Category: South Texas Destinations

I think I’m done with downtown destinations (though I reserve the right to revisit downtown at any time in the future).  I should probably start to write up some of the parks that I’ve visited in the last few years.  I guess I’ll start with the park that I visited on Saturday, April 23, Denman Estate Park.

Gilbert M. Denman, Jr. was an attorney and philanthropist who lived in San Antonio.  Denman donated many Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts to the San Antonio Museum of Art (review to follow).  When Denman died in 2004 at the age of 83, his only heirs were two cousins, and so the executors of his estate broke his real estate into two parcels and sold one to the City of San Antonio and the other (which contained the structures on the property) to the University of the Incarnate Word.  The 12.52 acre parcel that belongs to the city has become Denman Estate Park.

When you arrive at Denman Estate Park, the first thing you notice is Denman’s mansion.  This is now owned by the University of the Incarnate Word and you can photograph it, but it is private property and there are signs saying that trespassers will be prosecuted.

As you travel down the 0.36-mile path, there will be a labyrinth on your right-hand side.  I like to walk the labyrinth when I visit.  After the labyrinth, the path goes around a pond.  On the far side of the pond is a pavilion donated to the park by the city of Gwangju, South Korea.  The pavilion was built in Korea and then disassembled, shipped to the United States, and reassembled by the artisans who built the pavilion.  There are signs saying that people should stay off of the pavilion.  A friend who works in the construction industry says that the pavilion was built with traditional methods.  There is not a single nail in the whole thing.  This means that it is probably not going to fall down if you go up in it, but it also doesn’t comply with San Antonio municipal building codes and thus is unfit for human occupancy in the city.  Also, keeping people out of it will keep it looking as nice as it can for as long as it can.  So just admire it from the ground and don’t go up in it.

There is another branch of the path that passes down through a wooded area behind the pavilion.  I think I’ve only been down that path once or twice, and it’s a very nice, shady walk.

In front of the house is a statue of a mermaid labeled “AMA MARIA ” and with a set of coordinates.  In Spanish, “Ama” is “he, she, or it loves,” so I assumed that the name is in Spanish.  It isn’t.  The statue is part of a charity art project to raise awareness of the state of the world’s oceans.  The explanation for the “AMA” name is that this is the title used for female pearl divers in Japan and Korea.  It looks like there are nine of them in existence, and the website tells how to purchase one, if you have €15,000 plus tax (and shipping if you live outside of Europe) burning a hole in your pocket.  AMA Maria belongs to the University of the Incarnate Word, but she is on the park side of the house.  I’m not sure if she’s on private property or not.

Denman Estate Park is a nice little park to visit if you happen to be in the neighborhood or if you have half an hour or so to spare.  The main path is labeled Level 1, so it is wheelchair accessible.  The path behind the pavilion is unlabeled, but it seemed to be no higher than Level 2 to me.  There are some waterfowl in the park.  The Sebastapol geese seem to be the most aggressive of them, and I’ve never had them do more than hiss at me.  If you happen to have any ornithophobes in your group, you may want to be cautious on your visit.

HemisFair Park is the site of the 1968 World’s Fair. It has pretty much been a standard park for a long time, a little bit of walking, a playground, buildings to look at, things of that nature.

The 20 houses that were saved from demolition prior to the fair are in the park, and are all currently empty.  A number of the other pavilions from the fair are also still there.  There is a playground and also part of the Mission Espada Acequia (I’m not sure if I’ve covered the acequias before.  They were irrigation ditches that started at the San Antonio River and traveled towards the missions).  My now-ex and I, on our first visit to HemisFair Park, got attacked by mosquitoes.  We’d been living in San Antonio for a few years by then and had, up until that point, never seen a single mosquito.  I guess the relative lack of mosquitoes is something to be said for living in a paved, clear-cut semi-arid place. Probably the only thing to be said for the paving, clear-cutting, and semi-aridness, but it’s something.

There are two water features in HemisFair park as well.  We found the first one a few years ago after the Asian New Year Festival when we took a shortcut through HemisFair Park back to our bus stop. The other we just discovered on Christmas Day of 2015.  Alex and I went downtown to see the Christmas lights and got there several hours too early.  So, we walked down to the Institute of Texan Cultures and then up through HemisFair Park.  We took a right turn when we normally make a left and discovered a beautiful fountain with water cascading down a sort of ziggurat-ish structure. We hung around there for a while, taking the path to the top and just enjoying the water.

The Mexico Pavilion from the fair is one of the only buildings that I can find in the park that’s still open to the public.  This building is now the Mexican Cultural Institute (and it is the only national pavilion, aside from the United States Pavilion, that is still in the park).  Kitty-corner behind the Mexican Cultural Institute is the San Antonio branch of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (“UNAM”).  The San Antonio campus of UNAM is primarily a language school.  I considered taking Spanish classes there at one time, but never have had the free time to do so. And if I were to do forward in my Spanish education, I would probably want to get a degree, probably a master’s degree.

There are three buildings left over from the fair which are not part of the park.  Two stand on the southern edge of the park, along César E. Chávez Boulevard.  One of these two is the John H. Wood Jr. Federal Courthouse, which originally was the Confluence Theater of the United States pavilion of the fair.  The other is now the Institute of Texan Cultures (“ITC”), which originally was the State of Texas Pavilion. The third building is the Henry B. González Convention Center.  Both the courthouse and the convention center have fallen into disrepair, which leads me to what is likely to be my final point with regard to the park.

Much of this information is soon to be out-of-date.  The city is currently overhauling the park.  There is a new convention center which, I think, is now complete. Soon the will raze the old convention center.  The city also has $135 million earmarked for a new courthouse. They will overhaul most of the park, as well. The plan is to put an apartment building in the park and there will be some retail businesses added.  I read something just today about the city wanting to put restaurants and other businesses in the empty houses in the park, and part of the population of the city is agitating to remove the ITC building and move the museum to a new location more central in the park.  The University of Texas at San Antonio, which owns the ITC, is resisting any such changes.

The ITC is surrounded by a metal fence.  I would like to see that fence done away with.  One of the big arguments of those who want to see the museum razed is that it doesn’t feel like part of the park.  Removing that damned fence would go a long way towards making the museum feel like part of the park (the other would be removing the parking lot, but in a car-centric city like San Antonio, I don’t think that will happen). I believe that the ITC is one of only three museums that I’ve been to that have fences around them. One other is the McNay Art Museum, which used to be a private home in a not-very-pedestrian-friendly area, and the other is the Vatican Museums in Italy, and it would be weird to take down the centuries-old wall there to make the museums more accessible.  I’ve been to a lot of museums mostly, but not necessarily all, in Chicago, New York City, San Antonio, and the District of Columbia. I’ve even been to the Reading Museum (because I wasn’t about to miss a chance to see England’s copy of the Bayeux Tapestry).  And people can just walk up to just about all of the ones I can think of.  Maybe I should have left this to my post on the ITC, which is scheduled for April 15, more or less, but I’m on a roll now, so I’ll just leave it.

This will probably end up being a Part 1.  Part 2 will follow in another two years or so, once they have the official opening of the renovated park.

Okay, do I start with Benjamin Milam or with the cemetery?  :flips coin:

I literally did just flip a coin there, and it came up tails, so the cemetery it is.

In the 1850s, there were two graveyards in the area near the intersection of Houston and Santa Rosa Streets.  On one side of the line which is now Houston Street (underneath where the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio is today) was the Catholic cemetery.  On the other side of that line was a public cemetery for non-Catholic burials.

After only a few years, the number of dead in the public cemetery became too great for the small plot of land and all of the bodies there, except, to our knowledge, one, were moved to other cemeteries.  That one body belonged to Ben Milam.

Benjamin Rush (Ben) Milam was born in 1788.  In the early 1800s he moved to Texas and when the war for Texas Independence began, he is claimed to have called for recruits to take the town of San Antonio by calling out “Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio?”  In one version of the tale, he is said to have drawn a line in the dirt on the ground with a stick in his hand.  This will be important later.

Milam was killed during the Siege of San Antonio by a gunshot to the head.  He was on his way to the “Veremendi Palace, which the house gained the title “Palace” because it had been home to one of the governors of Coahuila y Tejas.  The Veremendi Palace was on Soledad Street not too far from Main Plaza.  Milam’s body was buried in the yard of the house originally and later his body was exhumed and moved to the public cemetery.

Once his body was interred in the public cemetery, a marble marker was placed over the spot.  Later that marker was removed and replaced by a granite monument, which was originally supposed to have been surmounted by a statue.  They never put the statue on the monument.  34 years after Milam’s burial, they turned the land into a park and named the park for Milam. In 1938, the Texas Centennial Commission put a statue of Ben Milam holding a rifle aloft in his right hand on the west edge of the park.  Over the intervening decades, the knowledge that the granite monument was a gravestone was lost and, in 1976, the marker was moved as part of a park beautification project.

In 1993, the city began renovations on the park and the workers found a skeleton under a concrete slab.  The slab was near the center of the park and was just little larger than the size of the granite monument.  Since the granite monument was heavy and had originally been planned to be even heavier, the archaeologists who were monitoring the project decided that the concrete slab may have been the original foundation for the granite monument.  If that were true, the skeleton had a good chance of being Milam’s remains.  They exhumed the body and took it to the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

The remains were of a man of about Milam’s height who was about Milam’s age at death.  Only fragments of skull were found, but they had markings consistent with having been killed by a gunshot to the head.  Remember the stick in Milam’s hand up there?  In that tale, he didn’t pick it up from anywhere, it just sort of was in his hand.  The body was found to have belonged to someone with arthritis in his legs and back, and, well, a cane is, in fact, a stick that you hold in your hand.

Remember that that land was only a cemetery for a few years.  The odds of another body having been placed beneath a concrete slab the size of the grave marker for Milam during those few years are slim.  Add to that the fact that the body found was a male the same height as Milam makes the chance that it’s anyone else slimmer.  That plot of land was a cemetery decades before the era of the old west gunfight (and San Antonio hasn’t been so much “western United States” as “northern Mexico”).  Most of the bodies in the cemetery had died of things like cholera and old age.  As a result, the bullet wound to the head makes it nearly certain that the skeleton belongs to Milam.

The body was re-interred under the statue in Milam Park in 1994.

Milam Park is a nice little (emphasis on “little”) park. From what I can tell, it is around four acres in area and, in addition to Milam’s grave, has a playground, a gazebo, picnic tables, and a quarter of a mile of walking trails.  As with most other urban parks, Milam Park looks pretty wheelchair accessible.  The park is all level and paved and there are curb cuts.

Reference:

Exhumation of a Hero, Colonel Ben Milam: Milam Park Renovation, Phase I, Cynthia L. Tennis, Center for Archeological Research, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1995

The area where La Villita Historic Arts Village (“La Villita”) stands today has been occupied by humans for centuries.  Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, that are on the shore of the San Antonio River had been home to a community of Coahuiltecan Native Americans.  Around 1722, the soldiers from the Presidio (the Presidio was where Military Plaza and the San Antonio City Hall are today) lived in huts on that site with their families.  That community was later destroyed by a flood.

Then, in the early 19th Century, a group of immigrants from Germany built more permanent structures on the site.  The Germans were followed by immigrants from Switzerland, France, and Italy.  These are the buildings that are there today.  As with so much of the historical sites of San Antonio, the buildings of La Villita fell into disrepair.  During the Great Depression, the buildings were restored to their original condition, and La Villita began its current life as an arts center.

Today, La Villita is home to shops, galleries, and restaurants.  Several festivals are held there, including the Fiesta event, A Night in Old San Antonio (popularly called by the acronym “NIOSA”). My family and I also attended the India Association of San Antonio’s annual Festival of India at La Villita in the early 2000s.  Even though this information will be outdated in a couple of months, the 2016 festival will be held on March 26.  I do not know if it will be held in La Villita again, though.

The Arneson River Theatre abuts La Villita on the San Antonio River side.  The theater is set up in an unusual but picturesque way, with the audience seating on the La Villita side and the stage on the other side of the river.

The streets of La Villita are level, but not all of the shops are wheelchair accessible. The Arneson River Theatre has steps leading down to (or up from, depending on your perspective) the river, but I am pretty sure that there is wheelchair accessible seating at street level.