San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A new day but lots of unknowns for ailing plan on Alamo Plaza
Project’s ‘reset’ follows state decision on Cenotaph, councilman’s removal
Four years ago, city and state officials had re-imagined Alamo Plaza as a vehicle-free area, partly lowered and enclosed with handrails to mark the site of the historic Spanish-Indigenous mission and 1836 fort, with limited access during daytime hours.
The plan had buy-in from the city, state General Land Office and deep-pocketed benefactors, who would help raise funds for the $450 million public-private project.
Today, the ambitious plan is on life support. Alamo and Houston streets likely will remain open to traffic for several years. The flagstone-covered plaza might not be lowered 18 inches to its historic 1836 surface. And the Cenotaph will remain in place near the center of the plaza, instead of being moved 500 feet south, as envisioned in the plan.
The question now is: What can be salvaged from the grand re-imagining of the most historic site in Texas? No one really knows. At San Antonio City Hall, it’s unheard of for a councilman to be removed from a key post on a committee guiding a major project in his own district. But, frustrated after months of delays, Mayor
Ron Nirenberg last week replaced Councilman Roberto Treviño in two key committee roles.
For six years, Treviño sought to broker compromises and solutions on aspects of the project before private fundraising would begin for an Alamo museum. He worked to get consensus on rerouting Fiesta parades and redesigning Losoya Street, one block west, to accommodate closure of streets in the plaza.
The last hurdle the city had to clear to begin construction in the south end of the plaza was relocation of the Alamo Cenotaph, a 56foot-tall 1930s monument to the nearly 200 known Texian and Tejano defenders who died in the early morning battle for Texas independence March 6, 1836. Crews erected tall construction fencing and removed two 1970s plaza fixtures — a bandstand and the nonworking Lady Bird Johnson fountain.
But the work came to a halt when the Texas Historical Commission voted 12-2 in September against moving the Cenotaph — an outcome Trevino warned “spells the
end of the project.”
Members of the historical commission disagreed with his assessment. So have many local leaders who initially supported relocation of the Cenotaph. But several philanthropists with the nonprofit Alamo Endowment who had planned to raise $200 million for the museum resigned in response to the commission’s decision.
In a one-page statement last week, without mentioning the word “Cenotaph,” Treviño said the project had unraveled and no longer serves the city’s best interests. The city has committed $38 million to the project, and the state Land Office has already spent at least $53.7 million of the $100 million set aside by the Legislature for the project, according to a recent state auditor’s report.
Land Office representatives have said the agency still plans to spend $15 million on construction of a storage and exhibit facility to house artifacts donated by rock star Phil Collins and $11.6 million for ongoing restoration of the church and Long Barrack.
Nirenberg said his decision to bring in new committee leadership establishes a framework for the project to proceed with the involvement of subject matter experts and feedback from the community. He alluded to past efforts dating to the 1990s to improve the thriving plaza, which has nearly 300 years of recorded history.
“I am confident that as we go to the next phase and the redesign, we can achieve what we have been attempting to do as a community in San Antonio and Texas and the world for the better part of the last 30-plus years,” Nirenberg said.
The mayor said he has an understanding with Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush on the project’s goals and wants to keep the partnership with the state intact.
“If the city were to abandon this project, we would have no input on what the GLO or the Alamo Trust will do on the museum site and the Alamo grounds,” he said.
The mayor wants assurances on preservation of the historic stateowned Woolworth and Crockett buildings across the street from the plaza, continued pedestrian access to the plaza and flexibility on street closures.
“These are the points that the land commissioner and I have discussed as the pathway forward,” Nirenberg said.
‘Not one inch!’
Treviño and Nirenberg have said a nine-page vision and guiding principles document, drafted in 2014 by the Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee formed under thenMayor Julián Castro, must provide direction for the project.
But Treviño never ruled out the possibility of demolishing the state-owned buildings to provide space for a modern museum, and he has supported lowering of the plaza and street closures, as envisioned in the Alamo master plan unveiled in 2017.
That plan initially would have moved the Cenotaph about two blocks away along Market Street, near the site of a funeral pyre where the bodies of Alamo defenders were burned. The plan also included vertical walls made of structural glass denoting the the mission-fort’s boundaries.
The plan was updated in 2018 to exclude the unpopular glass walls, and it proposed moving the Cenotaph only a few hundred feet south, keeping it in the plaza. But many San Antonians criticized the proposal to lower part of the plaza and surround it with a 42-inch handrail or other buffer.
And many Texans opposed moving the Cenotaph, shouting, “Not one inch!” at public meetings.
The state historical commissioners said the Cenotaph, which needs repair, can be conserved without being moved. They felt its placement and artistry are elements of the historic fabric of the plaza and that it should stay where it is.
Another of Nirenberg’s priorities is to use the 26-member citizen advisory panel as a more active player in providing feedback to the six-member Alamo Management committee. The citizen group will meet virtually at 5:30 p.m. Monday to discuss what the mayor called “a reset of the project,” to take place over the next couple of months, including a change to a 50-year lease for the Land Office and Alamo Trust to manage part of the plaza.
The mayor appointed Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran to replace Treviño on the management committee and as tri-chair of the citizen panel, and he named Aaronetta Pierce, advocate for African American art and culture, as another tri-chair, replacing Lionel Sosa, who resigned after the state commission’s Cenotaph decision.
Sue Ann Pemberton, an architect and the only tri-chair to have served since the citizen group’s inception, said the project’s vision and guiding principles should remain the “driving force of any design change or implementation.” She regretted Treviño’s removal but said she looked forward to working with Pierce and Viagran.
“There will have to be a new plan, though it may incorporate components of the previous plan. It is too early in the process to tell what that might look like,” Pemberton said.
Nirenberg said the decision whether to excavate part of the plaza to the mission-fort’s historic living surface “depends on those discussions with the advisory committee.”
Pierce, 78, said her personal priorities are preserving the Woolworth Building, site of one of seven local lunch counters that peacefully desegregated in 1960, and inclusion of the role of slavery in the Texas Revolution and other African American perspectives in the project. She wants to be respectful of other views while contributing to “a collegial outcome.”
She’s hopeful that lowering the plaza and the handrails will be removed from the plan.
“It was unpopular. And the last thing we want to present to our city is an unpopular center,” said Pierce, who served in 1986 as the first chairwoman of the Martin Luther King city-county commission.
Pierce said she realized a year
ago that she could not let the story of the Alamo be told without the reality that the siege and battle kept Texas on a path toward “legal installation of slavery.” Working with history scholars, she said, she realized “that’s how all of us, primarily the majority of Black people, came to Texas.”
“And to not include that in the story is to eliminate our history,” Pierce said.
She’s approaching the new role with “hopes, aspirations and prayers for wisdom,” knowing that opinions will be varied and passions high.
“I consider it a great challenge, and yet I believe it’s founded on truth and fact,” she said.
It’s never been clear how the project will balance the 1836 events with the diverse perspectives of the Alamo’s origins as Mission San Antonio de Valero. Native American groups have demanded an acknowledgment of the more than 1,000 burials in and around the plaza that archaeologists have said occurred during and after the 1700s mission era.
Telling ‘all the stories’
Nirenberg, echoing what Treviño has advocated, supports telling “all the stories” as provided in the project’s guiding principles.
Davis Phillips, a member of the citizen committee since 2014 who runs three amusement businesses in the plaza, said the panel needs to provide clarity. There’s never been a public discussion of how much on-site interpretation should focus on 1836, versus the mission era and other periods.
“What does ‘tell the whole story’ actually mean? That’s one of the things that the citizen advisory group needs to get on the same page with,” said Phillips, president and CEO of Phillips Entertainment, which owns businesses on the ground floor of the stateowned Woolworth and Palace buildings.
He supports inclusion of Black, Indigenous and other perspectives but feels the siege and battle should be the focus.
“Because I’m telling you, the average visitor would walk away disappointed,” Phillips said. “I think those elements are important. They just need to be in proper context of why people were there.”
Phillips said the debate over the project’s interpretive focus has been “one of the fundamental differences in how the city apparently wants to approach it, versus how the state wants to approach it.”
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who had sparred with Bush last year over the project, said in a statement last week that he and the land commissioner have come to an agreement that “the story of the 1836 Battle of the Alamo must be the central focus on any master plan design.”
The project’s guiding principles state that the battle, as the most widely recognized event at the site, “provides an opportunity to tell the entire history of the Alamo area.”
Nirenberg said he believes there’s now enough general agreement among the political thought leaders to advance the project.
“The vision and guiding principles are the foundation of the Alamo plan, and will remain so,” the mayor said.