Bay Ridge in the town of Morgan's Point is the oldest example of a coastal resort community in Texas. Situated just south of Morgan's Point, where the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou empty into Galveston Bay, Bay Ridge began to be developed in 1893–1894 as a line of long, narrow lots astride a ridge twenty feet above the bayshore. The construction of a spur line of the La Porte, Houston and Northern Railroad in the 1890s made the shore easily accessible by Houston families.
Houses graduated in size and pretension during the 1910s, but the decade of the 1920s was Bay Ridge's apogee, when elite families turned it into the Newport of the Houston area. After World War II, Bay Ridge began to be occupied year-round rather than as a seasonal resort. The Port of Houston took the northern tier of the Morgan's Point townsite, facing the Houston Ship Channel, to construct the Barbour's Cut Container Terminal, the largest container shipping port on the Gulf of Mexico, which opened in 1977.
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