San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Conservancy maps a future for a historic park in decline
For nearly 123 years, Brackenridge Park has served as a refuge for San Antonians who want to get away from the city and have a picnic, take a walk under the shade of a forest or relax beside a peaceful stretch of the San Antonio River.
In decades past, the park offered donkey rides, a carousel, a gondola skyride and paddleboats, but those activities are no longer available. Parts of the park have fallen into ruin: Retaining walls along the river are crumbling, and most of the seats at the 91-year-old Sunken Garden Theater have collapsed. Invasive species have taken over the forest, blocking the sunlight for native plants.
Last fall, the Brackenridge
Park Conservancy, a nonprofit that advocates for the park, released an extensively researched report, known as the Cultural Landscape Report. It laid out threats to the park in dire terms.
“At present, Brackenridge Park is in decline,” the report says. “Its historic and public value have become less and less comprehensible.”
The conservancy is seeking public funds to restore the park’s ecology and its historic features, such as the Lambert Beach swimming hole. It is seeking money from the city’s upcoming bond program, including $5 million to revive the Sunken Garden Theater as part of a proposed
$62 million public-private plan.
The rehabilitation will likely be a decades-long process, said Nick Hollis, incoming chairman of the conservancy’s board of directors.
“How do you eat an elephant?” he said. “You eat it one bite at a time.”
Hollis, who owns cybersecurity company Coherent Cyber and health care company United Allergy Services, has long been an active player in San Antonio’s civic life. He formerly served as chairman of the San Antonio River Foundation and chair of the San Antonio Public Library Foundation.
He recently sat with the Express-News to discuss the decline of Brackenridge Park, the difficulties of competing for bond dollars and the value of incrementalism
in historic rehabilitation projects. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: How does Brackenridge Park differentiate itself from other parks in San Antonio? A: The history, really. This park, the river itself and around the Blue Hole (natural spring), has been in constant habitation for almost 14,000 years. Every time you put a spade in anywhere around the park, you’re going to find some artifacts.
Also, it’s 300 acres of parkland in what is now a re-urbanizing
area. You’ve got Broadway and the Broadway expansion. You’ve got the Pearl and the expansion north of the Pearl. This sits right in the middle of a lot of the new growth in San Antonio.
Q: What caused the ecological damage?
A: Just the sheer volume of people. Nobody is intentionally doing damage to the park, but you put 1.5 million people through an ecological area, which is not well-defined, which is not well-maintained, and you’re going to find a lot of ecological damage. There’s some damming going on in the river, there’s runoff going into the river these days, so the river is not in pristine condition. The trees have not had the attention that’s necessary over the last 30 or 40 years, so they’re suffering.
Q: How do you hope to reverse the damage?
A:
The first thing is getting rid of the invasive species. You know, light is extremely important to all plants, and especially the native plants, and they’re being crowded out by bamboo and all sorts of nonnatives. We’ve got to get in there and grab those all out. In fact, we’re going to be bringing some goats in to do the initial brush clearing. They do a fantastic job. You put them in an electric-fenced area and you just let them eat everything they possibly can. They’ll take out the invasives on a temporary basis.
There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on the ecological side. What we’re trying to do is to generate income sources where we’re able to take care of those things. The Sunken Garden Theater is an opportunity for us to to create an income source. Possibly the Midtown (Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone).
Q: How much will it cost to do everything that needs to be done?
A: Let’s put it in perspective. One of our San Antonians, a woman called Betsy Barlow Rogers who was instrumental in setting up the conservancy, in fact also set up the Central Park Conservancy (in New York City). Now Central Park, I think, has about 600 acres and we’re about 300 acres. Since the ’70s, when she began
that, they’ve invested $1.4 billion in bringing Central Park back. So let’s assume, then, that we’re half of that. The numbers we’re talking about are in the $400 (million) to $500 million range over a 30- to 40-year period.
But with advocacy, this community is becoming wealthier and wealthier. There is more money available in bonds, there is more money available in TIRZ, there is wealth being created here in the tech community. Our businesses are growing and flourishing. So I see a combination of things happening here where we’re going to be bringing in additional sources of money, and what seems like a ridiculous amount of money today will over time, I think, be very, very achievable.
Q: Do you feel that the park has been overlooked?
A:
Oh, yes. We sat down at a joint meeting of the partners in our area, the (San Antonio) Botanical Garden, the Witte (Museum), the (San Antonio Zoo) and ourselves. We meet on a regular basis. And (Witte President and CEO) Marise McDermott pulled out a document that showed investment in cultural institutions in the last 10 years in San Antonio. The total was $167 million. Only $2 million went into Brackenridge Park.
That, historically, is what the problem is. Now, that has improved a little bit — we got $7.5 million in the last bond. But you’re only at $9.5 million in an ocean of $167 million in improvements happening elsewhere. So, yes, the park has been chronically underfunded. It’s certainly been appreciated, but it’s been very underfunded.
Q: What is it like to go through the process of seeking money through the bond? I would imagine it’s pretty competitive.
A: It’s extremely competitive. The first place that you need to go is to the city, the Parks and Recreation Department, because they have many, many competing priorities as well. So you’ve got to convince the people that
are actually running these things every day what the priorities are and where money should be going inside of the parks budget.
Then you’ve got to get support from your council members and from the community for the project that you’re working on. Not everybody is going to be standing up and saluting and saying they want these things. You know, there are plenty of people that like things just the way they are or have other spending priorities.
Then you’ve got to work within the political process and all of the necessary meetings, then you’ve got to work through the community process. So it’s a very rigorous process. It takes a lot of work. Really, as soon as this bond is out, you start the process for advocating for the next one.
That’s how long it takes.
Q: What kind of feedback have you gotten from the public on what should be done?
A: The feedback is we want more maintenance, we want things that are broken fixed. We want to be able to see through the park, we want better hike-and-bike trails. We want more access to the wilderness area.
The other thing that came out: People want to keep the historical features. They want the park to be like how they remember it as children, when there were paddleboats, when there was a carousel, when there was a sky ride, when there were donkey rides. There is a lot of history here that people remember about Brackenridge Park, and they want to see that brought
back and maintained.
Q: There was controversy with the master plan drawn up for the park in 2017 because in an early draft it would have closed roads and removed parking, and some of the people who use the park weren’t happy. Did you learn from that?
A: Well, that was not Brackenridge Conservancy’s master plan. That was the city’s master plan. As far as doing outreach, we all learned, at that point, that we needed to do more outreach. That was another reason for the Cultural Landscape Report. The report looked at the park differently from the way a master plan looks at it. It didn’t look at it from the point of view of structures; it looked at it from the point of view of the community and its cultural importance.
Q: How do you plan to bring out the layers of history? A: We’re going to be highlighting the first part, the ecology. That will take care of the river, but we’ve also got to take care of the invasives, we’ve got to take care of the trees. All of that work is going to go on every day.
But people are drawn to capital
projects, so they’re going to be drawn to the repair of the pump house and that area, they’re going to be drawn to the Sunken Garden, they’re going to be drawn to the hike-and-bike trails, they’re gonna be drawn to things that seem more tangible than runoff, or trees, or invasive species. But once you clear out all those invasives in that wilderness area and you can see through it, it will transform the park.
Big grand master plans, in the past, have cost a lot of money. They garner a lot of attention, negative as well as positive, and they typically end up in a drawer somewhere. The idea of doing this is to have a vision of where we want to go. The (Cultural Landscape Report) is an excellent place to start. Identify the projects, and then roll them out over time, rather than this big grandiose idea of getting $200 million and completely transforming the park. I think incrementalism, in this case, is a good thing. Generally, I’m not for incrementalism, but I think in repairing historic structures, and an historic park, which people are using today, I think incrementalism is going to be successful.