San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Plan for Alamo likened to menu
More public meetings are set for July
During tense public meetings last week on proposed changes to Alamo Plaza, a cadre of vocal Texans showed up in force on four consecutive nights, holding up fliers bearing the words, “Don’t Move The Cenotaph” in bold black letters.
Then there was George Harcourt, a 72-year-year-old San Antonio real estate broker who got hold of one of the fliers and tore off the top so it would read, “Move the Cenotaph.”
Some descendants of Texas Revolution participants have said the monument must stay in Alamo Plaza, as a tribute to 189 defenders who were outnumbered more than 10-to-1 during a 13-day siege and killed in the battle. But Harcourt, once opposed to Cenotaph relocation, has switched sides in favor of a new proposed location.
Officials with the city, Texas General Land Office and nonprofit Alamo Endowment said they will review last week’s input and reveal a second draft plan in July in another round of public meetings. The City Council could vote whether to support an Alamo plan as early as the fall.
Harcourt is worried that if the rancor and fragmented opinions continue, the plan could lead to no real action at all.
“It’s like a Chinese menu. People are selecting different things, and no one comes up with the same meal,” Harcourt said. “If everyone is dissatisfied with everything, then it all goes nowhere.”
After Alamo devotees railed for decades for more reverence in the plaza, Texans are being presented with a plan for dramatic changes: closure of streets to traffic; rerouting of parades and funeral processions; possible demolition of non-historic buildings; fences and railings to direct foot traffic for visitors; and a new museum with galleries explaining the site’s evolution from a 1724 mission to today’s heavily visited shrine, drawing about 1.6 million visitors annually.
A line in the ground
The single issue that dom- inated last week was a proposal to move the 1930s Cenotaph about 500 feet to the south, displacing a bandstand built near the Menger Hotel for the U.S. tricentennial in 1976. A proposal last year to move the
Cenotaph two blocks, close to a post-battle funeral pyre site where Alamo defenders’ bodies were burned, was replaced with the compromise location: a highly visible spot, on a more direct visual axis with the Alamo’s iconic church, next to a “reflective area” with engraved text and low bench seating.
A contingent of people who embrace their Texas patriotism, including some who fought the city’s removal of a Confederate monument last year from Travis Park, insist the Cenotaph be returned, after repairs, to the same spot it has stood since it was dedicated in 1940. Maggie Wright, a tea party leader from Burleson and self-described Christian conservative, sounded a battle cry at Wednesday’s meeting on the South Side.
“This is where they died. They spilled their blood,” she said late in the two-hour gathering, as a crowd of 80 people had dwindled to about 50. “We’re fighting this to the end! This is a war memorial.”
Harcourt, however, supports moving the monument to the new compromise location. That, he said, would restore open space to the plaza, once the main courtyard of the Alamo fort and 1700s Mission San Antonio de Valero. Where it stands now, the 60-foot-tall Cenotaph covers nearly 800 square feet in the middle of the plaza, with trucks and other vehicles rumbling several feet away, while its statues are exposed to the elements. Children have climbed on it. The city has had to refasten Jim Bowie’s nose, which has cracked amid the heat and cold.
What bothers Harcourt and other descendants and others interviewed by the ExpressNews or overheard at meetings is not just the plan, but the way it has been presented. Attendance at last week’s gatherings ranged from about 80 on the South Side to 250 on the near North Side, with an average attendance of about 150. Nearly one-fourth of those people attended each night, many from out of town and focused on the Cenotaph.
As the week progressed, architects with the design team tried harder to connect with the audiences. Roger Walshe, head of programming and operations at Cultural Innovations, noted that he was from Dublin, Ireland, and that 10 Alamo defenders were Irish. The goal of the public-private project, he said, was to help people from San Antonio and all over the world “personally connect and have an emotional connection with the Alamo.”
“We know that probably everybody here already has that because you all care so passionately,” Walshe said Wednesday night. “We want everybody to feel that strongly.”
Not on the same page
Doug Reed, principal with Reed-Hilderbrand Landscape Architects, led presentations in the last two meetings. He told a story of growing up near the Sabine River in southwest Louisiana and visiting the Alamo as a boy, later returning as a college architecture student.
“As embarrassing as it is for me to admit this, and shame on me, I never understood the Alamo as more than those two buildings,” he said. “I never made the connection or was told it was part of a mission, and that this mission tradition and heritage extended down the river.”
Reed discussed the project’s goal to “make this heritage viscerally felt.”
“It’s about learning and feeling,” he said. “I just wanted to mention that I feel that what you have here is so precious, and that we are charged with helping you give expression to it, and to recall it for the future for all generations.”
Even without its folklore, the true Alamo story is full of emotion — courage, determination and resilience, to name a few.
It’s where famed American frontiersman David Crockett was executed after the battle, presenting himself like a lion, according to one account. The youngest Alamo defender, William Philip King, 15, had joined the siege so his father could stay with his eight younger siblings in Gonzales.
The Alamo is where Francisco Esparza, a Mexican soldado, carried off the body of his brother, with permission from Santa Anna, so that Tejano Alamo defender Gregorio Esparza could be afforded the only Christian burial among the defenders. It’s where Lt. José María Torres, a Mexican officer, was seen ripping down the banner of the New Orleans Grays on the roof of the Long Barrack, replacing it with a Mexican tricolor, right before he was killed.
Stories also abound about the site’s mission era. More than one-third of the 300 Native Americans there died during a 1739 outbreak of measles and smallpox.
But despite the design team’s emphasis on emotion, many people said the long, plodding slideshow narration about aesthetics, functionality and the project’s guiding principles came across as sterile and boring, leaving the audience straining to find reasons to support the project.
Linda Gray, a collateral descendant of two Alamo defenders, said city officials and architects failed to win enough hearts at the meeting she attended Tuesday on the North Side, even though there are “a lot of people who want to reclaim the historic footprint.”
“People checked out. They were getting antsy,” said Gray.
She hopes the city and its project partners will be ready in the next round of meetings to connect with those who love the Alamo.
“They need someone there who’s going to tell the story. That’s going to sell it,” Gray said. “We should all be on the same page. This infighting is crazy.”
“This is where they died. They spilled their blood. We’re fighting this to the end!” Maggie Wright, a tea party leader from Burleson