San Antonio: ole for a world of changes

American Visions, June-July, 1996 by Henry Chase

The Alamo, the river meandering through the city, something of a Hispanic flavor, the U.S. Air Force bases. I vaguely remembered San Antonio from childhood visits in the early 1960's, when I was living in East Texas. In the late '80s, when I returned to the States for the first time after more than a decade in Africa, I mentioned to my parents that I was thinking of moving to San Antonio because a small, somewhat sleepy, out-of-the-way city appealed to me. They looked at me (not for the first time) with a mixture of concern and bemusement, informed me that San Antonio was now the 10th-largest city in the United States, and gave me to understand that I had better quickly get adjusted to the reality that time had passed and life had changed.

I may not have adjusted, but things certainly have changed. I know, because I'm in San Antonio watching Urban Bush Women stomp, twist and whirl at the Carver Community Center. If this doesn't raise eyebrows, then either you've lived through the country's changes or you never lived in the state in the '60s when the University of Texas, national football championship coach Darryl Royal was Texas, SNCC's Otis Lee Johnson got 30 years for selling two joints to an undercover narc, radical activists Johnny Coward and Bartee Haile got shot down in the streets of Houston during an armed confrontation with the police, and San Antonio was as upcountry for America as Shinyanga was for Tanzania or Nyala was for Sudan. Hell, New York City didn't have Urban Bush Women in those days!

Before San Antonio changed, it sailed very close to the wind, on more than one occasion almost smashing up on the reefs of appalling misjudgment. The city's famed River Walk-the more-than-two-mile stretch of shops, restaurants and walking paths-exists only because plans to cover the river with concrete and use the canal for sewage were dropped during the Great Depression. it was then that Works Progress Administration work crews completed the arched bridges, walkways and cobblestone stairways that now grace the city's water-way.

And as recently as the early 1970s, plans were afoot to demolish the Carver Community Center, which began life in 1905 as the Colored Community House and, whose present facility dates back to 1930, when it was known as the Colored Library Auditorium. With but a few missteps, San Antonio would have remained a backwater instead, within the last year, Urban Bush Women, the Dance Theater of Harlem, the Zimbabwean group Black Umfolosi, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Gregory Hines, Awadagin Pratt, Amiri Baraka, Saeko Ichinohe, the Turkish jazz group AsiaMinor and the National Theater of the Deaf have appeared on the Carver's stage.

The River Walk and the Carver add spice to the already heady brew of a Hispanic-majority city that has maintained and renewed its older buildings, whose facades are graced with the accents of Spanish architecture. Downtown San Antonio is compact, and public transport by faux trolley car is inexpensive and efficient. With the exception of the outlying old Spanish missions, which still serve as parish churches, and two commercial theme parks (Six Flags Fiesta Texas and Sea World), almost all of San Antonio's attractions are within easy reach. So all you need do to enjoy one of America's most pleasant cities is stroll about, hop aboard a trolley, check out the Tex-Mex restaurants, explore the museums and art galleries, catch a show and unwind.

The Alamo, the central cultural icon of Texas, is a must-see, though only the chapel and the long barracks still stand from that March day in 1836 hen Mexican army bugles sounded deguello (the signal that no quarter would be given) and the famous siege rapidly advanced to its bloody climax. Here, at the old Spanish mission, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Col. William Travis and 186 other men held out for 13 days before falling to the cannons, muskets and bayonets of 4,000 Mexican soldiers. Their sacrifice helped win independence for Texas-including independence from Mexico's prohibitions against slavery.

The Alamo is located in the center of downtown. Directly across from it on the tree-lined Alamo Plaza is the San Antonio Visitor Information Center (where you can get a schedule for the city's trolleys, which have special routes to San Antonio's major attractions). While the Alamo remains San Antonio's most famous tourist attraction, the modern city's greatest lure is the River Walk, 21 festive blocks of "sidewalk" cafes, clubs, restaurants, shops and hotels that open directly onto the San Antonio River. The river gently flows one level below the streets, and cobblestone walkways lead down to its relative cool. Flagstone pathways run along each bank, with cypresses, oaks willows providing shade. At night, colorful lights ornament the environment, adding their reflection to the flat surfaces of both the river and the gleaming glass buildings that line the waterway. The evening is certainly the best time to try the open-air river cruises, which cost a remarkable $4, making them one of America's best tourist values.