Nirenberg’s Alamo ‘reset’ has great potential
After years of stops, starts, setbacks and disappointment, Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s call this week for modifications to the Alamo Plaza redevelopment plan holds enormous potential.
Nirenberg’s “reset” promises to get the besieged project completed.
We can hope.
While the city’s plan is still to improve and expand the historic site, perhaps it might do so more modestly while telling the complete story of the Alamo. Boldly and with intent. Nirenberg’s belief in the project and his willingness to see its failings, to date, could help improve the tenor of conversations and overcome whatever local, state and federal obstacles the project will face.
Most of all, rebooting the plan can help heal wounds the project created and those of the Alamo itself.
The story, if fully recognized and told, must include the role of slavery in the Texas republic and the myth-making that followed the famous 1836 battle. Both will create a better understanding of the here and now.
Nirenberg has appointed several people to bolster the project’s management and the Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee, whose members have felt sidelined.
City Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran, who replaced Councilman Roberto Treviño, will serve on both the Alamo Management Committee and as tri-chair of the citizen advisory committee.
Arts and civic leader Aaronetta Pierce will serve as another trichair of the citizen panel.
Both will do a better job of listening to criticism and input from the citizen advisory committee.
The mayor also appointed scholar Carey Latimore to the citizen advisory committee.
A revamped Alamo Plaza can enrich the visitors’ experience.
If done right, the project will acknowledge those who built it, forged the state’s future from it, died and were buried there.
An estimated 1,000 Native American graves have been documented on the site. The Alamo is sacred ground for many reasons.
City Manager Erik Walsh will lead the city staff ’s work on amending the Alamo Plan. The city is contributing $38 million to the $450 million public-private redevelopment.
Another critical change happened last year when Alamo Trust CEO Doug Mcdonald left his position with a hefty bank account and little for which to thank him.
The Alamo Trust’s portion of the project remains the design and construction of an Alamo museum.
The Texas General Land Office will continue its work of restoring the Alamo Church and Long Barracks and handling improvements to the Alamo grounds.
Advisory committee member Ramón Vásquez, a Native American tribal leader in San Antonio who sits on the advisory committee, has renewed hope in the project.
“I welcome the changes,” he said. “Treviño and Mcdonald were major obstacles for this project. They didn’t work with the (citizen advisory) committee and the wealth of expertise on it.
“Relationships were damaged,” Vásquez said. “I look forward to talking about damage repair.”
He has been most focused on the archaeological impact the redevelopment will have on the site. He also expressed hope a modified plan will better address federal and state regulatory processes early, not as afterthoughts.
“I feel that moving forward on any decision we are involved in, we need to know the regulatory process and how it might impact every decision we make,” he said.
Vásquez has long said he never “felt heard” by project leaders. He hasn’t been alone. Pierce felt the same way.
But she was moved by the mayor’s call for a complete telling of the Alamo’s history and for preservation of the historic Woolworth building, a landmark of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
For her, including the role slavery played in the development of Texas will be critical to the project’s reset.
Pierce, who has become a student of the Texas republic period, said she has long “wanted to make sure that finally the truth would be told. That African Americans could learn the truth of how they came to Texas.
“Everyone needs to know the truth,” she said. “When you know better, you do better.
“Our history is painful, but if we know who we are we can grow from it.”