Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Wednesday, May 31, 2000

Shoreline has a long, colorful history

The first building in Corpus Christi was Kinney's trading post, perched on the bluff where Southwestern Bell is now, but most of the stores and homes in those early years were between the bluff and the water, mostly on the strand - or Water Street.
   In the mid-1840s, when Zachary Taylor's army was here, the main business district was on the waterfront. Back then, there was no clean, elegant demarcation between land and water like there is now. There was a muddy expanse of tidelands separating the town from the bay. The water at high tide lapped at the backs of buildings on Water Street which, on the bay side, faced not toward the bay but toward the bluff.
   Most of those early buildings were made of oyster shells burned for the lime and mixed with sand to make "shellcrete." (Few examples are left, but there's part of a shellcrete wall in the Executive Surf Club.) Wooden buildings became common later when lumber schooners began to ply between Florida ports and Corpus Christi. Lumber was cheap then; in one example in the 1870s, the best grade of longleaf yellow pine sold for $10 a thousand board feet.
   The first docking place on the water was built by Hiram Riggs in, I think, 1844. He laid a base of green mesquite on the sand at the foot of Lawrence Street and filled it in with oyster shells, twigs and sand. Carts rumbled along this pier to unload waiting schooners. Riggs was the town's main port merchant; his wife, Mary Hefferman, was the survivor of an Indian massacre near Beeville.
   In 1852, William Mann, the city's richest merchant, built a 170-foot wharf. Two years later, John Willet built the Central Wharf, so called because it was between the Government Wharf built by Zachary Taylor's engineers and the Mann wharf. It was probably at the Central Wharf in 1854 that a Mexican fruit vessel docked, which brought the deadly yellow fever. This outbreak claimed a fourth of the city's inhabitants. Hiram Riggs was one victim; he was buried in Bayview Cemetery.
   Shortly after the city was incorporated in 1852, it was decided the city needed a jail. The dimensions of this first jail were 18 feet by 16 feet, two stories, with a trapdoor for the occasional hanging.
   In those early times, a German immigrant named Ziegler planted salt cedars and opened a beer garden. I'm not quite sure of the location. The beer garden failed, but the Ziegler House hotel stayed in business for a long time. Another famous place to stay on Water Street was the Virginia House, sometimes called "Mann's red house.'' It was actually a complex of buildings around a courtyard that included William Mann's store, warehouse, hotel and sundry other buildings, in front of Mann's wharf. It was the shopping center of its day.
   Two years after the Civil War, in 1867, a man named Snyder came from_Indianola, crossed the reef road, and put up at the Ziegler House. Two days later he was dead, a victim of yellow fever. So many people died in this outbreak, including members of the City Council, that the town went for a year without a local government.
   Seven years later, the Central Wharf was the site of one of the biggest celebrations in the city's history. An eight-foot channel dredged across the bay made it possible for larger Gulf ships to call at Corpus Christi. The first one, the steamship "Gussie," arrived on a Sunday, May 31, 1874. The side-wheeler brought 1,700 barrels of freight from New Orleans and left with a cargo of beeves, calves, and sheep shipped by Martin Culver.
   This was the great wool era when the harbor was usually crowded with side-wheel steamers and schooners. Up to 12 million pounds of wool were shipped out of here each year, making Corpus Christi one of the wool capitals of the world.
   In this era, some of the city's Irish families, like the Shaws and Fitzsimmons, lived in Irishtown, which stretched along the waterfront from Twigg Street to where Heritage Park is today. Irishtown had its own volunteer fire company called the Shamrock Hose Co., a perennial winner in the annual water-pumping contest between volunteer fire departments.
   In the 1880s, there were only two main shipping piers left - the railroad pier at Cooper's Alley and the old Central Wharf. They were joined by more people-oriented piers.
   During the Ropes boom in the 1890s, the Ladies Pavilion was built between Schatzel and Peoples streets to provide a place for meetings, plays and dances; the city had outgrown the old Market Hall. One tableau presented at the Ladies Pavilion was called "A Dream of Beautiful Women,'' with the town's most fashionable women striking poses of famous women in history. Clara Driscoll was Cleopatra.
   In 1909, a Beaumont oilman, Jack Ennis, built the Seaside Pavilion on a pier stretching into the bay from Taylor Street. This over-the-water hotel, with a saloon and dance hall, was damaged in the 1916 storm and then destroyed in the 1919 storm. Ennis also operated the Seaside Hotel, famous for its large canopy of salt cedars. Were these the cedars planted for Ziegler's beer garden? I don't know.
   In June, 1914, J. E. Loyd opened Loyd's Pavilion and Pleasure Pier. After selling 17,186 ten-cent admissions on opening day, the cashier quit, saying she had worn out her fingers tearing off tickets. Loyd's had bathing facilities, a room for a moving picture show, and ice cream and cold drink stands.
   The Natatorium on a nearby pier had 198 separate bathing rooms where, for $1, one could get a sulfur bath, with the water piped in from the well in Artesian Square. It also featured a bathing area enclosed in a net to keep out jellyfish. One visitor said it was funny when he saw more jellyfish trying to get out of the protected area than in. The Natatorium, Loyd's and the Ladies Pavilion were destroyed in the 1916 storm.
   The city built the Pleasure Pier at the foot of Peoples Street, which became a favorite place for Sunday strolling, fishing and kissing in the moonlight.The old Japonica was usually docked at the end of the pier. The Pier Café was next to the pier on Water Street. In 1926, a family-sized seafood platter cost $1 and regular fish lunches were 50 cents. Just as storms claimed the pavilion piers, progress, in the form of the seawall, claimed the Pleasure Pier and the old Pier Café. But we gained a beautiful new bayfront.
   (This is the second of three parts. Part three will appear next Wednesday.)
  

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