South Texas Destinations: San Pedro Springs Park, San Antonio, Texas

San Pedro Springs Park which has also been known as just “San Pedro Park” in the past, is (depending on how you count) the second-oldest public park in the United States.  The land where San Pedro Springs Park currently is was set aside for public use by the King of Spain in 1729, making it 95 years younger than the oldest public park in the United States, Boston Common.  The “depending on how you count” is because the Trust for Public Land, which apparently uses different criteria for “park” places San Pedro Springs Park at tenth-oldest.  Either way, though, San Pedro Springs Park is one of the oldest parks in the country.

Humans have been living in and around the area that is now San Pedro Springs Park for millennia.  When the Spaniards arrived in 1709, the area was home to a Coahuiltecan tribe known as the Payaya.  The Spaniards knew a good thing when they saw it, so they decided to move in there, as well.  Unfortunately, there were two groups of Spaniards — soldiers and Franciscan missionaries and there was apparently some kind of conflict between them.  Eventually, the missionaries set up on one side of the river and the soldiers on the other.  This is the first of the missions named for San Antonio de Padua (the final one of these is the Alamo).  The mission was moved to the other side of the river, then to where St. Joseph’s Church is today (I must remember the link when I get to writing up St. Joseph’s), and then to its final location.

In what is likely to be the most confusing sentence I will ever write, parks today aren’t what they were then.  Parks started out as land for sort of general public use.  Boston Common, the oldest park in the United States, was originally a field where residents could graze their cattle.  And so it was with San Pedro Springs Park.  The original use was primarily for travelers, however.  The travelers would let their animals eat and drink and refill their water containers in this area.  It wouldn’t become a park as we recognize the term until 1864.

Prior to 1864, one tenant of the land that is now San Pedro Springs Park was the military.  Because of this history, the stone house in the park is generally thought of as an old fort or possibly a storage building for weapons.  No one is sure where the building, generally known as the “Block House” was built, but a 1909 photograph shows a building that was already apparently old, and the architectural style looks to be from the mid-1800s.

Among the uses that we are sure the military put the land to was the garrisoning of soldiers and stabling camels that the Army attempted to use in military campaigns.  The park was also a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War.

In 1864, a man named Jacob Duerler took over the park.  He got a license to use the park for 20 years in exchange for fixing the damage done by the soldiers (and the camels) during the years when the military used the park.  Duerler opened up a number of amusements including a fish pond and a bar.  Duerler died 10 years into the 20-year period, and eventually his son-in-law took over. His son-in-law mismanaged the property and so when he wanted to break the lease early, the city allowed it.  A new tenant, Frederick Kerbel, took over and made still more improvements to the park, including landscaping and the addition of a “grotto,” generally thought to be a summer home, which stands there today, and which looks kind of like a very large statue of Cousin Itt from The Addams Family.

When Kerbel’s lease expired, the city took over management of the park.  Some of the buildings built during the era when the park was let to tenants remained, including the grotto and a strange star-shaped structure that originally had a fountain in the center.

When I first moved to San Antonio, the park had not been renovated for a long time and it looked sort of post-apocalyptic.  They have done quite a lot of renovation, including upgrades to the swimming pool and the addition of a small skateboarding park.  The park has a lot more visitors these days than I saw in my first visits, which is lovely to see.

Since San Pedro Springs Park is a historic landmark, there are some places that are not handicap accessible.  For example, the photo at the top of the page was taken at the top of a flight of stairs.  The top of that sort of bluff thing is accessible by a sloped path, however.  The “shallow end” of the pool actually is a ramp that leads into the pool, making the pool itself handicap accessible (though I’m not sure about taking one’s wheelchair into the pool itself), from what I have read.

South Texas Destinations: San Fernando Cathedral, San Antonio, Texas

I have always loved visiting churches.  We didn’t visit churches much on vacations when I was growing up, probably because my dad is an atheist.  I do remember visiting what looks like Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg in 1979 and The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1988.

And while it’s not Notre Dame de Paris, or even York Minster (as I was reminded several times by another transplant), I do love San Fernando Cathedral. I’m sort of an amateur tour guide and San Fernando Cathedral is on nearly every tour I give of the city.

The cathedral was originally the parish church for the colonists from the Canary Islands, who arrived in 1719.  The first stones of what was then called Nuestra Senora de Candelaria y Guadalupe (and which is now San Fernando Cathedral) were laid in the early 1700s.  I have seen numbers ranging from 1729 through 1738.  And, by the way, both aspects of Mary the Mother of Jesus, as Our Lady of Candelaria and as The Virgin of Guadalupe, still have their places in the cathedral.

Beginning in 1868, the building, which had fallen into disrepair, was fixed.  In addition, the church was enlarged and the Gothic front was added. One tower was finished decades before the other, and in 1874, the church was designated a cathedral. You can still see the original church if you go around to the Military Plaza side of the building.

San Fernando Cathedral San Antonio Texas
San Fernando Cathedral, San Antonio, Texas

In 2003, the cathedral underwent a major renovation to stabilize the foundation.  Additionally, according to news sources at the time, the Second Vatican Council recommended placing the altar closer to the congregation.  In aid of this, the altar was moved from the front of the church to the center of the church and the seats were placed in a sort of cross shape around the altar.

If you enter the cathedral through the left-hand (viewing from the front) door, you will see a marble casket that says that it contains the remains of Davy Crockett, William Travis, and Jim Bowie.  This is one of the most interesting parts of the cathedral for me.

In the last years of his life, Juan Seguin wrote a letter saying that he buried the remains of Crockett, Travis, and Bowie under the altar of the cathedral (which had been a parish church at the time).  In 1936, when they were replacing the altar, they did, in fact, find human remains.  This caused someone to remember the letter, and so the decision was made that these were, in fact, the remains of Crockett, Travis, and Bowie.  The remains were put on display for a year and then placed in the marble casket.

While this is a romantic story, however, there is some reason for doubt. For example, it is an established fact that the dead from both sides of the battle were burned on three pyres near the Alamo, and no mention is made of any special considerations being taken for the bodies of those three men.  So far as I know, the only fighter on the Texian side whose body was given special consideration was Gregorio Esparza.  Esparza’s brother fought on the Mexican side and he got special permission to claim his brother’s body and give it a burial. Additionally, Seguin was not in San Antonio when the bodies were burned, so he could not have separated their remains out from the rest at that point.  Additionally, the marker says that “other Alamo heroes” are in the marble casket, so perhaps Seguin didn’t separate the bodies out, but took some ashes from the pyre that the three were supposed to have been burned on.

Additionally, the story in the Express said that the bodies were found in three separate graves, and I have found that apparently bodies have been buried in San Fernando Cathedral in the past.  Two of these bodies were Simon de Herrera and Manuel Maria de Salcedo.  Both had been governors of Texas while Mexico was still part of Spain.  During the War for Mexican Independence, one of the battles, The Battle of Rosillo Creek, was fought in 1813 at a location around 11 miles southeast of the cathedral.  Following the battle, Herrera and Salcedo, among others, were executed and a priest, Jose Dario Zambrano, took at least Herrera’s and Salecedo’s bodies and buried them in the church.  Is it likely that some of the the bodies that were exhumed in 1936 were those of Herrera and Salcedo?  Maybe not.  Is it possible?  Definitely.

San Fernando Cathedral is downtown on Main Plaza.  The cathedral is handicap accessible.

South Texas Destinations: Lockhart State Park, Lockhart, Texas

I really put the mileage on my state park pass this year.  Alex and I may actually have gotten our money’s worth this year.  One of our outings was when we took a friend to Lockhart State Park.

I wanted to check out Lockhart State Park because of it was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (“CCC”). The CCC was a way for unemployed men between the ages of 17 and 28 to help the nation out and make some money during the Great Depression.  The CCC was founded in 1933 with the goal of not just keeping young employed people busy and help them become more employable, but also to raise awareness of the outdoors. And it worked, on all counts.  There was a maximum of 300,000 young men at a time in the CCC, and in the nine years that the CCC existed, over three million young men worked with them, so each young man was with them for just a little more than ten months. Each young man could enroll for up to four six-month periods if they were unable to find work at the end of each six-month period. In order to end up with an average of 10.8 months per participant, a lot of participants must have found jobs after their first six-month period, and very few had trouble finding work for the entire two years.  And the rest of the population of the United States gained a lot from the CCC as well.  Over 800 parks, 29 of which were in Texas, were built by the CCC.

So, having read about the CCC involvement in Lockhart State Park, and having seen a list of the structures they built, I had to go check it out.  Unfortunately, I decided to check it out in August, so we didn’t get to explore as much as we would have liked.

Alex and I invited a friend to come with us, and we got as early a start as we could, which was around 10 a.m. Lockhart State Park is just south of Austin, so it’s about an hour drive from San Antonio.  We had some trouble getting to the park, as there was construction on Texas 130, and Google Maps apparently didn’t know about it.  We had hoped that the construction would start after our turn for the park, but the road was blocked off just at the turn, so we had to double back.

Lockhart State Park has several amenities, including a swimming pool and a nine-hole golf course.  If you aren’t interested in golf or swimming, it is still a nice park to visit with around three miles of (unfortunately, not handicap accessible) trails and, from what I can tell, around 20 structures built by the CCC, including a recreation hall and water tower, a residence, a bridge, several check dams, and the golf course.  The swimming pool is actually the second swimming pool built at the park.  The CCC built a swimming pool which has been filled in.  You can still see the outline of the pool on the ground, however.

Lockhart State Park pool outline
The outline of the pool at Lockhart State Park

On the whole, we really enjoyed our very brief visit to Lockhart State Park and hope to return now that it’s cooler and explore more. However, unless you are really into state parks, or golf, it might not be worth a special trip.  As a side trip from a trip to Austin, however, Lockhart State Park might just be perfect.

South Texas Destinations: The Alamo, San Antonio

Nearly everyone in the United States has some awareness of the Alamo, even if it’s just our fifth-grade teacher saying “something something ‘Remember the Alamo’ something something” in social studies.  Or, “Hey! Isn’t that the movie with John Wayne?” There’s a lot of that going around.

The Alamo, more properly called “Mission de San Antonio de Valero,” was one of the five missions in San Antonio that were founded by Franciscan missionaries from Spain.  The word “Alamo” means “cottonwood,” and no one is sure how the mission got this nickname.

The original Alamo mission was in or near what is now San Pedro Springs Park (writeup to follow later, but for now, the header image on this blog is from the park). The mission moved several times over the years before finally settling in its current location near the San Antonio River.

What we see as the Alamo today is by no means the entire mission.  The mission started not too far behind the current buildings (which were the church and the convento, where the monks lived) and stretched out in front of the mission, across Alamo Street. As I write this, you can see the foundation of the original walls on the other side of Alamo Street. There are discussions of somehow rebuilding the complex, but with buildings that are also historic landmarks on the other side of the street, I find that impracticable.

You may find it odd that the Alamo grounds didn’t to all the way to the river.  That is because the missionaries set up an alternative sort of water delivery system called “acequias.” The acequia system in San Antonio consisted of seven acequias, one for each mission, one for San Fernando de Bexar, the original village that eventually became San Antonio, and another that started out as a flood control measure in the late 19th century.

Alamo acequia with koi
The acequia behind the Alamo, which was, at least in 2014 when I took this picture, home to a school of koi.

As an aside, if you know your Catholic saints, I am sure you notice that there is no St. Antonio of Valero or St. Ferdinand of Bexar.  As I point out in my post on St. Augustine, Spaniards named places after the saint’s day that they were first sighted/visited/settled.  San Antonio de Valero was founded on the day of St. Anthony of Padua.  The “Valero” comes from the title of the Viceroy of New Spain at the time, Baltasar de Zúñiga y Guzmán, duque de Arión y marqués de Valero (title copied and pasted from the Wikipedia article, because I’ve got places to go today and didn’t have time to painstakingly transcribe all of that). I would assume that San Fernando de Bexar was founded on May 30, which is St. Fernando’s feast day, and took a different part of Baltasar’s title.  Baltasar was the second son of the Duke of Béjar, Spain.   The “j” turned into an “x” as a result of Mexican influence.

The Alamo was an active church until the Spaniards deconsecrated (which is different from desecration) it in 1793.  Then when the Texians wanted their independence from Mexico, the famous battle was held at the site, which was pretty much a ruin by then, in March of 1836.  All of the adult male Texians died during the battle, though some women and children survived. One of the primary sources that historians have traditionally used are the reminiscences of Enrique Esparza, who was present for the battle, though he was either six or eight years old at the time.

This is where the “Remember the Alamo” part comes in.  The Battle of the Alamo was such a resounding defeat for the Texians that they went on to win the final battle of the Texas Revolution, the Battle of San Jacinto (“Jacinto” is pronounced, “ja-cin-toe,” not “ha-ceen-to”) in 18 minutes.

Over the intervening years, the locals scavenged the site for building stone, leaving just the church and part of the convento standing.  Texas became a state of the United States on December 29, 1845, and the United States Army rented the church, such as it was, beginning in 1846 (my fingers keep wanting to type “19” instead of “18” for the years.  This is probably a side-effect of typing birth years nearly all day at work).

The Alamo, 1840, by Moore
The Alamo in 1840, by Francis Moore, Jr. Note that the top of the front of the building is flat-ish. The United States Army added that curved parapet when they moved in 1850 or so. This image is in the public domain.

San Antonio seceded from the Union along with the rest of Texas on February 1, 1861, so that was pretty much it for the presence of the United States Army at that point.  They moved out, then back in after the Civil War.  When Fort Sam Houston was founded in 1876, the Army left the Alamo for good.

The Alamo was used for other purposes for several decades, including as a general store.  The Alamo now belongs to the State of Texas, which appointed the Daughters of the Republic of Texas as caretakers.  In 2011, care of the Alamo was transferred from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas to the Texas General Land Office.

The Alamo has another, more odd, bit of history. Moving mature trees is a thing around here.  I don’t think I’d ever heard of that before moving to Texas.  At least in the area where I grew up, if you want a tree in a location, you plant a sapling and wait, but here in San Antonio there are actual companies that exist just to move trees. The first mature tree successfully transplanted in the area is in the courtyard of the Alamo.  They estimate that the tree is around 140 years old and it has been in its current location since it was put there by Walter Whall in 1912.

As you probably know by now, I’m a Chicago girl, and when first found out that I was moving down here, a coworker told me that she had expected the Alamo to be out in the desert (probably thanks to our friend John Wayne), but that it was right downtown.  My frame of reference for “downtown” is tall buildings and big business.  I was picturing it somewhere like Daley Plaza in Chicago. I found the reality to be very different.  The tall-ish buildings part of downtown is a good quarter-mile to half-mile away from the Alamo. The area where the Alamo sits is mostly hotels, actually.  There’s the Menger (five stories), behind it is the Crockett (six stories), and to the north is the Emily Morgan Hotel (13 stories), so if you’re imagining a concrete canyon, don’t.

You will notice that I do not have any photographs of the inside of the Alamo.  This is because the Alamo has a no-photography policy.  There are photographs of the interior available online, if you want to go looking for them, but I have never felt comfortable trying to take pictures there myself.  The Alamo is handicap accessible.  I thought that the exit door had stairs, but after looking at photographs (of the outside), I see that I was mistaken.

South Texas Destinations: Museum Reach, the River Walk, San Antonio, Texas

While you are on the River Walk in downtown San Antonio, you will see occasional signs pointing north (well, generally north, I suspect there may be some that actually point east and will take you to a north/south part of the river, where the signs point north, and the river is not strictly straight, so some may point northeast or northwest) that say, “Witte Museum.” These signs will take you to the Museum Reach section of the River Walk.

The Museum Reach section is comparatively new. I remember one of my parents’ visits here in the 1990s my dad insisted on walking to the northern end of the River Walk.  At the time, the path ended near the Hugman Dam. The San Antonio River’s elevation changes pretty suddenly both just north and just south of downtown with the end result that the current was faster than Hugman would have liked for the gondolas that he envisioned traveling up and down the river.  So he put a dam in at either end of the River Walk.  The water would pool up a bit behind the dams and would slow down the flow of the water.  When they extended the River Walk to the north, they added a river taxi service and put an opening in the dam so that the boats can get through.

Anyway, back to the 1990s.  My dad wanted to keep walking, so we continued through the underbrush for another couple of blocks after the sidewalk ended. I don’t think we went as far as McCullough, though. All of that is area paved and landscaped now and it is unrecognizable from that scrubby bank that we walked along in the 1990s.

The Museum Reach section of the River Walk is designed for use by tourists, so as you go farther north, the River Walk passes several other destinations.  First is the new lock and dam that they built to take care of that elevation change and allow the boats to go on farther north on the river.  If you are so inclined, you can just stand on top of the dam for hours just watching the river boats being carried up and down in the locks.

Along the way towards our next destination, the San Antonio Museum of Art (must remember to bring these links back here once I make these posts.  If I never do, at least you will know that I meant to do so) you will find a public art installation called “Sonic Passage.” Sonic Passage is a sound-based installation, so there’s nothing to see, but it’s an interesting experience.

The Art Institute of Chicago, it is not, but the San Antonio Museum of Art, which is housed in the original Lone Star Beer brewery, has a lot going for it, including a very important, both regionally and nationally, collection of Asian art and most of the collection of Mexican folk art amassed by former Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller.

Continuing farther north, we will go under Interstate 35, where you will see another art installation, ‘F.I.S.H.” F.I.S.H. is, just like the name implies, fiberglass fish.  The fish light up at night, as well. Past the bridge is another installation, the concrete “Grotto.” Another former brewery, the Pearl Brewery, is the next stop.  The Pearl Brewery was a working brewery until 2001 and was nearly razed after it closed.  The centerpiece of the brewery, the brewhouse, was built in 1894 in a sort of I guess Second Empire style.  Today the complex is home to a number of businesses, including restaurants, a hotel, and a farmer’s market that is held twice a week.  The Pearl Brewery also has 324 apartments, so it is not just a restaurant complex, it is also home to (at least potentially) 324 families.

And I was right.  The Pearl Brewery is Second Empire. I spent several days researching the Hugman Dam, and didn’t want to lose that kind of time on the architectural style of the Pearl Brewery.  So I basically thought, “It reminds me of Philadelphia’s City Hall.  What style is that?” And Philadelphia’s City Hall is Second Empire.  So when I searched for “Pearl Brewery” and “Second Empire” I found all kinds of pages that backed me up.

Not too far north of the Pearl Brewery, the sidewalk ends at a big concrete structure that looks kind of like a dam.  It isn’t a dam, however, it’s the flood control inlet.  There is a giant tunnel underneath downtown where extra water from potential flooding is channeled underneath the city so that potential flooding won’t become actual flooding and flood downtown (as we saw in the spring of 2015, the tunnel is not 100% effective). The water comes out south of downtown and we will see the outlet in my post on Mission Reach (once Alex and I finish walking that entire distance, which probably won’t be until winter sometime — it’s October and still hot here).

If you are looking at the flood control inlet and want to continue on farther north, you have to double back to the other side of the Josephine Street overpass and go up to street level.  The other side of Josephine Street is Flood Control Inlet Park.  At the far side of the park, there’s a ramp that goes back down to the river level.

Enjoy the river while you can, because we’ll be leaving it (temporarily) soon.  The path goes under U.S. 281 and then makes a right, but the river goes on straight. Straight through the Brackenridge Park Golf Course. They don’t want tourists walking through the golf course, so instead the path goes along the southern edge of the golf course, then along Avenue B.  From Avenue B, make a left onto Mulberry and then a right onto Red Oak.  At this point, you are in Brackenridge Park.  A block or two down Red Oak, the path will meet up with the river again, but the river will never be quite as manicured as it was south of Flood Control Inlet Park.

Red Oak ends at Tuleta, and there is really only one direction to walk — right. There, at the intersection of Tuleta and Broadway, is the destination that the sign way back downtown was leading you — the Witte Museum.

It looks like most of the destinations I have covered are handicap accessible.  There’s a ramp at Lexington, just south of Hugman Dam.  There is are others at the San Antonio Museum of Art and at the Pearl Brewery.  It looks like you need to be able to navigate stairs to get down to the actual flood control inlet, but the way to get back up to street level at Josphine Street sure looks like a ramp on Google Earth.

The last time I did this walk (I’ve done it twice) there was no signage indicating what to do after the flood control inlet.  I suspect a lot of people just give up and go home at that point.  Maybe they go back to the Pearl and throw back a beer or something.  I know that if I had any interest in beer, and was less determined to find that damn museum, that’s probably what I would have done.

Texas State Parks Passes

There are 102 state parks in Texas, stretching from Resaca de la Palma near Brownsville in the south to Palo Duro Canyon south of Amarillo in the north; from Franklin Mountains in El Paso in the west to Sea Rim State Park in Sabine Pass to the east. Wherever in Texas you are, you are likely to be near (for Texas-native values of “near”) a state park. State Parks come in all sizes, as well, from the largest, the 311,000-acre (126,000 hectare) Big Bend Ranch State Park in Marfa to the smallest, the 16.1-acre (6.5 hectares) Old Tunnel State Park in Fredericksburg.

With a Texas State Parks Pass, which in 2015 costs $70, you and your guests can have unlimited visits to the parks of the Texas State Park System. “Guests” generally works out to anyone in the same noncommercial vehicle with the pass holder.  Holders of Texas State Parks Passes also get discounts on purchases in the stores of the parks and also on overnight camping, which can be done in a tent or in a recreational vehicle/RV.

This is not an ad, it’s more of a testimonial. On and off (mostly on) for the last ten years or so, I have been the proud holder of a Texas State Parks Pass. And we take pretty good advantage of our pass. Generally, my “guest” is actually a household member, my son (who has decided that he would like me to call him Alex in blog posts).  Occasionally, Alex and I will bring a friend (or two) with us to a park.

Being that Alex does not have a driver’s license yet, we haven’t wandered too far afield too often.  I am a native Chicagoan.  Where I grew up, anything farther than about 20 minutes away by car is far.  I have adjusted somewhat to the Texans’ idea of “close,” which is something along the lines of three or four hours (before we moved down here, Texans would tell us that San Antonio is close to Mexico, to Houston, and to the Gulf; the closest of these is two and a half hours away0. However, an hour, maybe as much as three for something really important, is about my maximum.  We have made it as far as the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site to the east, Mustang Island State Park to the southeast, Garner State Park to the west, and McKinney Falls State Park to the north.  Mostly, though, we stay pretty close to the city.  We visit Government Canyon State Park once or twice a year, and Guadalupe River State Park a little less frequently than that.  We also go to Lost Maples State Natural Area every few years. In another year or so, once Alex has a driver’s license, we will be able to go farther, since we will have two drivers.

I don’t know if we exactly get $70 of activity out of the pass, but we do pretty well.  It is nice to be able to go to a state park on a whim. It is also a nice feeling to know that I am helping support the conservation and preservation work that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department does.