Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406270136
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
OK, so I never actually heard anyone make this play on the title of the movie of a few years back. (And OK, so that movie was set in Montana, not Texas.)
But I did see the phrase on a T-shirt as I strolled along the river as it horseshoes through downtown San Antonio.
And OK, so the wearer of the T-shirt was most likely a visitor, part of the city's booming tourist and convention trade, and not a genuine San Antonian.
But it's only because of genuine San Antonians that the river and what became the city's world-famous River Walk wasn't paved over years ago.
Instead, it has evolved, and is evolving, into a sort of G-rated Bourbon Street. The jazz isn't as pervasive, yet, but it comes without the strip joints. The food isn't as good, yet, but the drinking is generally done with meals and not in lieu of them.
And it all goes back to the 13 ladies who in 1924 organized the San Antonio Conservation Society to halt the decay of the 18th-century Spanish missions that line the river south from center city.
Today, four missions, one every couple of miles, comprise the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. All are also active parishes of the Archdiocese of San Antonio.
A fifth, the oldest and best-known of the missions though less interesting architecturally due to later remuddling, is of course the Alamo, as in "Remember the." The Mission San Antonio de Valero, to call it by its formal name, is downtown, at the northern end of the string of missions.
The Alamo, however, is not part of the national park, nor is it a Catholic parish. It is run by a different faith, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and is a shrine (I'm not kidding; that's what they call it) in the Church of Texas (just kidding now). Given the hordes of tourists that jam the place, many the progeny of Baby Boomers weaned on the legend of Davy Crockett, I imagine the Daughters' effort to insist on proper reverence is not always an easy job.
But back to the River Walk.
Organized to save the missions, the Conservation Society was soon fighting other preservation battles - not just against the elements to halt further decay of valuable historic resources, but also against the oft-seen disease of officialdom myopia.
Among the victories of the '20s was defeat of a plan to pave over the downtown bend of the river, which courses through a ravine one floor below street level. Public support for saving the river had been forged in part by a puppet show whose characters resembled the city officials of the day. The story, foresightedly dramatized by the puppets: "The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg."
Had the river been paved over, there would have been no WPA project in the '30s to build the River Walk, footbridges, open-air theater and floodgate. (The river in the River Walk area is only a couple of feet deep. Floodgates at each end of the horseshoe keep the water at that depth by shutting off the flow after upstream rains, and diverting the water into a deeper, man-made channel running between the two ends of the horseshoe.)
Had the river been paved over, the first restaurant - appropriately for San Antonio, a Mexican place - on the River Walk would not have opened in the late '40s.
Had the river been paved over, other restaurants and shops - often, the basements of businesses with first-floor operations opening on the other side at street level - wouldn't have followed.
And had the river been paved over, there would today not be the conventions and tourists - nor, perhaps, corporate headquarters attracted to San Antonio - to provide a new egg in the economic basket.
The Conservation Society is today a comprehensive historic-preservation organization, said to be one of the most powerful political forces in the city. It fights proposed demolitions of downtown buildings, helping residential neighborhoods win historic designation, and sponsors pageants, fiestas and other events that highlight the city's heritage, both Anglo and Hispanic. The spirit seems to be catching: The city's biggest art museum, for example, is in the old Lone Star brewery - very adaptive reuse, and rather like Roanoke's Center in the Square.
Not everything about San Antonio works. Downtown has its share of empty storefronts. Hemisfair, the city's attempt a few years ago at staging a world's fair, was pretty much a flop. Freeways into and around the city are overbuilt. A huge new multistory shopping a mall a block from the Alamo and news of "the biggest Hard Rock Cafe in the world" coming to the River Walk makes you wonder how much longer the blend of old and new can be sustained.
But this much seems obvious: The Conservation Society's historic-preservation victories through the years, and not its defeats, are what's making San Antonians better off today. Other places ignore such lessons at their peril.
by CNB