Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

33. THE SAN ANTONIO RIVER WALK

122 +- +33+ THE SAN ANTONIO RIVER WALK I WAS NO T ABL E to attend the meeting in Marfa at which the Texas Tech architecture students presented proposals for rebuilding Marfa, but I enjoyed reading James Tierney's account of it in the Big Bend Sentinel. Had I been there, I would have risen in the interest of historical accuracy to correct a statement made by Midland architect Mark Wellen, who was quoted as saying in response to the proposal for a Marfa river walk that San Antonio's River Walk "also began with a dry riverbed." Nothing could be farther from the truth, and because the San Antonio River Walk is Texas's most important-and most enjoyable-public works project , I'd like to tell its story, even if it is not likely to be replicated in Marfa. San Antonio's River Walk actually began with a devastating flood on the San Antonio River, which wound in a big horseshoeshaped loop through the city's downtown business district and was wet enough for citizens to swim in, do their laundry in, and occasionally drown in. In 1921, rains upstream caused a flood that created a lake nine feet deep in downtown San Antonio and resulted in fifty deaths. The engineers immediately went to work to make sure that never happened again. Their proposals included building a cutoff channel across the neck of the downtown bend. The original plan was for the cutoff channel only to be used during floods; in normal times, the river would flow through the downtown bend. But several developers stepped forward with the idea of permanently diverting the river into the cutoff channel and filling in the old river bed; they argued that 294,000 square feet of developable land, worth millions of dollars, could be obtained in this way. The San Antonio Conservation Society and the C ity Federation of Woman's Clubs came up with a counter-proposal to beautify the downtown bend with grass and trees. While the argument was going on, a young architect, Harvey Harold Hugman, came forth with a third alternative, which he called "The Shops of Aragon and Romula." Hugman's vision, perhaps inspired by the canals of Venice overlaid with a heavy dose of pseudo-Hispanic romanticism, eventually became the River Walk, but it took the New Deal and the WPA to make it happen. Hugman presented his ideas in a set of beautiful watercolors, now in the archives of the San Antonio Conservation Society, which showed people in gondolas passing under arched bridges while diners watched them from sidewalk cafes on the river's banks. But it was the depths of the Depression, and the city was broke. A group of citizens formed an Improvement District, which issued $75,000 worth of bonds, and Congressman Maury Maverick engineered a matching Works Progress Administration grant of $450,000. (Franklin Roosevelt reportedly told his Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, to "give Maury the money for his damned river so he will stop bothering me.") Work started in March of 1939 with one thousand WPA employees building bridges, limestone retaining walls, and flagstone sidewalks. Part of the charm of the River Walk lies in the fact that there were a number of Hispanic stone masons and bricklayers among the work crews, and they used their traditional skills to interpret the architect's plans. It took almost exactly two years to complete the work, which resulted in 17,000 feet of walkways, bridges, fountains, benches, flower beds, and the Arneson River Theatre, an amphitheatre with the river separating the seats from the stage. It took even longer for Hugman's vision of shops and restaurants to be fulfilled. The first restaurant on the River Walk, Casa Rio, opened in 1946, and when I moved to San Antonio twenty years later to go to work for HemisFair, the River Walk was still fairly sleepy. +- 12 3 ''4