San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Big Pig’s wandering trail is still hard to trace
For a few years now, the King William Association has been researching the Big Pig, currently located on South Presa Street, the site of one of the last Pig Stand locations, No. 24. My specific quandary is I cannot find a picture of the Big Pig when it was located at the Pig Stand No. 29 on Broadway, not where the current Pig Stand is located, but the location slightly south before the interstates 35 and 37 interchange was put in. I have two 1958 photos from UTSA Special Collections that are aerial black-and-whites, but I cannot see the Big Pig. I have spoken with the current owner of the Pig Stand on Broadway and she confirms when she started work there as a carhop, the Big Pig was there when the Pig Stand was a few hundred yards south. But she does not have any pictures. So, I was wondering if you have any photos of the Big Pig on Broadway.
Somewhere out there, someone knows something. A small, pig-shaped building was constructed according to a patented design. It was put to some use and then it was moved. And seemingly, no one saw it come and go. Really? It’s a building that looks like a pig … with a door and windows. The whole point of programmatic architecture is to get attention for whatever’s inside the representational structure — and no one showed off the pseudo-pig, when it was new or when it was moved? Not in photographs, news coverage, local legend? No one saw the pig rolling down city streets?
This is not this column’s first pass at the pig. That was published July 9, 1995, when the Southtown neighborhood association was gearing up to move it from the parking lot of an ice house at East White and Roosevelt avenues to what was then Pig Stand No. 24, 801 S. Presa St.
Although the cement-andsteel pig is now affectionately known as the Big Pig, it used to be the smaller of two pig-shaped buildings at a restaurant on
East White, diagonally across from the Mission Drive-in Theater, as Sarah Reveley remembers. Her parents “took us to the Mission Drive-in and seeing
the pigs was a huge thrill” through the 1950s.
A larger pig was the main building, and the piglet “moved to South Presa.” There was a
Big Pig Drive Inn on Texas 66 (following the north-south route of U.S. 281, according to Reveley’s 1936 Texas Centennial map), but whether its name was literal is not known. It was a two-pig operation through the ’50s, after which the bigger pig was torn down.
The smaller pig in question was still at that location when it was the subject of an Action Express column in the San Antonio Express, May 4, 1973. The response to a reader’s question about the purpose of “the large statue of a pig” on a side street off Roosevelt says it was built for one of the original Pig Stand restaurants and moved during the mid- to late-1930s. But was it?
Now, as in 1994, rumors swirl around the pig. It has been said to have been used as a walk-up stand for orders to go — suggested by the windows on one side — or as a carhop shelter. In fallow periods, it had been used for storage and even living quarters.
Originally white with black spots, measuring 12 feet high and 10 feet long, it appears to have been made from a design by W.H. Alston of San Antonio, patented in 1933 as a “barbecue stand.” There was one in front of the Pig Restaurant in Harlingen,
photographed in 1939 by Russell Lee, who documented American life for the Farm Security Administration. It was said to have been moved here, but its ears are flatter than our pig’s alert ones, and the windows and doors are configured differently.
The association of San Antonio’s surviving pig building with the Pig Stand chain seems inevitable, although it wasn’t part of Pig Stand’s first presence here.
Founded in 1921 in Dallas, the pioneering drive-in restaurant chain had five San Antonio locations by 1926, all on main routes through the city — Fredericksburg, South Flores, Presa, West Commerce and Broadway — with several different addresses on Broadway over the years. The original stands promised “a tasty meal served at your wheel” to customers who drove in to order sandwiches from carhops.
Starting in the early 1930s, local Pig Stands began to step up their game. New buildings had air-conditioned dining rooms, and a 1937 menu listed filet mignon with salad (60 cents) and fried oysters with tartar sauce (70 cents) as well as “Hot BBQ Pig” (30 cents). But if any of them had a pig-shaped annex, it doesn’t show up in any of the frequent, photo-illustrated advertorials they ran in both daily newspapers.
When a new store opened at
South Presa and Pereida streets, it was in conjunction with a Weber’s Root Beer stand; the two establishments occupied “the entire corner lot from
South Presa Street to St. Mary’s and fronting Pereida Street,” says the San Antonio Light,
May 14, 1932.
Unlike the city’s first Pig Stand, a small, flat-roofed stand as shown in a photo in the
Light, May 19, 1939, the new ones were much more eye-catching.
The one on Presa was larger and much more elaborate, with a pagoda-style roof and plateglass windows in the dining room, and a drive-thru window on one side of the building, surrounded by parking spaces. A later replacement on Fredericksburg looked like a streamlined, shiny white diner in front. “Modern Pig Stands of today bear little resemblance to the original stands,” said the Light, Aug. 14, 1938, “as now every convenience is afforded a patron.”
These stories bragged on all things Pig Stand, including their method of washing dishes — sterilized, washed and dried before using again — their variety of drinks (milkshakes from the soda fountain, popular brands of beer) and choice of tables, booths or counter for those who ate inside. From the mid-’30s on — after Alston’s patent was issued — they could have had a pig-shaped “barbecue stand” outside, but there’s no trace of it in the copy or photos.
Pig lore most often puts the pig-shaped stand at one of the successive Broadway locations.
Sanborn Insurance Co. maps show and label all the structures on a lot; research by Beth Standifird, Conservation Society of San Antonio librarian, traced the changes on the Broadway sites and came up inconclusive.
At the first location, 1230 Broadway, from 1926 to 1934, there’s only the stand and a “canvas covering,” probably for parked cars. At 1426 Broadway, from 1931 to 1934, there’s only a single, larger building.
As of 1934, though, there’s a new, small building at 1230 facing Broadway at the corner of 13th Street — no identification, but it has an automatic sprinkler system like the main building, labeled with an S denoting an automatic sprinkler system. By 1951, it’s gone. The property was Gene and Ted’s Drive Inn — so the pig might have moved to the restaurant Reveley remembers across from the Mission Drive-in Theater.
As for the 1426 Broadway site, it has outbuildings behind the restaurant starting in 1934, but they’re identified as “barbecue oven” and “storage,” and their shapes and sizes would seem to rule them out.
What we do know is that the pig-shaped building was moved in 1995 from the Humbert O’Con Tavern on East White at Roosevelt to 1604 S. Presa, says an account on the King William Association website.
The following year, thanks to an agreement between the association, Pig Stand’s then-owner and the lot owner, it moved to its present spot at 807 S. Presa, where it was restored by local artist Carlos Cortes, great-nephew of faux-bois master Dionicio Rodriguez. After Pig Stand filed for bankruptcy and closed its stores in 2006 — the one at 1508 Broadway reopened under new ownership — the Presa pig was donated to the association.
The King William Association is raising Feed the Pig funds for another restoration and possible move. To donate, visit www.ourkwa.org/big-pig. To share memories or photos of the peripatetic pig, contact this column.