San Antonio, Texas, has not had as great an opportunity to decimate itself with misguided urban renewal projects in the way that other cities have, but, the city still managed to makes some terrible demolition blunders.
A few that were lost in San Antonio, Texas:
Texas Theatre, (1926-1982)
(Photo from
CharmaineZoe's Marvelous Melange on Flickr)
(Photo from
UTSA Special Collections)
Once the largest theater in Texas and even billed as the "finest in the South," this in 1926 Spanish Rococo Revival landmark from on San Antonio's bustling Houston St. was demolished during the height of urban stagflation in 1982. Downtown theaters were dilapidating all over the country, and city councils were desperate for any corporate investment that offered the promise of downtown renewal. RepublicBank of Dallas offered to build a corporate office tower, but the theater needed to go. After a protracted legal battle with local preservationists, the city allowed the swift demolition of the theater under the promise that RepublicBank would save the façade:
(Photo by
Kevin G. Saunders on GigaPan)
(Photo by Bob Owen for
The San Antonio Express-News)
(Photo by
Joanne & Tony DiBona Photography)
The contrast of the gaudy theater decoration against the stunningly banal bulk of the office tower perfectly memorializes the architectural travesty. RepublicBank ultimately collapsed during the '80s savings and loan crisis, leaving their boring building. It eventually became the headquarters of SBC, which, having regrown back into today's AT&T, abandoned the tower for sexier corporate digs in Dallas. Downtown areas with interesting histories and urban lifestyle attractions have since become popular again, but we have already shortsightedly lost a key landmark of our downtown urban fabric and replaced it with banality. There had long been hopes of joining the various downtown theaters in San Antonio into a performing arts district, but a key component of that plan, sitting on today's Riverwalk, was long ago sabotaged by a city council futilely hoping to land a big bank.
Ken Erfurth has put together a Flickr album showing the sad destruction of the Texas Theatre:
Texas Theatre 1926-1...
Blue Bonnet Hotel (1927-1989)
(Postcard originally published by Hannah-Robinson Color Productions and
image hosted on HipPostcard)
One of San Antonio's many historicist revival buildings constructed in the Roaring Twenties, opening in 1929 just in time to meet the Wall Street crash and the resulting Great Depression. By the 1970s and '80s suburban flight had drained downtown, leaving many of these buildings threatened. When the hotel was foreclosed, new owner MBank sought to demolish the building before it could receive a historic protection and leave the site a park until the market could allow for an office tower alongside the nearby Weston Center complex. However, MBank itself also failed as the savings and loan crisis topples banks across the nation, cancelling any lofty plans for the cleared site to become an office tower. It became a parking lot and later a garage.
Local history recounts that the hotel's pioneering recording studio was used in the 1930s for recordings of local and regional singers and musical artists of the country, blues, Hispanic, cowboy, and folk genres of the period. A transmitting aerial allowed for local radio broadcasts.
It looks like any old, prewar downtown building in the U.S., but consider its former urban context and its current status as the site of a parking garage:
(Photo from Lewis F. Fisher,
Saving San Antonio: The Preservation of a Heritage (Trinity University Press, 2016), The Institute of Texan Cultures, and the San Antonio Development Agency)
(Photo by Austin Seymour Masterson and
hosted by miaht82 on Flickr)
(Imagery from Google Earth)
The movement now is for downtown residential development, and had we saved this building, not only would we have kept a piece of local history and our historic and
photogenic urban fabric, we would also have a potentially choice building to redevelop next to an already successful residential reuse of a historic building. Instead, we have a parking garage desperately trying to be colorful, and lots of brown modern buildings that are ugly as hell and cannot hope match the picturesqueness of the equally brown but far more visually interesting and detailed historic buildings.
We've actually demolished our cityscape, along with its signage and sidewalk canopies, and are only now trying to figure out how to build it back:
(Photo by Zintgraff Studio and hosted on
Zintgraff Studio Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections -- Institute of Texan Cultures)
This is so marketable...
(Photo by Mel Koenning for
The San Antonio Light and hosted on
San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections -- Institute of Texan Cultures)
Unfortunately, half the buildings in the picture above no longer exist.
(Photo from Google Earth)
Katy Depot, Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, (1916-1969)
(Postcard originally by The Fox Company and
image from TheAlamoCity.com)
(Photo
hosted on ebay.uk)
(Photo from
Texas Transportation Museum)
(Photo from
Texas Transportation Museum)
San Antonio's south end station serving the regional Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad was a Mission Revival landmark directly modeled after the Spanish colonial
Mission Concepción, the city's oldest mission and today a World Heritage site. Locally popular, the railroad's heyday was the diesel era of the 1950s. However, faced with the rapid expansion of the interstate highway network and the development of jet travel, the M-K-T too would struggle through the collapse and consolidation of American railroading companies in the 1970s, and would close this station in 1964.
(Photo from
Texas Transportation Museum)
Demolished in 1969, the site of the former Katy Depot, with the railroad yard becoming apartment complexes and the site of the depot main building eventually becoming a La Quinta Inn. Almost all traces of the little depot building have been erased, but remnants of the tracks remain running through middle of the development block following the line of the former terminal station platforms.
(Imagery from Google Earth)
Interesting, San Pedro Creek runs through the middle of the site in a covered trench/tunnel beneath the former rail yard. The creek had long been relegated to an ugly drainage ditch, but it is now slowly being redeveloped as a linear park paralleling the more famous Riverwalk. I do not know what is the planned for the creek project at this block, but it would have been interesting if, had the picturesque depot not been demolished, the preserved building could be integrated as a community landmark into the linear park project. If I really wanted to dream, a reconstruction of the depot would become the southern downtown light rail station, part of a ring of historic Mission Revival style stations that would also include the surviving former eastside
Sunset Station and the westside
International & Great Northern Depot, both of which are already being targeted as transit centers. From the first old photo we can even see the catenary lines of the old streetcar system, which connected the stations and downtown together in an integrated and comprehensive transit system. Oh well, water under the bridge now--or maybe, more accurately, water under the rail tracks.
This could have been a charming modern transit hub, but, instead we now just have yet another anonymous, nondescript suburban block.
(Photo from Google Earth)
(Poster art by Bern Hill and hosted on
Texas Transportation Museum)