Scattered Work

Defining the Alamo

My most recent column in Plaza de Armas covers an ongoing debate about how to improve Alamo Plaza — and in the process how to understand its meaning to San Antonio visitors and residents. My characterization of the factions was informed to a large extent by a recent article in the Express-News. Today I received a thoughtful response from Gary L. Foreman (author of the Alamo Plaza Restoration Project) that I think is worth publishing in its entirety. I certainly hope his understanding of the planning process is more accurate than what came across in my column and in the Express-News piece, and there are reasons to think it is. The Alamo is a contentious place, which makes it fertile ground for a vital dialogue about history, culture, and place. My hope — and I think Gary’s and Phil’s — is that we can use this dialogue to build a stronger community.

Mr. Judson,
A brief introduction — I’m Gary Foreman, author of the Alamo Plaza Restoration Project. Phil Myrick of PPS drew my attention to your recent and timely column about the potential transformation for this historic space and I wanted to take a few moments to share some thoughts on the subject.

Although some people have anticipated this exercise as extremely politically sensitive, the public forums professionally conducted by the city and PPS are showing that perhaps a major tipping point has been reached in what people now expect of this Plaza environment. Will there be 100% agreement? Of course not, but now there is more to agree about than disagree. Part of that comes from a momentum that has been developing since the early 1980s as sincere philosophical exchanges about what the Plaza could be has resulted in a series of studies and debates that basically led us to where we are today. In your column you mentioned that there are three camps with three ideas. We think that the camps are blending quickly because the uniqueness of Alamo Plaza can no longer be denied. In other words, it’s the History that now drives the design and intention. Those of us in the ‘History Camp’ actually feel the proposal is typical of a world-class historical site, and not glitzy. The statement made by a single DRT official is not necessarily representative how a majority of ‘Daughters’ feel about that space. Many will tell you that all ‘shrines’ need education and interpretation about its evolution. Likewise, the ‘Placemaking Camp’ understands now that Alamo Plaza is unlike other urban spaces and that the passion for finally interpreting this rich history is paramount to typical considerations, something the locals do understand– as witnessed in the public discussions. They, like the visitors, want to feel the past and see it come alive in an appropriate setting.

Finally, we’ll be submitting the thousands of letters, petitions, and notes we have collected during the last decade from concerned Texans and Americans and delivering them to city and state officials. These statements fundamentally remind us why millions invest their time, money, and passion to visit this ‘Sacred Ground.’

We look forward to a personal meeting with you in the near future.
All the best,
Gary

Tags: Alamo Plaza, Alamo Plaza Restoration Project, Project for Public Spaces, public meetings

Taking back the streets

Southwestern edge of HemisFair Park, at the corner of S. Alamo and César Chávez (Durango)

This article was originally published in Plaza de Armas.

“The current situation is one where we have a variety of buildings on the site, in what appears to be a random order, because there’s no particular logic or sense to their organization … We have an enormous convention center, and we have what is left over after all those buildings have been put in their places or left where they were, that’s been called the open space. It lacks clarity.”

This is probably the most concise description of HemisFair Park I’ve ever heard. It came from David Alpaugh of Johnson Fain, the firm leading the development of a new master plan for the massive, 40-year-old downtown park and cultural center.

The framework for the plan was unveiled at a public meeting on April 26, and will be presented to City Council in early May, after incorporating community feedback. The primary tool that Johnson Fain proposes to remedy this lack of organizational structure within the site is the reinstatement of significant parts of the street grid that existed before 1968, when the park was built to house the World’s Fair.

Rebuilding the street grid — which includes Goliad, Water, Matagorda, Indianola, Labor, and others — will involve the destruction of a number of the post-1968 buildings, while restoring context and access to many of the buildings that survived the creation of HemisFair.

Another key recommendation of the framework plan is to make both South Alamo and Durango streets more pedestrian friendly, by narrowing them, expanding on-street parking, widening sidewalks, and bringing in landscaping. The team hopes that by making these thoroughfares less daunting to cross, and opening up more portals to the park along them, HemisFair will become a more cohesive part of the city.

The planners at Johnson Fain aren’t the only people hankering to reconfigure San Antonio’s streets. The Midtown Brackenridge Master Plan, released in February, also puts a strong focus on turning streets into usable public spaces. Although the Midtown Brackenridge plan looks only at the streets and neighborhoods around Brackenridge Park, while the HemisFair plan is mostly focused on the park site itself, the two projects have much in common. The former proposes to remake Broadway as “the ‘extended living room’ of the City,” using the same structural changes Johnson Fain recommends for Durango. It aims to make Avenue B (which runs parallel to Broadway) into a woonerf, a type of anarchic road found primarily in the Netherlands on which pedestrians, bikes, and cars all have an equal right to the street.

Underlying both these plans is the idea that streets are public spaces, not just big pipes for moving cars from one parking lot to another. Where streets have become barriers — as Broadway is between the Mahncke Park neighborhood and Brackenridge, or as Durango is between Lavaca and HemisFair — these proposals hope to heal the divisions the streets have created, and knit the city back together.

The “healing” I’m talking about here is only partly metaphorical. There are very real ways in which pedestrian-hostile streets like Broadway are harming our health. A recent study in the Journal of the American Planning Association used data from San Antonio to better understand what makes streets safe for different types of users. It found that large, arterial surface roads are more dangerous not just for cyclists and pedestrians, but also for motorists. And it hardly needs to be said at this point how a lack of walkable places contributes to diabetes and obesity rates.

If we look around San Antonio, it’s not hard to find these situations. San Pedro Park is divided from San Antonio College by a very unwalkable San Pedro Avenue, and, as many have pointed out, the entire East Side is separated from downtown by I-37.

In an interview a few days after the latest HemisFair meeting, William Fain told me that the team is considering several approaches to overcoming the physical and psychological barrier presented by the highway just to east of the park. One idea, which he says his team got from the meeting, is to create another boulevard between the freeway and the park that would share the comfortable, tree-lined feel of the renewed Durango, and offering a welcoming face to the east. The planners are also lobbying to run a proposed east-west streetcar line right through the middle of HemisFair. The park would then become a central public space, connecting Lavaca to downtown, and offering a passageway from the east side to the west side, which both contain many neighborhoods historically neglected by planners.

Taking the street seriously as a public space is a step that San Antonio sorely needs to make. As Christopher Alexander, et al. wrote in A Pattern Language, “Many of the greatest places in cities, Piccadilly Circus, Times Square, the Champs Elysées, are alive because they are places where pedestrians and vehicles meet.”

The usability of streets is not a zero sum game: places become great because they work on multiple scales. A street that’s more safe and pleasant to walk is also more safe and pleasant to drive. These are streets that belong to neighborhoods, rather than just demarcating them. If these two planning efforts are successful, San Antonio will be a healthier, better connected city.

Tags: Brackenridge Park, Complete Streets, HemisFair Park, Johnson Fain, street safety, streets

Main Plaza Farmers’ Market

My girlfriend, who just wrote an article on the San Antonio Food Bank for San Antonio Magazine, tipped me off to a new farmers’ market in Main Plaza organized by the Food Bank on Tuesdays. We went down there today to check it out. It’s pretty small — the first image below shows about the entire extent of it.

The only thing missing from this photo is a booth selling some pretty tasty fish tacos, courtesy the Food Bank’s Catalyst Catering program. The market’s just getting off the ground, and it’s only there for a few hours around lunch time on Tuesdays. But for at least those few hours, this farmers’ market provides the best tomatoes within a five mile radius of my house. The carrots are quite good as well.

Tags: farmers' markets, food, Main Plaza, San Antonio Food Bank

Low traffic, expensive downtown

The Express-News reports that San Antonio’s congestion rates are lower than any big city in Texas. A trip in San Antonio during rush hour takes 16% longer, on average, than it does during free traffic flow times; in Dallas, that figure is 22%, Houston clocks in at 25%, and Austin is the worst at 28%. (The number of hours each person wastes in traffic each year is lower in Austin than in Houston or Dallas, however, presumably because people living in Austin have shorter commutes.)

Anyone who spends time in these cities knows that San Antonio’s traffic is pretty mild, especially if you manage to avoid the area around 281 and 1604. But it occurred to me as I was sitting in SmartWay SA meetings last year that this low level of congestion could be hampering San Antonio’s will to diversify transportation options. After a light rail plan was voted down in San Antonio in 2000, the idea was effectively killed for a decade. Now we’re coming back around to the idea, although it looks like a slower (and probably more politically savvy) strategy is in place: start with Bus Rapid Transit and downtown street cars, and slowly warm voters up to the idea of light rail. Meanwhile, Dallas, Houston, and Austin already have functioning light rail systems in place.

I wonder if there’s an analogy here with downtown San Antonio’s reliance on tourism. I’ve heard that because the city can fill big hotels downtown, real estate is pricey, so offices and residential developments are difficult to finance. (Although developer Ed Cross thinks it’s possible, and certainly has put his money where his mouth is). So while the tourism industry has kept the core of the city somewhat lively during the decades of urban decay experienced throughout the United States, it may be holding back growth now that people are actually ready to move back into urban centers. We usually see the number of downtown residential units pegged at around 3,000 (although depending on what you consider “downtown,” the figure could be as high as 23,000); it’ll take a lot of Vistanas — at under 300 units a pop — to get to Cross’ magic number of 10,000 downtown residents.

If San Antonio’s successes in highway infrastructure and downtown tourism are analogous in that they both create a risk of complacency, they are also linked in a more literal way: a thriving downtown will partly be driven by a robust and diverse transit system. The City is working on both these problems simultaneously, as are developers prescient enough to see the long-term trends and ignore the immediate lure of Stone Oak’s high income levels. But educating voters about the need for these improvements will be that much harder; after all, traffic isn’t that bad, and downtown seems more like a nice tourist stop than a rotting core in desperate need of attention.

Tags: development, downtown, Ed Cross, hotels, light rail, tourism, traffic