Print Email Facebook Twitter The Texas Coast: Ship Channel Network of the Petroleum Age Title The Texas Coast: Ship Channel Network of the Petroleum Age Author Lessoff, A.H. (TU Delft History, Form & Aesthetics; Illinois State University) Date 2023 Abstract This article provides an overview of the Texas Gulf Coast as a port city region dedicated above all to oil and gas. By the late 1800s, the same trends in transportation and industry that encouraged ship channel construction around the world drew attention to schemes to transform the Gulf Coast’s shallow bays and estuaries into inland deep-water harbors. An added factor in Texas was the vulnerability of Galveston and other coastal locations to hurricanes. Between 1902, when construction began on the 52-mile Houston Ship Channel, and the 1950s–60s, when a deep-water channel opened at Matagorda Bay along the mid-Texas coast, various levels of government—local, state, and national—combined to engineer one of the world’s most elaborate navigation networks. Six deep-water channels were woven together by Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which connected Texas to the Mississippi and beyond. During the years when these ports were taking shape, the Texas oil industry had begun to burgeon. In a reflection of the pre-Spindletop origins of Texas’s deep-water movement, policy and planning continued to assume, until oil’s dominance had become clear, that even the massive ship channels at Houston and Corpus Christi would serve mainly as outlets for agricultural commodities. It was the organizers of the state’s petroleum sector who came to understand the Texas ship channels as exemplary locations for aggregating their diverse operations. This interplay between civil engineering and the energy sector made coastal Texas into a dynamic urban port region. Petroleum and petrochemicals, however, so thoroughly imprinted themselves on the landscape, economy, and life of Texas’s oil port region that the region’s post-oil future remained difficult to envision. Subject Beaumontclimate changeCorpus ChristiHoustonpetroleum industryPort Arthurport citiesship channelsTexas cities To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d2212587-436e-48ba-8e6a-c178b185732d DOI https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v8i3.6783 ISSN 2183-7635 Source Urban Planning, 8 (3), 330-345 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2023 A.H. Lessoff Files PDF UP_8_3_The_Texas_Coast_Sh ... um_Age.pdf 7.38 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:d2212587-436e-48ba-8e6a-c178b185732d/datastream/OBJ/view