Snobs should respect attractions near Alamo
Like them or not, gaudy establishments attract tourist dollars and provide jobs
Alex Amaro remembers standing on Alamo Plaza as a 16-year-old, not admiring the Shrine of Texas Liberty, but instead studying a help wanted sign hung on a dilapidated building across the street.
Like many San Antonio teens in 2001, Amaro needed to work while finishing high school. He’d already gained experience at Six Flags and SeaWorld, but he wanted to work downtown, in the heart of the city. Donning a costume and terrifying tourists in the still-under-construction Ripley’s Haunted Experience seemed like the perfect gig.
Amaro was the haunted house’s first hourly employee, and 18 years later, he’s the director of marketing for Phillips Entertainment, the company that still operates it. Amaro, 34, still loves hearing the crowds scream as they exit the attraction. And he still loves coaching teens working their first job.
“If the city really knew how many young people this place impacts, and not just their pockets, but sometimes their family’s pockets, they’d see it differently,” Amaro told me in his tiny office above the Guinness World Records Museum’s snack bar. “There are teenagers working here who pay the apartment’s rent for the whole family.”
Since I’ve started routinely reporting from San Antonio, I’ve heard countless people decry the attractions across from the Alamo. Whether it’s the Wax Museum, the gift shops or the Tomb Raider 3D Ride, San Antonio’s high society and intelligentsia like to sneer at businesses they find indecorous.
Last Friday, though, I enjoyed an October afternoon watching grandparents with their grandchildren, young couples, groups of teens, and proud parents with sons and daughters who recently graduated from Air Force basic training visit these so-called schlock shops. They were having a damn fine time.
More than 3.5 million people a year visit the 18 businesses that the city and state plan to close as part of the Alamo’s redevelopment
plan. These workplaces employ 458 people a year with a payroll of $6 million, a survey of business owners shows.
The highfalutin among us may celebrate the closure of these popular entertainments, but the $36.4 million that the business owners invested generates $28.7 million a year in revenues. Former Mayor Julián Castro may have wanted to replace them with art galleries and sidewalk cafes, but Davis Phillips, CEO of Phillips Entertainment, questions whether they could afford his $67,000 a month lease.
“The tourists who come to visit the Alamo are not the wine and cheese crowd, they are the beer and nachos crowd,” Phillips said, counting himself among them.
The General Land Office bought the old Woolworth’s Building intending to force the attractions out, and they should move. The question is whether the city and state will help relocate those businesses nearby and save those jobs?
The redevelopment asks more fundamental questions about any change to a major historical site: Who are you overhauling it for? Should the attraction serve historians, locals or tourists? And how much should the redevelopment focus on business and jobs, and how much on community wishes?
Careful answers are needed, because when social, economic and political snobs look down their noses at something that appeals to the medianincome American, they risk angering the political zeitgeist.
The elite should remember who brings the most tourist dollars to San Antonio. They alienate the masses at their economic peril.
“A cool mix of people are able to come here, whether they like history, whether they love culture, or whether they love just partying and having fun, or having family-fun experiences,” Amaro said. “San Antonio has it all, and I think that we are part of that mix.”
These businesses also play a role in employing young people. Hundreds of teens work at these businesses in the summer, and Amaro said the opportunity to learn proper workplace behavior and professional standards changed his life and the lives of many others.
“It’s not something that they taught me at school; it’s not something that I learned at home,” he said. “It’s about learning that there is truly such a thing as constructive criticism, and it’s really just an opportunity to learn and to grow and to learn from mistakes.”
Some of my earliest jobs were working at a gaudy theme park and a rundown movie theater. I still like a good haunted house. In upgrading Alamo Plaza, decision makers should work hard to relocate these businesses in a nearby entertainment district where they can serve their customers and thrive.
After all, if tourists did not enjoy them, these businesses would not have survived the past 20 years. No one should underestimate their value — even if you don’t like their looks.