- City:
- Galveston, TX
- Site Type:
- Infrastructure and Utilities, Roads, Bridges, and Tunnels
- New Deal Agencies:
- Public Works Administration (PWA), Public Works Funding
- Started:
- 1936
- Completed:
- 1938
- Contractor:
- Austin Bridge Company
- Site Survival:
- No Longer Extant
Description
Galveston Causeway “carries traffic over Galveston Bay and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The original causeway was built in 1912 and carried both rail and auto traffic. The auto traffic was transferred to new causeways built to the west” during the late 1930s, “leaving the original bridge for rail traffic.” The Depression-era structure was constructed as a Public Works Administration (P.W.A.) project from 1936 to 1938. The auto bridges have since been replaced and demolished.
PWA Project No. Tex. 1968-R
Source notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galveston_Causeway Bridge plaquesSite originally submitted by Evan Kalish on May 8, 2017.
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Kathleen Tol
My father (Lovell Brown Crain) and his roommate (J. C. Byars), medical students at UTMB got summer jobs building the 1938 span of the Galveston Causeway. They were paid with “script” (a piece of paper that was a promise to pay them their wages when the state of Texas had the funds to do so). They bought a huge can of peanut butter and made a deal with the manager of a cafeteria in Galveston for one meal a day on credit, to be paid when they collected their wages. Otherwise, they would have had to sell their script to profiteers for 50% of its value if they had to have money immediately. They both lost 50 lbs. that summer wielding sledgehammers to complete the bridge. They managed to can 16 gallons of fig preserves from a huge fig tree on the property of the fraternity house on their days off. The fraternity brothers enjoyed that during the following school year.
I would like to know the dates when construction was started and ended and when that span was dedicated.