American Forests: A City Guided by Its River

For decades the people and the waterway struggled to coexist. Now everyone loves this "riparian fantasy."

Beyond The River Walk

Leaving the idyllic shade of the River Walk, the San Antonio Rivers heads southwards into trapezoidal, cement channels through the Historic Mission Reach. This once-meandering nine-mile stretch skirted through five of the original Spanish Missions, including the Alamo.

Successors to landscape architect H.H. Hugman pored over the smallest details to balance aesthetics and flood prevention within the city center, but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was far less imaginative elsewhere. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the Corps straightened and contained the river, removing large numbers of trees and other vegetation-standard flood-control practices in that era.

To the south, the straightened San Antonio River no longer abutted the missions themselves. The river that attracted and sustained the earliest Native American settlements and later Spanish settlers was detached from both its ecological footprint and its historical context. While effectively preventing devastating floods, the alterations were a triumph of function over form. Residents' affection for the River Walk is matched only by their distaste for the river's decrepit state outside town.

With a zeal reminiscent of the downtown river park's champions, the San Antonio River Oversight Committee was formed in 1998 to confront blight, lack of access to the missions, and loss of ecological integrity in the River's southern stretch. The Committee also considered aesthetic improvements to the four-mile stretch north of the city (known as Museum Reach). Under the San Antonio River Authority's supervision, the city of San Antonio, Bexar County, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are collaborating to restore these sections to their past glory without undermining flood control progress.

The Committee hired the firm Carter & Burgess, which opened its initial plans for public review in June. The 10-year, $180 million project departs from the Corp's past reliance on culverts, channels, and dams. By acknowledging and guiding the river's energy-rather than trying to simply contain it-the northern and southern stretches will regain much of their natural course and character. Released from its confining channel, the river will be widened and its banks recontoured to allow for natural dispersal of floodwaters during and after heavy rains. Meanders will be created to reunite the river and the five missions.

A massive reforestation and planting effort will include more than 40 native species. Besides attracting back native fish and wildlife, streamside and watershed planting will improve water quality.

A revised trail network, complete with public art and interpretative tools, will provide bicycle and pedestrian access from downtown, allowing the missions to regain their stature as a premier tourist destination. According to the senior program manager with Carter & Burgess, public support is overwhelming. "Residents have weighed in on many issues," Kevin Conner says, "but mostly they want to know how soon this can happen."-Alexis Harte

By Alexis Harte

A river's inclination is to change its course-exploiting the shore's variations, throwing its energy into erosion-prone banks. As cities burgeoned around once-wild rivers, there followed a period of struggle as the two forces learned to cope with each other.

When they were no longer able to change their paths, rivers would transform their characters. Following the ascendancy of rail transport in the 1800s, many became polluted, sullen places, the neglected neighbors of iron scrap yards and industrial decay. Confined to flood channels, rivers rebelled, regularly hopping their banks with disastrous results.

San Antonio is a prime example of a city and river coming to grips with each other's inevitability. Although historically prone to frequent bouts of flooding, the San Antonio River has become the well-groomed, even-keeled pride of the city.

With its canopy of native cypress and oak overhanging a subterranean labyrinth of waterfalls, lily ponds, stone stairways, and trestle bridges, San Antonio's 2.5-mile River Walk is a triumph of landscape architecture on a grand scale-a monumental work of riparian fantasy. Today the river's character is shaped more by residents' whims (from an environmentally friendly Irish-green dye job to a yearly drain-and-scrub party) than by its own hydrologic leanings.

The River Walk's European Style cafes, shops, bars, and restaurants also make it a serious economic engine for the city, annually drawing more than 7 million visitors who spend roughly $800 million. An unmistakable serenity combined with thriving commerce and ample recreation places the River Walk in the forefront of urban U.S. waterfront projects and neck-in-neck with the Alamo as Texas' most popular tourist destination.

And because it provides a multitude of services-recreational, economic, aesthetic-the River Walk invites stewardship from an incredible diversity of San Antonio residents. Festivities surrounding the yearly scrubbing, in which locals pay a nickel to vote for the "King and Queen of the Mud," are indicative of the enthusiasm with which residents greet their care of this resource. The urbane river park of today, however, is the latest stage in a millennia-old human-river relationship.

The native Payapa people called it "Yanaguana," or place of refreshing waters. Arriving in 1691, Spanish missionaries found the Payapa living in "an oasis of wild grapes and cypress." Before laying down their satchels, the missionaries named it Rio San Antonio do Padua. With abundant water and unvarying climate (water temperature changes only 5-7 degrees throughout the year), the Spanish thought it ideal for the five missions built between 1718 and 1731 in and around what is now the city of San Antonio.

Unlike Texas' 15 other major rivers, the San Antonio has been spared a major dam or reservoir on its main trunk. Flowing southeasterly 194 miles through mostly mixed riparian forest, the San Antonio drains 4,180 square miles in six counties before joining the Guadalupe River. The Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, located on the confluence of these two rivers at San Antonio Bay, lies on the central neotropical migration path for hundreds of species of birds, including the world's largest existing flock of endangered whooping cranes.

While the San Antonio River system has long supported birds and wildlife, its relationship with humans has occasionally been less hospitable. Following deadly floods in 1921 that killed 50 and cost $10 million in damages, city leaders thought it best to simply bury the urban stretch of the river once and for all. A prominent engineering firm, Hawley and Freese, floated a fairly traditional plan that proposed constructing an upstream dam as a retention basin, straightening and widening the channel, and covering the downtown section with concrete. The City Council quickly approved the plans.

With construction set to begin, the city's environmental consciousness awoke with a combination of jazz-age enthusiasm and frontier determination. Vocal opponents included the San Antonio Conservation Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, San Antonio Advertising Club, and San Antonio Real Estate Board.

Among those envisioning a river park for San Antonio was landscape architect H.H. Hugman, who waxed poetic about romantic midnight gondola rides past gas lamps. "Imagine," he told skeptical civic and business leaders, "floating down the river on a balmy night fanned by a gentle breeze carrying the delightful aroma of honeysuckle and sweet olive, old-fashioned street lamps casting fantastic shadows on the surface of the water, strains of soft music in the air."

Despite the potent imagery, it took a few years to convince pragmatic civic and business leaders of the plan's merit. With the onset of the Depression, the city could not afford a plan that looked good but didn't tame the river's wild streak. And Hugman's somewhat dandified vision stood in marked contrast to the river's temperament outside city limits, where cattle ranching formed the main economic activity. Today hundreds of families still manage active farms throughout the region, a tradition that dates back to pre-Civil War times.

The River Walk plan gained momentum only after local businesses, grasping the benefit of a park atmosphere near their shops, in 1938 approved a self-tax of 1-1/2 cents per $100. The vote enabled the issuance of a $75,000 bond, seed money for the $3.5 million Work Projects Administration grant that followed. With funding in place, the city appointed Hugman principal architect and hired more than a thousand workers to clean and deepen the channels; construct retaining walls, elegant stairways, and bridges; and plant more than 11,000 trees and shrubs.

Many of the native baldcypress seedlings they planted then still tower overhead, but Hugman's plan was not restricted to natives. The River Walk retains a picturesque combination of perennials and subtropical trees and shrubs.

Completed in 1941, the cement-channeled River Walk bore little resemblance to the original river, and the rapid revitalization was matched by an equally swift deterioration. Financial planners overestimated the potential for revenue generation, and for the next 20 years the area became a nest of illicit activity and petty crime.

When San Antonio was selected to host the 1968 Hemisfair, a scaled-down World's Fair for the Americas, a new generation of civic leaders began to see the Riverwalk's potential. A 1962 master plan called for a permanent River Walk commission, recommended improvements to lighting for safety and aesthetics, and reoriented many stores to face the river.

Now the River Walk is seen as a worldwide model for urban riverfront revivial-and an early triumph in citizen conservation planning. Through perseverance and with an eye to the asthetic potential, original champions of a river park concept narrowly saved the San Antonio River from becoming another paved afterthought-the fate of many rebellious urban rivers in the early part of the 20th century.

Recognizing the San Antonio River's many personalities-from the pristine habitat of the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge to its cement-channeled pied-de-terre downtown-management involves the coordination of many agencies. The actual River Walk is managed as a city park under the auspices of San Antonio's parks and recreation department. Technical assistance comes from both the Texas Forest Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Outside city limits, river management becomes the responsibility of the San Antonio River Authority, an independent cross-municipality government entity.

The largest challenge, according to Richard Hurd, park operations manager for the park and recreation department, is "keeping the river clean and free of debris." Park personnel haul off more than 600,000 pounds of trash and place 80,000 new plants each year. "We benefit from having many microclimates on the river and it shows in the diversity of plants that do well," says Hurd.

The transformation of the Riverwalk continues, but any changes occur first in the city's planning office and under the careful scrutiny of professonials like Mark Peterson. Peterson, regional urban forester with the Texas Forest Service, conducts a careful analysis of any proposals to gauge their impact on the existing trees.

"New development along the river often negatively impacts the roots and canopies of existing trees, but the existing trees are what attracts the development," says Peterson. "The trees and the river should be considered two halves of the same River Walk coin. Negative impact to either ruins the quality of the whole." AF

Alexis Harte writes from his home in Berkeley, California. [TOP]