San Antonio: a city guided by its river; for decades the people and the waterway struggled to coexist. Now everyone loves this "riparian fantasy" - San Antonio's River Walk

American Forests, Summer, 2003 by Alexis Harte

A river's inclination is to change its course--exploiting the shore's variations, throwing its energy to erosion-prone banks. As cities burgeoned around once-wild rivers, there followed a period of struggle as the two forces learned to cope with each other.

When they were no longer able to change their paths, rivers would transform their characters. Following the ascendancy of rail transport in the 1800s, many became polluted, sullen places, the neglected neighbors of iron scrap yards and industrial decay. Confined to flood channels, rivers rebelled, regularly hopping their banks with disastrous results.

San Antonio is a prime example of a city and river coming to grips with each other's inevitability. Although historically prone to frequent bouts of flooding, the San Antonio River has become the well-groomed, even-keeled pride of the city

With its canopy of native cypress and oak overhanging a subterranean labyrinth of waterfalls, lily ponds, stone stairways, and trestle bridges, San Antonio's 2.5-mile River Walk is a triumph of landscape architecture on a grand scale--a monumental work of riparian fantasy. Today the river's character is shaped more by residents' whims (from an environmentally friendly Irish-green dye job to a yearly drain-and-scrub party) than by its own hydrologic leanings.

The River Walk's European Style cafes, shops, bars, and restaurants also make it a serious economic engine for the city, annually drawing more than 7 million visitors who spend roughly $800 million. An unmistakable serenity combined with thriving commerce and ample recreation places the River Walk in the forefront of urban U.S. waterfront projects and neck-in-neck with the Alamo as Texas' most popular tourist destination.

And because it provides a multitude of services--recreational, economic, aesthetic--the River Walk invites stewardship from an incredible diversity of San Antonio residents. Festivities surrounding the yearly scrubbing, in which locals pay a nickel to vote for the "King and Queen of the Mud," are indicative of the enthusiasm with which residents greet their care of this resource. The urbane river park of today, however, is the latest stage in a millennia-old human-river relationship.

The native Payapa people called it "Yanaguana," or place of refreshing waters. Arriving in 1691, Spanish missionaries found the Payapa living in "an oasis of wild grapes and cypress." Before laying down their satchels, the missionaries named it Rio San Antonio do Padua. With abundant water and unvarying climate (water temperature changes only 5-7 degrees throughout the year), the Spanish thought it ideal for the five missions built between 1718 and 1731 in and around what is now the city of San Antonio.

Unlike Texas' 15 other major rivers, the San Antonio has been spared a major dam or reservoir on its main trunk. Flowing southeasterly 194 miles through mostly mixed riparian forest, the San Antonio drains 4,180 square miles in six counties before joining the Guadalupe River. The Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, located on the confluence of these two rivers at San Antonio Bay, lies on the central neotropical migration path for hundreds of species of birds, including the world's largest existing flock of endangered whooping cranes.

While the San Antonio River system has long supported birds and wildlife, its relationship with humans has occasionally been less hospitable. Following deadly floods in 1921 that killed 50 and cost $10 million in damages, city leaders thought it best to simply bury the urban stretch of the river once and for all. A prominent engineering firm, Hawley and Freese, floated a fairly traditional plan that proposed constructing an upstream dam as a retention basin, straightening and widening the channel, and covering the downtown section with concrete. The City Council quickly approved the plans.

With construction set to begin, the city's environmental consciousness awoke with a combination of jazz-age enthusiasm and frontier determination. Vocal opponents included the San Antonio Conservation Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, San Antonio Advertising Club, and San Antonio Real Estate Board.

Among those envisioning a river park for San Antonio was landscape architect H.H. Hugman, who waxed poetic about romantic midnight gondola rides past gas lamps. "Imagine," he told skeptical civic and business leaders, "floating down the river on a balmy night fanned by a gentle breeze carrying the delightful aroma of honeysuckle and sweet olive, old-fashioned street lamps casting fantastic shadows on the surface of the water, strains of soft music in the air."

Despite the potent imagery, it took a few years to convince pragmatic civic and business leaders of the plan's merit. With the onset of the Depression, the city could not afford a plan that looked good but didn't tame the river's wild streak. And Hugman's somewhat dandified vision stood in marked contrast to the river's temperament outside city limits, where cattle ranching formed the main economic activity. Today hundreds of families still manage active farms throughout the region, a tradition that dates back to pre-Civil War times.