THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Winter 2018-19 61 TheCoastalBend.com Coastal Bend Community (Top) The Miramar Hotel was a beach landmark for the four months it operated before burning down; (Middle) Drawing of Gen. Zachary Taylor’s army encampment in the Mexi- can-American War, 1845. ; (Lower) Methodists at their retreat on North Beach, 1900’s. The History of North Beach Part I BEFORE THE GREAT STORM All glory and thanks to the great Bill Walraven. He was the historian of the Coastal Bend who wrote numerous books about the area’s rich past, and was a columnist for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times for decades. Bill passed away in 2013 at age 88, but left a grand legacy of deep research and analysis of the region’s history, on which many of our historical articles are now based. Thanks Bean! T he wooden bridge that passed over Hall’s Bayou connected the bustling and growing seaside city of Corpus Christi, officially incorporated in 1852, to Rincon Point, the isthmus of land that separated Corpus Christi and Nueces Bays, and where North Beach was located. From the time the bridge from the city, along with the Nueces Bay rail bridge, were constructed in the 1880’s, North Beach boomed with luxurious bayfront homes, hotels, a bathing pavilion, picnic area, shops and curios, and even a country club—that was, until, the great Hurricane of 1919. The area known to locals as Rincon was renamed Brooklyn when the city was officially platted in 1868 by Felix Blucher. Within a decade, a small community had formed on the beach and visitors began to make their way there to swim and fish. Unfortunately, agricultural and mariculture pollution had started to keep the tour- ists away, with cattle processors discarding carcasses in the streets where fish heads, crab and oyster shells and other seaborne waste had already created a foul stench that was giving the newest part of town a bad name. Before the turn of the 20th Century, Rincon was a major agricultural processing site, at one point serving as the busiest transit center for wool in the entire world. The building boom that came to the Coastal Bend in the 1880’s and 1890’s touched North Beach in a big way. Pioneer developer Col. Elihu Ropes, who sought to dredge the first deepwater port in South Texas via a pass through Mustang Island, extended his steam-driven street car line north, across Hall’s Bayou, to Rincon. While Ropes’ grand plan for a railway connecting Corpus Christi to Mexico City failed to make it past Robstown, his rail line to North Beach provided quick travel to and from the city. Investors including ranchers Robert J. Kleberg and Col. Mifflin Kenedy pur- chased $50,000 in bonds to build the luxurious Miramar Hotel on a nine-acre plot of land, roughly where the Texas State Aquarium is today. By the time electricity came to Rincon in 1889, North Beach was the site of a horsetrack, baseball stadium, and grandstand built by the Bluff City Pleasure Park Association, all located across from the new Miramar Hotel, which was under con- struction. The San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railway provided daily access to the beach as well as tour groups vacationing during the busy summer months—the momentum in the popularity of North Beach eclipsed with the 4th of July celebration of 1889. The beach was the site of sailboat races, large family picnics, horse races and two big baseball games, one of which was marred in great controversy as the Corpus Chris- ties defeated the San Antonio Little Jokers by default after a spectator hid the ball long enough to allow the winning run to be scored by the Christies. The long-anticipated opening of the Miramar Hotel took place in June 1891 and was a center of activity throughout the busy summer season. Sadly, on Sunday, Sep- tember 13, embers from the kitchen’s mesquite fire ignited bedding in a guest room above that led to the entire hotel burning to the ground—the flames were so high they could be seen from Aransas City, now Rockport, more than 20 miles away. Plans to rebuild the Miramar never materialized, and the site later became home to the Spohn Sanitarium, Corpus Christi’s first full-service hospital. Amid a generally bad economic environment, by 1894 the post office at Rincon that had opened in 1891 had closed, and the outlook for North Beach at once looked grim.