Saving San Antonio: The Precarious Preservation of a Heritage

by Lewis F. Fisher, T.R. Fehrenbach (Foreword)

Few American cities enjoy the likes of San Antonio's visual links with its dramatic past. The Alamo and four other Spanish missions, plus a host of additional landmarks and folkways surviving over the course of nearly three centuries, still lend San Antonio an "odd and antiquated foreignness." Adding to the charm of the nation's ninth largest city is a bend in the San Antonio River, saved to become a winding linear park through the heart of downtown and a world model for sensitive urban development. San Antonio's heritage has not been preserved by accident. The wrecking balls and headlong development that accompanied progress in nineteenth-century San Antonio roused an indigenous historic preservation movement—the first west of the Mississippi River to become effective. Its thrust has increased since the mid-1920s with the pioneering work of the San Antonio Conservation Society. Lewis Fisher peels back the myths surrounding more than a century of preservation triumphs and fai

552 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1996

Reviews

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a nice enough history of the struggles of multiple folk to preserve/repair various bits of San Antonio. There's a bit more focus on the people doing the struggling than I'd like and I'd like more on San Antonio's economic drivers throughout the periods addressed.

But what I'd really like - in this and in every other book of Texas History - is an acknowledgment that Stephen F. Austin's father led slavers to bring enslaved people into what became East Texas, that S.F. Austin spent a decade trying to convince the president of Mexico to let those slavers ignore Mexico's anti-slavery laws, and that Texas was formed by those revolting slavers, whose purpose was to keep people enslaved. That's why Texas remains the only country to have ever written slavery into its constitution.

And I really wish that I (a white man raised in Texas) had been taught this true history, rather than the Alamo-based propaganda that is pumped through the schools.