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First, supply yourself with pamphlets and maps from the Visitors Center. Then rent a bicycle from one of those places along Seawall and ride north on 19th Street to Sealy. The heart of the East End Historical District is located between 19th and 14th, from Sealy to the Strand. Mainlanders who envision the Island as a barren sandbar are invariably amazed at the canopy of great oaks and the wall of stately palms that grace Galveston’s historic neighborhoods. Many of the homes are identified by markers: the “castle” of the Danish immigrant John C. Trube, at 1627 Sealy, is one of the Island’s strangest and most intriguing homes. It looks as though it were designed by a committee of architects. Trube, once the gardener of a Danish nobleman, had the house designed to resemble a castle in Kiel, Denmark, with battlement towers, and a mansard roof with nine gables. The house on the northwest corner of 17th and Winnie is the boyhood home of King Vidor, one of Hollywood’s best directors in the 1930s. The single most spectacular home is the old Gresham Mansion, now called the Bishop’s Palace, at the corner of Broadway and 14th. In silhouette this immense place looks like a medieval town. This was once the home of Colonel Walter Gresham, whose lobbying efforts secured federal money to widen and deepen the ship channel after the Civil War. Ashton Villa, a more delicate Victorian structure at 2328 Broadway, was once the home of Miss Bettie Brown, who scandalized Islanders in the 1880s by smoking cigarettes in public and racing unchaperoned along Broadway in a carriage pulled by matching teams of stallions—a black pair for day and a white pair for evening. It is said that on occasion Miss Brown’s ghost appears in the dead of night and plays the piano in the villa’s Gold Room.
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Gary Cartwright (Galveston: A History of the Island (Chisholm Trail Series Book 18))