San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Giant San Antonio history mural is missing
Please let me know what became of the mural installed in an Alamo Plaza walkway in 1988. My hope is the mural can be located and once again displayed so San Antonio residents and visitors may again enjoy this handsome artwork.
— Bruce Martin
This is why we can’t have nice things: San Antonio has had famously bad luck with the preservation of murals, including two created by artist/architect Roland Rodriguez.
One of those was Rodriguez’s “Victory and Triumph,” a massive architectural trompe l’oeil artwork chosen for the southern walls of HemisFair Arena through a competitive design process sponsored by Target.
Although there was talk of preserving the 1986 mural — painted on concrete-aggregate panels — when the arena was razed in 1995, it seems the art went down with the walls. At least, there are no reports of its removal or storage.
The other one, the “River Corridor Mural,” met an even more mysterious fate. It was installed in two phases, 1986-88, on the south wall of the Alamo Plaza South walkway, also known as the Crosswalk.
The walkway, which no longer exists, made a convenient shortcut between the River Walk and Alamo Plaza and then-Rivercenter mall. It was the inspiration of downtown developer Arthur “Hap” Veltman, who also commissioned the mural that graced its brick wall.
Impressed by Rodriguez’s work on the arena project, Veltman proposed a mural to add interest to the partially enclosed passageway, home to the long-gone Crosswalk Deli at the Alamo Plaza end.
“He was the best patron one could have hoped for,” Rodriguez said. “He never suggested content, didn’t give me a deadline.”
The subject was how the San Antonio River is central to the city that grew up around it, and the design was painstaking in its layers of detail as well as the physical process of assembly.
In 34 panels each 40 inches square, the design depicted the urban corridor of the river, left to right, from its origin at the Blue Hole at the University of the Incarnate Word to the Blue Star Arts Complex — 50 feet across when installed.
Starting in 1986, Rodriguez researched street grids and the original path of the river before it was channeled for flood control. Based on material
culled from libraries and archives, he included photos and drawings of “significant buildings, landmark trees, public artworks and every historic bridge over the river,” as the artist describes it. It was an appealing, richly informative artwork annotated with names and dates, adding up to a visual primer of our city’s history.
Realizing it as an artifact, Rodriguez says, was a “laborious process of
combining many images printed on clear acetate, laid out on large (40-inchsquare) plastic sheets that designated the separate colors for printing.”
The panels were made of ColorCore laminate, a sturdy, chip-proof product of Formica, a contributing sponsor along with HEWI, which supplied architectural hardware used as mile markers along the design’s river.
Rodriguez didn’t have enough studio space to fabricate all the panels himself, so construction, printing and installation were supervised by David Haynes, director of production at the Institute of Texan Cultures, and Bob Fitts, who devised the interlocking system for hanging the panels.
The completed artwork — an illustrated map of San Antonio that was theoretically movable — was dedicated in December 1988, in a ceremony with remarks by then-City Councilwoman Maria Berriozabal, who represented downtown’s District 1.
The project later was awarded the Gold Prize in Graphic Design by the San Antonio Art Institute.
How long it remained in place is hard to nail down. The Crosswalk Deli closed in 1997; the mural was still there then, as reported by the Express-News on July 22, 1997, noting that unnamed “prospective owners have agreed to donate the large Roland Rodriguez San Antonio River mural located in the Crosswalk passageway” as a tribute or memorial to Veltman. A suggested site was on the River Walk near the Convention Center — but it didn’t happen.
The Alamo Plaza South buildings that framed the passageway have been bought and sold by various investors since then. The walkway where the river mural used to hang has been enclosed and became part of the entry to Pat O’Brien’s, the legendary New Orleans bar that opened a River Walk outpost in 2003. A San Antonio-theme artwork wouldn’t have been a good fit for the home of the Hurricane cocktail.
Meanwhile, Rodriguez moved to San Francisco a week after the mural was dedicated and worked on the West Coast for 10 years before returning to San Antonio. When he came back, his artwork was gone. Its whereabouts remain “a big mystery even to me,” he says.
Rodriguez has been told that they are in storage but hasn’t been able to determine their condition, conjecturing that panels might have been damaged in removal, since his Institute partners weren’t involved. He holds the copyright on the original drawings and has thought about recreating them.
“I’ve been computer savvy for 20 years,” said Rodriguez, who lives in San Antonio and is an art director for companies on the West Coast and in Europe. “It would be easy to reformulate an updated version of that mural.”
If you know what happened to the 1988 mural, contact this column. Replies may be featured in a future column.