photo courtesy of San Antonio CVB
San Antonio is world-famous for its River Walk, the linear park that snakes through the center of town, one story below street level. Enhanced greatly over the years, this Paseo del Rio become a crowd-pleaser that, instead of fading away like so many urban innovations, seems to keep getting better.
And longer: Lately, the city (with other public and private parties) has been busy extending the corridor.
The idea for the River Walk was born more than 80 years ago after a killer flood nearly led the city to pave over the San Antonio River. Alarmed citizens banded together as the San Antonio Conservation Society and saved the stream, which architect Robert Hugman proposed transforming into a romantic passageway echoing the Spanish Colonial past. In the late 1930s the city, using WPA funds, launched the project.
Over the years, shops, restaurants, hotels, and civic spaces began cocooning the river. In May 2009, the $75 million, 1.3-mile Museum Reach extension opened, nearly doubling the walk northward out to the Museum of Art and the 1894 Pearl Brewery live/work/play complex.
photo courtesy of San Antonio CVB
The reach, still urban but not as confined as in downtown, offers walking and biking trails, overlooks, water features, and a dazzling collection of public art. Beneath an overpass, Donald Lipski’s fiberglass sunfish “swim” above the river; Bill Fontana’s sonic passage bathes one in live and recorded sounds culled from locations along the stream; and Carlos Cortes’ exotic grotto with waterfall, though made of concrete, looks as organic as it can be. Even the new locks that access the upper stretch are a delight to the eye. Floating on a barge up the Museum Reach, as I did one evening recently, is pure pleasure.
Soon the corridor will also head south, along the eight-mile Mission Reach. There the city pulls away from the river as it traverses a less crowded setting of neighborhoods and parks, including four Spanish missions. The river, much of it now a flood control channel, will return to a semblance of its old self with the reinstatement of vegetation, aquatic habitats, and natural flows. Four “portals”— prominent architectural and landscape features echoing mission themes — will encourage visits to these historic outposts.
Spain established the missions in the early 18th century, using Indian converts to build each walled compound — church, monastery, dwellings, workshops, and granary — and to work at nearby farms and ranches. “In the process of creating Spanish citizens, they created a whole new culture,” says Al Remley, chief of interpretation at San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. “It was a complete transformation.”
photo by Eleanor Hendricks McDaniel
The most celebrated is Mission San José, whose church disports a limestone frontispiece of dizzying ornamental density. Populated with symbols and holy figures ranging from clam shells to the Virgin of Guadalupe, this recently cleaned facade “once again tells a story,” says Remley. Just outside the walls stands the state’s oldest grist mill, which still runs thanks to an intact acequia (irrigation system) fed by the river. Features like this make San José popular with day-trippers, who also stop nearby at missions Concepción, San Juan, and Espada.
Completion of the Mission Reach, expected by 2013, “is going to fundamentally change the south side of San Antonio,” says Remley. “We’ll have an incredible recreational opportunity.” As more visitors — hikers to bikers to joggers — find their way to the missions, the idea is to support their continuing restoration and to add new attractions like the Spanish colonial demonstration farm planned for Mission San Juan.
“The river is no stranger,” boasts a slogan of the San Antonio Convention and Visitors Bureau. Now, it’s become an extra-fascinating friend.
One good book: River Walk: The Epic Story of San Antonio’s River
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