enough," she said as she stood with her video camera and watched a bizarre sight — Navy landing craft depositing amphibious trucks on the beach across from her home. "They'll make it come back."

Newcomers, too, will help keep the city alive.

Sitting in line at a mobile Federal Emergency Management Agency aid station, Melinda Frazee savored her first cigarette in days. The 51-year-old maintenance engineer grew up in western Kansas, where she says "nothing ever happened." It had been a lifelong dream to live near a beach. A year and a half ago, she and her son rolled into Galveston, and drove to the seawall. They got out and took a walk on the dunes.

"My son looked at me and he said, `I've never seen you smile so big in your life, Mama,'" she recalled as she sat with a dirty rag around her neck. "He said, `Is this it? Is this where we're going to stay? I said, 'This is it! This is the place.' ...

"Nasty, filthy, trashy little tourist town. And I love it."

Already, Galvestonians are putting on a brave face.

On Thursday, rows and rows of tables covered in gleaming white linen tablecloths and napkins appeared in front of Gaido's restaurant, which first opened on Murdoch's pier in 1911.

National Guard troops, electrical workers and other first responders filed in for plates of Gulf shrimp and red potatoes boiled over propane flames as the Beach Boys played over the loudspeakers. Big black letters on the marquee declared: "We Will Return/So Also This Island."

"We realized that if we made it really nice and it became a bright spot in everybody's miserable week, then it gives you a sense of normalcy," says Mary Kaye Gaido, the restaurant's wine buyer. "Somebody said to me today, `It was so great to hear music. We haven't heard music in five days.'"

'Here for the long haul'
Taking a page out of the New Orleans restaurant industry's post-Katrina playbook, Gaido's hopes to reopen soon in a smaller location with a limited menu.

"We're here for the long haul," Gaido says.

Galveston goes on.

Tilman Fertitta, who owns five beachfront restaurants and three hotels in Galveston and an entertainment complex in suburban Houston that was submerged, vowed that spring would bring resurrection to the island.

"Anybody can come to Mardi Gras in February, and I will guarantee they will be able to say Galveston is back. That's a guarantee," he says.

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