Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens
Corpus Christi History is published Wednesdays. Murphy Givens also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at givensm@caller.com
Wednesday, October 27, 1999
Seawall was built to hold back ocean
It was 1929. Most of the streets in this city of 27,000 were shelled. Parts of Mesquite, Chaparral, Leopard and South Staples were paved. The South Staples pavement ended out in the sticks, at Six Points, where one business, the Triangle Service Station, was located.Louisiana was a ditch outside the city limits.
The port was three years old. The causeway to Padre Island was a wooden trough. And sailboats tied up at the Princess Louise Hotel on Water Street.
The City Council decided Corpus Christi needed a plan if it was to grow in an orderly way. It hired one of the nation's top urban planners to draft a master plan. He was Maj. E.A. Wood, the city planner in Dallas. Wood spent a year here before presenting his plan. Part of it called for a parkway boulevard stretching from the bascule bridge to Louisiana Ave.
"From the water approach to the city,'' Wood wrote, "the seawall and boulevard would furnish an unusual attractive setting and emphasize the graceful curvature of the bay. The boulevard will give Corpus Christi the same opportunities for fame that certain European and South American cities have utilized to such good advantage.''
The idea for a seawall goes back much further. The Caller in 1890 featured a profile of how the city might look at the turn of the century. It forecast building a seawall "500 feet out from the shoreline, filling up back of this wall and utilizing the ground thus acquired.''
It didn't happen, but two decades later, in 1909, Walter Timon came up with a seawall plan. Timon was the Nueces County judge and the pugnacious political boss in this corner of Texas. But he couldn't get Corpus Christi Mayor Dan Reid interested in the project.
After the storms of 1916 and 1919, people remembed Timon's proposal. The former county judge was asked to study and inspect breakwaters and seawalls along the Atlantic Coast, from Florida to Canada. When he returned from his trip, he drafted the "Timon Plan'' for the bayfront. Timon called for the state to give Corpus Christi the state's share of ad valorem taxes from seven South Texas counties for a period of 15 years to pay for the breakwater and seawall. (This would be extended twice, each time by 10 years.)
Work on the breakwater started in 1924. A railroad trestle was built into the bay and cars hauled in granite boulders from central Texas, which were dumped around the pilings. The crew pulled up the trestle deck and pilings as they moved backwards. It was completed in 1926, along with a north wing to protect the entrance to the port turning basin.
Gutzon Borglum, the Mount Rushmore sculptor, was commissioned to design a seawall for Corpus Christi in 1928. His plan included a 32-foot bronze statue of Jesus in the bay. There was a knock-down fight over the statue and the plan was rejected. There wasn't enough money at the time to build the seawall anyway. But Borglum's idea of a grand boulevard no doubt inspired Maj. Wood's plan two years later.
It was 1938 when voters approved the first of two bond issues to begin work on the seawall. The first, for $650,000, passed by a vote of 14 to 1. The following year, voters by a margin of 13 to 1 approved a $1.1 million bond issue.
Construction of the seawall could begin. A story in 1939 said storm protection was the primary purpose, but it noted that the seawall would give Corpus Christi a bayfront "second to none in point of beauty.''
Work started near the ship channel. In the early stages, it looked like a big dirt levee, which is actually what it is under Shoreline. Creosoted pilings were driven to provide a footing for the embankment. Reinforced concrete was poured in 40-foot lengths. The steps start two feet below low water and rise 14 feet above it. Behind the concrete structure is sheet steel piling and creosoted timber. The area behind the seawall, the glorified levee, was built up with dredged fill from the bay bottom. The two T-heads and L-Head were part of the plan. Originally, there was supposed to be another L-head. The first step in building the T-heads was to drive wooden pilings to outline the structure; then bay fill was pumped into the enclosures.
One of the more expensive parts of the project was a storm sewer system for the downtown. Sandwiched between the high bluff and newly elevated bayfront, the downtown is in a trough which requires pumping stations to lift the stormwater above sea level.
Work by contractor J. DePuy of San Antonio was completed in March, 1941. The city had been extended two blocks and the bayfront had been elevated to 14 feet above sea level, or 3.7 feet above the high water mark of the 1919 storm.
The stepped seawall looked like a giant amphitheater facing a sun-glinted, shimmering stage. For South Texas, it was the eighth wonder of the world. People would drive by to look and marvel. With this project, the city also gained the wide European-style boulevard and park system on the bayfront recommended by Gutzon Borglum and Maj. Wood.
Next to the acquisition of the port turning basin, the ship channel, and access to deep water, building the seawall was the single most important project ever undertaken in Corpus Christi. It was undertaken by a very small city, but there were no doubts then that it was a project worth doing, that it was worth the cost, and that it was worth the citizens taxing themselves to help pay for it. Of course, that was another time and another generation.
