Water Rails & Oil - Historic Mid & South Jefferson County

In the end, the gambling parlors and cathouses
closed down and bars and nightclubs were forced
to obey state laws against the sale of liquor-by-thedrink.
Many Port Arthur residents who lived
during that era still claim that the city lost much
of its allure and grandeur when James left town.
The latter half of the twentieth century was
not kind to Port Arthur: a successive string of oil
busts knocked the petrochemical industry from
its once lofty position, forcing the plants to
tighten their belts, computerize processes, and
lay off workers by the thousands.
The city also suffered growing pains similar
to those challenging other cities in the nation.
As the center of commerce shifted away from
downtown to undeveloped areas in the
outskirts, the white population moved to larger
homes and to suburban towns surrounding Port
Arthur. As social pressures changed, the
African-American community moved into the
older neighborhoods vacated by the whites. But
with fewer jobs that required more education
and training, fewer city residents were filling the
precious few industry jobs.
Port Arthur continued to lose retail
businesses that moved nearer the higher-paid
population in the suburbs. But with the
beginning of the new millennium, retail
businesses began to return to Port Arthur, along
with jobs, although they were primarily for a
lower-paid, unskilled local job market.
Several plants announced major expansions in
the latter 1990s, which pumped billions of dollars
into the local economy and prompted more
commercial expansion, including new retail,
residential and hotel development, along with oil
industry support and subcontracting businesses.
With things looking up, the summer of 2005
brought old realities into perspective. While the
city of Port Arthur, nonprofit charity providers
and others struggled to provide disaster
recovery for Hurricane Katrina victims from
New Orleans, a new Gulf hurricane forced those
efforts to be redirected as Rita bore down on
Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana.
After reaching Category 5 strength in the
open Gulf waters, Hurricane Rita dipped to the
third lowest pressure (897mb) ever recorded in
the Atlantic basin. With a flooded New Orleans
fresh in our minds and another “storm of the
century” looming offshore, Gulf Coast residents
from Houston to the Atchafalaya Basin were
ordered to evacuate on the morning of
September 22. The evacuation routes turned to
parking lots and emergency shelters as far north
as Texarkana, Fort Worth and Dallas were filled
to capacity, as were the hotels and motels.
Most urgent was the evacuation of residents
with medical special needs from private homes,
nursing homes, assisted care facilities and
hospitals. Port Arthur firefighters and police
officers went without sleep for days as they
cared for those who could not care for
themselves. Evacuation ambulances were
rerouted to other areas of the state, so quickthinking
first responders called in U.S. Air Force
C-5s and C-130s that lumbered, overloaded,
from the Southeast Texas Regional Airport until
a mere four hours before Rita struck land near
Sabine Pass.
About ninety-eight percent of the city’s
residents were evacuated and were not allowed
to return home for almost two weeks, while city
crews removed debris and electrical workers
struggled to return power to the tens of
thousands of customers in the dark.
Damage from Rita is estimated to exceed $16
billion over all, with Port Arthur receiving at
least a quarter of that. Intrepid city residents
bent into the task of digging and cutting their
way out from under devastation that many had
never encountered before.
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Above: In celebration of the nation’s
bicentennial in 1976, student artists
designed and painted numerous
murals on downtown Port Arthur
buildings, each with images
representative of freedom or the
cultural heritage of the city’s diverse
citizenry. Many of these murals
appeared in German director Wim
Wender’s 1984 film Paris, Texas,
written by Sam Shepard and starring
Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja
Kinski and Dean Stockwell.
Below: Mardi Gras of Southeast Texas
attracts more than one hundred
thousand visitors to downtown Port
Arthur during the annual four-day
celebration. This scene of Procter
Street taken from Beaumont Avenue
in 2002 shows the opening night
Mardi Gras crowd for the tenth
annual event.
Sharing the Heritage ✦ 57