San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
No efforts to save historic home-turned-club
If you’ve seen the recently released documentary “Hap Veltman’s San Antonio Country,” about the history-making gay nightclub at 1122 N. St. Mary’s St., or remember visiting it during its 1970s disco heyday, you might have wondered how such a preservation-minded city allowed the old rock structure to be torn down in favor of a parking lot.
Heaven knows it was a place that never shrank from attention.
The house was built in 1924 of “random rubble” for a dentist, John B. Wagoner, and his wife, actress Maria Ascara, who grew up in San Antonio and had a career on Broadway and in touring plays before returning to her hometown, according to a narrative written in 1980 by local historian Maria Watson Pfeiffer for a Texas Historical Commission marker application.
The house was tailored to Ascara’s theatrical tastes, with dramatic details inside and out. The interior featured a tower bedroom reached by a spiral staircase and a living room with a replica of the Rose Window at Mission San José, a massive fireplace with a mantel decorated with Indian motifs and a stage where Ascara performed for guests under a triple-dome ceiling fitted with lights that changed color.
After Wagoner’s death in 1939, Ascara sold the house and moved back to New York to become a drama coach. The property changed hands a few times and housed the Manor Tea Room/ Manor House Restaurant until it was rented to Walter Koenig, a German-born and trained pastry chef who reopened it in 1957 as the Old Heidelberg Restaurant (briefly Manor). The restaurant had “one of the most authentic German atmospheres to be found anywhere in the country,” according to a San Antonio Light advertorial, Nov. 7, 1956.
Over time, Koenig and his wife, Hortense, experimented with different attractions — a coffee house, a patio with live music and singalongs, sidewalk café, beer garden, private party room and Old World October Festival with “plenty of draft beer.” The restaurant offered to-go orders, free parking, “traditional American breakfast” (pancakes, waffles and coffee cake), German specialties (pigs’ knuckles, bratwurst and sauerkraut), short orders and wedding buffets, staying open from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. to accommodate it all.
The Old Heidelberg’s bakery was probably the apple of the chef’s eye. Koenig, who came to this country in 1952, had a sideline as baker of choice to the Democratic elite. Before his move to San Antonio, he made President John F. Kennedy’s wedding cake; after, he supplied yearly birthday cakes for former Vice President John Nance Garner and catered events for President Lyndon B. Johnson, including a dinner at the LBJ
Ranch for West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
Koenig died Dec. 17, 1970. Foreclosure forced the sale of the restaurant Dec. 7, 1971. Equipment and fixtures — from a “Germanmake oven” to draft beer dispensers — were sold in a bankruptcy auction the next year.
After some remodeling, local businessman Hap Veltman opened his history-making nightclub on the premises in April 1973. As the documentary explains, it wasn’t the city’s first gay bar, but it was the most high-profile of its kind and soon drew straight as well as gay customers for the latest dance music and a lively, diverse scene.
Early on, the Country, as it was known, had some skirmishes with military police during an effort to place it off-limits to personnel. Veltman, supported by prominent civil liberties lawyers Maury Maverick Jr. and Gerry Goldstein, emerged victorious from hearings before a military disciplinary control board at Brooks AFB, reaching what Veltman called “an informal truce.”
“Beginning with a simple bar, the club has grown to include a large dance floor and a theater,” said the San Antonio Express, July 25, 1976. A theater company produced gay-themed plays (“The Killing of Sister George,” “Steambath”), and the club produced a popular annual drag show, the “October Extravaganza.”
On weekend nights especially, an eclectic crowd packed the house and lined up to gain entry. While straight people came to dance to the latest records, the crowd was primarily gay. The Country “represented the single most social scene for an individual who has been classified as a member of this group,” Veltman said in a July 27, 1975, San Antonio Express-News article on “S.A. Gays” written by Jack Handey. (Yes, the “Saturday Night Live” humorist got his start writing in this newspaper.)
Toward the end of the disco era, Veltman and his club entered a protracted wrangle with Valero Energy, a corporation that had moved into a nearby building and wanted to buy out the Country to build a parking lot on the site.
After lengthy negotiations, Veltman sold the property in November 1981 for $1 million – twice Valero’s original offer — and invested the money in a new gay bar, the Bonham Exchange, still at 411 Bonham St. The application for a historical marker for the unique building on St. Mary’s was withdrawn.
In short order, the Wagoner House/Old Heidelberg/Country was demolished.
There’s no record of any protest at the city’s Office of Historic Preservation or the San Antonio Conservation Society, nor does historian Pfeiffer recall any outcry about the destruction of the structure.
“The house was so compromised by then that I don’t think it was on the preservationists’ radar,” she said. “There had been so much coverage of the fight over the property that perhaps no one wanted to take it on. Fighting to save a gay nightclub at that time would still have been a bit bold and probably controversial, and also probably not perceived as a winnable fight.”
Veltman died in 1988.
Some elements of the old stone house remain. Joan Duckworth, office manager of the Bonham Exchange and caretaker of the Hap Veltman Estate, confirmed that stones salvaged from the rubble of the old house were used to build a rock wall that still surrounds Veltman’s former home on River
Road, where the Wagoners’ Rose Window also will be installed. Both, she said, “will be a permanent part of the estate.”