Few American cities enjoy the likes of
San Antonio's visual links with its dramatic past. The Alamo and
four other Spanish missions, plus a host of additional landmarks and
folkways surviving over the course of nearly three centuries, still
lend San Antonio an "odd and antiquated foreignness."
Adding to the charm of the nation's
ninth largest city is a bend in the San Antonio River, saved to
become a winding linear park through the heart of downtown and a
world model for sensitive urban development.
San Antonio's heritage has not been
preserved by accident. The wrecking balls and headlong development
that accompanied progress in nineteenth century San Antonio roused
an indigenous historic preservation movement - the first west of the
Mississippi River to become effective. Its thrust has increased
since the mid-1920s with the pioneering work of the San Antonio
Conservation Society.
Lewis Fisher peels back the myths
surrounding more than a century of preservation triumphs and
failures to reveal a lively mosaic that portrays the saving of San
Antonio's cultural and architectural soul. The process, entertaining
in the telling, has significant lessons for the built environments
and economies of cities everywhere.
Lewis Fisher came to San Antonio
in 1969 as a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, covering,
among other issues, conservation and historic preservation. He
later established a group of suburban San Antonio newspapers,
which he published for 21 years. He is a graduate of Allegheny
College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
and a former intelligence officer in the US Air Force. Fisher and
his wife Mary, a fifth-generation San Antonian, have two sons and
live in San Antonio.
Published by the Texas Tech
University Press
© 1996
Jacket photo of the restored Majestic Theater ©
John Dyer 1989
|
