San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A quick guide to planning an Alamo visit
You’ve heard of the Alamo, but what do you really know of its history?
Here are a few tidbits before visiting the state’s most popular historic site, which is now in the middle of a massive upgrade and expansion. Appreciating the Alamo’s many historical crosscurrents and connections to popular culture might enhance your experience.
What happened there?
It was San Antonio’s first permanent Spanish-Indigenous mission and a cemetery for nearly 70 years, then a military outpost, a fort, the scene of a horrific battle, a U.S. Army depot and a commercial area. Only in the 20th century did it become a historic site overlain with an aura of reverence as the “shrine of Texas liberty.” That’s a lot of history!
Although the Alamo is best known for the 13-day siege and battle for Texas independence in 1836, those in charge of preserving it now are committed to telling the full story, dating to its 1724 founding as the Mission San Antonio de Valero. The prevailing Anglo-American view of its importance will be one of several perspectives: Tejano, Mexican, Native American and African American.
“We’re a 300-year-old historic site with so many important milestones here, and to answer that question, we explain every single milestone. So a two-second question the visitor thought they were asking is close to a 5-to 10-minute answer,” said Jennifer Castillo, sales and marking coordinator at the Alamo.
Site makeover
There’s been unprecedented support and cooperation in recent years for a public-private project to upgrade the physical footprint and interpretive experience of the mission and battle site. The Alamo’s $550 million makeover is being led by the city, Texas General Land Office and nonprofit Alamo Trust.
Amid controversies over street closures and historic nearby buildings, some early design elements drew strong opposition, including proposals to relocate the 1930s-era Alamo Cenotaph, lower part of the site by 18 inches and surround portions of it with vertical glass walls.
Those elements have been dropped. The Cenotaph will be repaired in place. The historic Woolworth and Crockett buildings will be preserved as part of a visitor center and museum, set to open in 2027.
A new collections center and Alamo Exhibit opened in
March. Outdoor additions in the plaza represent historic architectural features of the fort. A new education center is under construction, to open in 2025, and the southern portion of Alamo Plaza is being renovated.
Once the visitor center is completed, the 1.6 million people who pass through the site annually are expected to increase to 2.5 million.
Planning a visit
The website, thealamo.org, offers information and links for booking tours up to 60 days in advance. As part of her job, Castillo takes calls from anyone who needs help. The Alamo also has a guest experience team on-site that works to “make everyone’s visit here memorable.”
“They’re all about customer service, and not just customer service with a smile. It’s customer service with historical knowledge and making every visit here one that you want to do again and again,” she said.
The Alamo is shifting away from a timed-ticket system implemented during the pandemic for free entry to the Alamo Church. Visitors still are encouraged to reserve a date and number of people in their group to access the church and Alamo Exhibit. The site also offers selfguided audio tours, 45-minute tours led by a guide using audio technology, a bus sightseeing tour and private tours during and after regular hours.
Questions about slavery
The newly established Republic of Mexico had vast amounts of land, but few willing to move to the remote territory of Téjas, with its harsh conditions, isolation and exposure to Comanche raids.
So Mexico, concerned about that exposure, accepted groups of settlers from the United States.
It required them to become Catholics and obey its law against slavery, but enforcement was lax. Many Americans were streaming in illegally, and even the legal ones brought enslaved people with them. Mexico City’s attention was distracted by attempted coups, insurrections and arguments over whether the new nation should be federalist, centralist or ruled by a monarchy.
The role of slavery in the 183536 Texas Revolution has long been debated. Some who supported Texas independence had urged a federalist model for Mexico, like the system that kept a lid on divisions over slavery in the United States. Mexico’s assertion of centralism pushed them to revolt.
The Texas Declaration of Independence didn’t mention slavery — it cited grievances regarding the right to bear arms, religious freedom, due process and other issues. But the first Texas constitution established slavery and excluded Black and Indigenous people as citizens.
To bring clarity to how the issue should be presented at the visitor center, the Alamo Trust has commissioned scholar Andrew Torget to produce a paper on the subject. In his 2015 book, “Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 18001850,” Torget wrote that slavery was one of “a complex tangle” of factors that led to the Texas Revolution.
Pee-wee’s basement
A new pop culture fixation at the Alamo came to life in 1985, when the film “Pee-wee’s Big
Adventure” was released. Actor Paul Reubens, as the lead character, a hyperactive man-boy with a red bow tie, visits the Alamo searching for his bicycle and asks where the basement is.
There’s no basement at the Alamo, a tour guide tells Pee-wee, as other Alamo visitors laugh.
That’s the movie. But there is a basement at the Alamo — two, actually. One is located under the 1930s gift shop, and a smaller one below Alamo Hall, a meeting venue on the grounds that was built in 1922 as a city fire station. Reubens, who died in July, got a tour of the gift shop basement in 2011 while taping a segment for the Bravo network cooking show “Top Chef.”
The Collins connection
While many young people aren’t familiar with Phil Collins, adults who remember his music dating to the 1970s as the drummer for Genesis and a solo artist have been curious about his obsession with the Alamo. That seed was planted when he watched episodes of Disney’s “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” as a boy in Hounslow, a district in western London.
Collins recalled first seeing the Alamo with fellow Genesis member Peter Gabriel in 1973, after a performance in Houston. Collins began collecting artifacts from the 1830s and visiting the site regularly in 2006. He donated his collection of about 400 items to the Alamo in 2014 and has commissioned other work related to the site, including seven bronze panels there that show its appearance during different periods of history.
Collins also recorded the narration for a diorama in the Alamo Exhibit. He is an honorary member of the Alamo Trust board and was named an honorary Texan by the Legislature in 2015.
Presidents and Ozzy
John F. Kennedy gave a speech at the Alamo while campaigning for president in 1960, and other commanders-in-chief have appeared there, including both Roosevelts (Theodore and Frankin D.), Harry S. Truman, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton.
Less-dignified brushes with celebrity involved rock stars, including the Rolling Stones, who posed for irreverent group photos in front of the church in 1975. Ozzy Osbourne was arrested for public intoxication after reportedly defiling the Cenotaph in 1982.
The Alamo has some photos and memorabilia connecting the site to celebrities in its collections center exhibit, and it plans to display other pop-culture photos and artifacts in the new visitor center, including a coonskin cap worn by John Wayne in the 1960 movie “The Alamo.”
Just this year, celebrity sightings have included ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, football commentator and former NFL great Terry Bradshaw, Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama and Guns N’ Roses bass player Duff McKagan.
21st century Alamo
Today’s Alamo seeks to be more welcoming and accessible to people of all backgrounds, including those with mobility challenges, as well as people with sensory sensitivities or other difficulties associated with autism, dementia, posttraumatic stress disorder and other conditions.
The site last year announced a partnership with KultureCity, a nonprofit providing assistance with staff training and equipment such as noise-canceling headphones, fidget tools, verbal cue cards and weighted lap pads that are available to visitors who might feel overwhelmed.
The Alamo also is developing an app to help people plan visits, purchase tickets and use augmented-reality features at the site, “so they can basically lift their phone up and use it as a window back into time” to see how it appeared in 1836 and other periods of history, said Jonathan Huhn, director of communications and community outreach.
The Alamo offers one-year individual and family memberships that support the site, starting at $50, that provide discounts on tours, special events and gift shop purchases, free entry to the Alamo Exhibit, a monthly e-newsletter, early ticket sales for events and other perks.