The eastern portion of th island was elevated on the debris left by the storm, where the seawall is. When you drive the island, you will see basement windows on the older homes. These are actually the first floor of the structure as it existed before the hurricane.
It’s impossible to stand anywhere in the historical parts of Galveston and get exactly the same perspective a viewer would have gotten 100 years ago.
Everything is higher than it was back then, and some spots are much higher.
The feat of raising an entire city began with three engineers hired by the city in 1901 to design a means of keeping the gulf in its place.
Along with building a seawall, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and H.C. Ripley recommended the city be raised 17 feet at the seawall and sloped downward at a pitch of one foot for every 1,500 feet to the bay.
The first task required to translate their vision into a working system was a means of getting more than 16 million cubic yards of sand - enough to fill more than a million dump trucks - to the island, according to McComb.
The solution was to dredge the sand from Galveston’s ship channel and pump it as liquid slurry through pipes into quarter-square-mile sections of the city that were walled off with dikes.
Their theory was that as the water drained away the sand would remain.
Before the pumping could begin, all the structures in the area had to be raised with jackscrews. Meanwhile, all the sewer, water and gas lines had to be raised.
McComb wrote that some people even raised gravestones and some tried to save trees, but most of the trees died. In the old city cemeteries along Broadway, some of the graves are three deep because of the grade raising.
The city paid to move the utilities and for the actual grade raising, but each homeowner had to pay to have the house raised.
By 1911, McComb wrote, 500 city blocks had been raised, some by just a few inches and others by as much as 11 feet.
http://www.1900storm.com/rebuilding/