Proposed Alamo Plaza changes

4 ideas, particularly about access, likely to stir debate

Proposed changes to Alamo Plaza — a topic that draws excitement, objections and strong passions — are the subject of four local meetings this week to gather input before the City Council decides on a plan for the historic mission and battle site.

Councilman Roberto Treviño, who serves on two committees guiding development of a long-range Alamo master plan, said the meetings are among many to be held before the council likely will take action in the fall. People at the meetings will see a presentation on a draft site plan for the plaza and surrounding area, and will have a chance to ask questions or provide comments with note cards or texting technology.

Ultimately, the goal is to improve the plan and its many facets, said Treviño, an architect.

“In any major project, you want to find common ground and get to what is the right solution,” he said. “We’re try-

ing to make room for all of those thoughts and conversations.”

The draft plan envisions:

Closing sections of Alamo, Houston and Crockett streets to traffic, tripling the pedestrian space.

Defining the outer footprint of the mission and battle compound and adding gates, fences, landscaping and 4-foot-tall rails.

Lowering the grade in the plaza by 16 inches to its historic level. Demolishing, in part or in full up to five buildings along Alamo Street in the plaza.

Constructing a museum to house indoor galleries, in conjunction with open-air displays and replicated features in the

plaza.

Relocating the 1930s Alamo Cenotaph to about 500 feet south of its present location, to return the plaza to its earlier appearance as the open, main courtyard in the walled-in mission and fort.

Limiting access

While the latest iteration of the plan drops the unpopular idea of vertical glass walls, there remains the issue of access to the plaza, which is owned by the city and has been for more than 100 years a busy urban square.

When the latest plan was first publicly presented June 7 to the 30-member Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee, one consultant talked about “organizing people’s access to the site.” When the Alamo itself is open, from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., visitors might be asked to go to “one of those specific moments of entry” to begin a tour of the plaza, Eric Kramer, principal with Reed-Hilderbrand Landscape Architects, told the panel.

Slides projected at that meeting showed a primary entry point to the plaza on the west, with secondary entrances on the south, northwest and northeast. To the east, the

1930s Alamo Garden, which is outside the 1836 footprint, would be enclosed by a high fence, with gates to the north and south.

Some committee members and others have raised concern about ease of access to the area for the general public, including downtown residents, workers and others walking through. Members of the design team have said they are looking at different options for the Alamo’s north wall and its main gate to the south that could affect access to and from the plaza.

“I want to be sure that the plaza is open,” said Sharon Skrobarcek, one of three mayoral historical appointees to the citizen committee and a member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, which long maintained and operated the Alamo before the state took it over.

Closing streets

Another issue that design officials have said is critical to the public-private plaza makeover project is closure to traffic. The biggest change would be removal of vehicles from Alamo Street, which has two northbound lanes. Some people, including citizen committee members, have said they want more details of the street plan, which also recommends modifying five traffic signals and removing four others where streets would be closed.

Pape-Dawson Engineers, hired by city to do a downtown traffic study in 2012 that it updated last year, has proposed converting Losoya

Street, now one-way southbound, to two-way, with one northbound lane. To the immediate west, Presa and Navarro streets have a combined northbound capacity of 1,200 vehicles per hour — twice the northbound capacity Alamo Street has, officials said.

“There’s a lot of capacity on Presa,” one block west of Losoya, said Gene Dawson, PapeDawson president.

Conversion of Losoya to two-way traffic, he said, would clean up the confusing “torch intersection” at Convention Plaza, where the Torch of Friendship sculpture is located. It now has “three clustered intersections” that leave motorists waiting in stop-and-go mode, at risk for collisions, he said. Dawson said consolidating the area to two intersections would make it more intu- itive for drivers, especially visitors.

Closure of a section of Houston Street, near a point where traffic already bottlenecks by a cul-de-sac north of the Alamo, will have little impact, he said, because of the low volumes — 200 vehicles per hour eastbound and 100 westbound during peak periods.

Razing buildings

Although the design team said it hopes to at least save the facade of the 1882 Crockett Building, it’s studying various demolition options for the structures on the west side of the plaza, to make room for indoor museum and outdoor pedestrian space and to create new views of the Alamo church. That concept, while embraced by fans of an 1836 interpretation, is drawing opposition from preservationists.

Mardi Arce, a citizen committee member and superintendent of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, said she has mixed feel- ings about razing the buildings, but does not support preserving only the facades.

“Either they’re there, or they’re not,” Arce said of the structures.

Moving the Cenotaph

The most contentious issue in the Alamo plan may be relocation of the massive Cenotaph featuring “The Spirit of Sacrifice,” by sculptor Pompeo Coppini. Although the plan no longer proposes moving the monument two blocks to a pocket park along Market Street, Alamo defender descendants and others oppose a compromise to move it to a spot in front of the Menger Hotel. Arguing that the Cenotaph is a symbolic tombstone of the defenders, whose bodies were burned after the battle, some have said it should be repaired but left in its present spot in Alamo Plaza.

Design consultants have said the Cenotaph would be treated with more dignity in its newly proposed location by the Menger, far from rumbling trucks and buses that now pass by the monument, and in a more direct line of sight of the mission-era church. Design renderings show the Cenotaph in a “reflective area” with engraved text and subdued bench seating.

Forrest Byas, descendant of Alamo defender Andrew Kent and a member of the citizen panel, said he would like a different compromise that puts the Cenotaph some 200 feet south of its current spot, near the site of the main gate that once was used to enter the Alamo from the south.

“If it is the tombstone, the grave, the tombstone goes at the head of the grave. It doesn’t go at the middle of the grave,” Byas said. “So I’ve always been for putting the Cenotaph at the south gate.”