Galveston was Houston’s port, until Houston politicians got the Corps of Engineers to dredge a navigable channel through Galveston Bay, and they built their own port. The ships sailed right past Galveston and the city died. Now it’s just condos and is more or less an exurb of Houston.
“Galveston was Houston’s port, until Houston politicians got the Corps of Engineers to dredge a navigable channel through Galveston Bay, and they built their own port. The ships sailed right past Galveston and the city died.”
Actually, Galveston was still a bigger port than Houston until after WWII. What really killed the Port of Galveston was the Container Revolution. Houston was an early-adaptor (the first containers landed at the Port of Houston). Galveston — in part because of unions and in part because it was still the more successful port at that time — stuck with break-bulk until Houston had a massive, massive advantage in containerization. Then it became an also-ran.
Same thing happened in New Orleans and many of the big East Coast port towns. Container ports were set up outside them (above and below New Orleans in the case of that city) and the traditional break-bulk ports dried up and blew away in the 1990s.
Same story in Europe. Liverpool and London were Britain’s biggest cargo ports. Today it is Colchester and Southampton. (Southampton got lucky — the container revolution hit at the same time as the airline revolution. Southampton containerized because it saw the passenger liner trade going away and was willing to use the quay-side railroads to load containers instead of passengers.)