Things are happening
March 2022 and all of a sudden I am doing tours again – Alamo, Missions, the Conservation Society’s historic house museums (Steves Homestead in King William and the Yturri-Edmunds House and Mill) and sites in between. I did a talk and walk with a Houston arts group, and all-day tour with a Houston boys school and a tour with Preservation Action auction winners this week.
The 186th anniversary of the Alamo battle is in a few days, just as the world watches another hopelessly overmatched people try to repel an invading army, a parallel not lost on the speakers who celebrated the Texas Revolution at the Alamo yesterday.
On March 16 at lunchtime we will be screening our videos on San Antonio’s historic 1960 lunch counter integration at the Instituto Cultural de Mexico in Hemisfair, followed by a panel discussion led by Sarah Zenaida Gould, PhD, of the Mexican American Civil Rights Initiative. Please join us for this free event!
This will be followed the very next night by our biannual Historic Preservation Awards honoring projects and people in and around San Antonio. This paid event has several highlights, including the restoration of City Hall and the incredible dome at Temple Beth-El. Also Texas Preservation Heroes!
This is followed by a blizzard of galas the final week of the month, including our own Capital Club event on the 22nd, the Brackenridge Park Conservancy Gala on the 23rd, and the Make It Your Mission gala on the 24th. And then it is less than a week to Fiesta!
NIOSA is April 5-8 this year, so order your tickets now!
Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Justice
Since late last year I have been Co-Chair of the Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Justice Working Group, one of four groups comprising the Preservation Priorities Task Force, a joint effort between the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Preservation Partners Network. For most of my years (2006-2015) as a Trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, I was Vice Chair of the Diversity Committee and Diversity Task Force. This is an issue that is of profound importance to heritage conservation, especially in the United States.
Diversity is the need to represent the full heritage of a place for the full complement of its communities. Inclusion is the necessity of insuring that every member of every community has a hand in the decision-making of what gets saved, why it gets saved, and how it gets saved. Racial justice is the need to address an imbalance that the historic preservation field helped foster, beginning in the 19th century and continuing into recent memory.
It made matters worse that we focused historic preservation on architectural history, which was the white-manniest of professions until a week or two ago. Moreover, many of the early preservation organizations in the 1920s, including my own, engaged in cultural heritage preservation of minority cultures without any input or involvement from those cultures. Commemoration of the Other simply reinforced power and hegemony.
In June, James Madison’s Montpelier took it a step further and voted to share power with the descendants of those 3,000 American men, women and children who were enslaved at the sixth president’s sprawling home and plantation. You can read about it here. This is ultimately what it is about. When Juneteenth came to Texas 156 years ago, it was followed quickly by sharecropping, poll taxes, and a penal system designed to return recently emancipated slaves into a state of servitude. It is a testament to human resilience that so many rose above despite a multivalent and violent system designed to prevent them from doing so.
What Montpelier did is key, because the only way to achieve Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Justice is to hand power over. This is hard for any institution, any movement, any society. It is like the challenge I wrote about ten years ago as two of my preservation organizations struggled to figure out how to incorporate the next generation. The answer is simple. You hand them the steering wheel and get out of the way.
It has been very rewarding to make some progress in this arena in San Antonio, especially our recent success in saving the 1921 Woolworth Building on Alamo Plaza. It was listed on the World Monument Watch List 2020 in part due to the “underrepresented narrative” of Civil Rights history. That publicity resulted in our finding out that famed sculptor Richard Hunt ate at the Woolworth lunch counter that day.
Our Coalition for the Woolworth Building has been the subject of several presentations and an upcoming article and this fall the Conservation Society will be honored for its “important contributions to to civil rights history in the City of San Antonio” by the San Antonio Branch NAACP. Here is a recent National Trust blogspot on the Coalition.
It took centuries for us to get to this place, and the need for reckoning, for Truth and Reconciliation, is still apparent. Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert recently made an eloquent and personal plea to look to San Antonio’s Alamo Plaza as a place to begin that process in the U.S.
There is a long way to go for both society and the heritage conservation field, but at least we are facing in the appropriate direction.
Woolworth and Crockett Buildings SAVED
According to the conceptual plan presented in Bexar County Commissioners Court today, not only will the Woolworth Building be repurposed as part of the new Alamo Museum, but there will be a free exhibit about Civil Rights and lunch counter integration in the space where the lunch counter was inside the building! The county is contributing $25M over 5 years to the museum project. The state legislature is going to vote on $50M this week and the major players all seem to be on the same page regarding the new plan. This is amazing news and a real confirmation of the work of the Coalition for the Woolworth Building and the Conservation Society of San Antonio over the last four years. It is also a testament to Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who has been fighting right along side of us this whole time.
When Coalition for the Woolworth Building member Aaronetta Pierce became tri-chair on the Alamo Citizens Advisory Committee and Rebecca Viagran took over on the management committee, we knew there would be a new approach. New Alamo Trust CEO Kate Rogers has also made a great impression. There’s much more emphasis on stakeholder inclusion and telling the full story now. It’s a new day.
It is almost too much to process today. Thanks to our supporters at the World Monuments Fund, and the preservation community throughout the United States and especially the members of the Coalition for the Woolworth Building: Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, San Antonio Branch NAACP, Westside Preservation Alliance, San Antonio for Growth on the East Side, Mexican American Civil Rights Institute and all of the individuals who have made this moment possible.
For background, here are a few blogs on the buildings, which we have been fighting to save since 2015.
Also, the first two videos on the unique Civil Rights history of the Woolworth Building are available online here!
SEPTEMBER 2021 UPDATE – Check out this blogpost on the Coalition on the National Trust Leadership Forum Page!
Richard Hunt in San Antonio
I have been aware of Richard Hunt – the sculptor with more public commissions than any other in U.S. history – for well over 40 years. When I attended the University of Chicago, his flamelike metal sculpture Why? was in Harper Court which I walked past almost daily in the late 70s and early 80s. I liked it – it seemed kind of like a fire, kind of like a hand and it epitomizes the spirit of inquiry there.
I got the chance to spend a lovely lunch with Richard Hunt about 15 years ago at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago when I was doing a presentation on Hubert Ropp, who was Dean of the School when Richard attended in the 1950s. Just recently I noticed that sculptor Preston Jackson, whom I also know from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, had posted a painting of Richard and he online.
Now, here in San Antonio, as you know from my last blog, we have been waging a campaign to Save The Woolworth Building, not only for its drop-dead gorgeous Chicago Commercial style architecture, but because it was the focus of the only voluntary and peaceful integration of lunch counters during the Sit-In movement of 1960. Following letters sent by Mary Lilian Andrews, NAACP Youth Council Chair, in early March, and a mass meeting of 1,500 held March 13, 1960 at Second Baptist Church, Woolworth’s and 6 other lunch counters quietly and peacefully integrated on Wednesday, March 16, 1960 before any sit-in demonstrations could be held.
Last week, Jon Ott of the International Sculpture Center telephoned me and asked about the Woolworth campaign. I related the recent shift in leadership that seemed to bode well for the building and its role in Civil Rights History. Then he asked me whether we knew of any African-Americans who ate at the Woolworth lunch counter that day and I related the story of the photographer who captured a young black man looking in the window but only found blacks and whites eating together mid-morning when he wandered down to the Kress cafeteria on Houston Street. That story was related here.
Then Jon Ott informed me that Richard Hunt ate at the Woolworth lunch counter on that day, March 16, 1960. I was floored. Then Jon told me the rest of the story. Richard Hunt had graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957 and gone to Europe on a Traveling Fellowship while preparing for an exhibit at a New York Gallery. In Paris he received his draft notice, was given extra time to report in order to prepare for the New York show, which he missed due to basic training.
Hunt was sent to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston as a medic but quickly became an army illustrator. Friends with modernist architects O’Neil Ford and Allison Peery, Richard and his wife Betty Scott managed to rent a brand-new home at Fort Sam for NCOs, despite the fact that he was a private and African-American. He and his wife went to the NAACP rally on Sunday, March 13, 1960 at Second Baptist Church when the sit-ins were planned for Thursday, March 17.
When the lunch counters peacefully and voluntarily integrated on Wednesday March 16, Allison Peery and his wife Mimi drove to Fort Sam and brought Richard down to Woolworth’s for lunch. He had a ham sandwich.
Richard Hunt is the first identified African-American we can place at the Woolworth lunch counter that day. By that time, he was sharing the Mill Race Studio – where Gutzon Borglum designed Mount Rushmore, with artist Chester Toney. He had also just returned from Louisiana, where he had his first public sculpture commission at Southern University. He has had some 150 such commissions over his lifetime, more than any other American sculptor. His first was crafted in San Antonio.
Jon Ott has been interviewing Richard Hunt for a year and a half, and he asked Richard why he had never told this story before. In his typical humble manner, he said “I wasn’t a Freedom Rider.” He had an uneventful lunch on the first day of integrated eating at Woolworth’s. But then again, that was the whole point.
Featured photo by Martha Mood courtesy Richard Hunt and Jon Ott.
Re-membering the Alamo
Aaronetta Pierce, a lion of civic life and civil rights in San Antonio, was named one of the Tri-Chairs of the Alamo Citizens Advisory Committee last week. Shortly thereafter we learned that Council Member Roberto Trevino had been replaced on the management committee for the Alamo by Council Member Rebecca Viagran, a descendent of Tejano Alamo defender Toribio Losoya. Dr. Carey Latimore was also appointed to the Citizens Advisory Committee following his detailed study of Civil Rights around Alamo Plaza, specifically the famed lunch counter integration of 1960 – the first peaceful and voluntary integration of lunch counters in the South during the Sit-In movement.
The Mayor made it clear that the buildings facing the Alamo chapel/shrine – the Crockett, Palace and Woolworth Buildings – are to be saved. This is huge news and a validation of the position taken by the Conservation Society in the fall of 2015. It is also huge for our Coalition for the Woolworth Building, formed in 2018 and including the aforementioned Aaronetta Pierce. The milestones of the Coalition: State Antiquities Landmark status in May, 2019; the release of a plan showing how to repurpose the buildings that same month; a prize-winning ofrenda honoring civil rights leader Mary Lilian Andrews in October 2019 and the listing of the Woolworth Building later that same month as one of only 3 U.S. buildings on the World Monuments Watch List 2020, have now come to fruition. A year ago we held a Donut Day at the Woolworth and then an all-day seminar on the role of Alamo Plaza in Bexar County’s Civil Rights history. We spent the pandemic year continuing to lobby, collecting video testimonials and crafting a series of short videos about the lunch counter integration that are now in production.
The Mayor is also revisiting a few more ill-conceived and unpopular elements of the 2018 plan, including lowering the plaza (which makes the archeologists CRAZY) and permanently closing the streets (which makes the businesspeople CRAZY). San Antonians have heaved a sigh of relief as the Alamo plan enters a new era that will remember the long arc of its history by preserving all of its layers and getting comfortable with the fact that it is in the middle of a city.
And soon we will reveal the story of a young black man who ate lunch at Woolworth’s on March 16, 1960.
Alamo Plaza Reports Released
Last week the reports that the Alamo had commissioned regarding the three buildings the State purchased in 2015 were finally released more than two years after they were announced. The reports vindicated preservation.
The report from highly respected John G. Waite & Associates, Architects, confirmed what we had expected – the buildings are structurally sound and adaptable to a variety of uses, including a museum. Another report by Trinity University historian Dr. Carey Latimore was commissioned later, after the efforts of the Coalition for the Woolworth Building documented the history of San Antonio’s famous lunch counter integration, which occurred at seven sites on March 16, 1960. As a bonus, the Waite Report also noted that the Woolworth Building was the only one of the five surviving buildings that actually had physical traces of the lunch counter.
A third previously unknown report was designed to specifically counter the Conservation Society’s argument that the photographs taken March 16, 1960 all depicted the Woolworth lunch counter. I dealt with this conflict between documentary and visual evidence ten months ago here.
Just before the release, the Alamo announced the construction of a new exhibition hall at the east end of the existing gardens behind the shrine. The reason for this is that they have a deadline to exhibit Phil Collins’ Alamo collection.
The Conservation Society has been advocating for the re-use of these buildings for over five years, and the release of the reports vindicated our position, a position that also led to State Antiquities Landmark designation for the Woolworth Building, and its landing on the World Monuments Watch List 2020. We had been requesting these reports for over a year and we are glad that they have been finally made public.
NOVEMBER 13 UPDATE
City Council was briefed on the Alamo plan yesterday and there has been a lot of discussion of “unwinding the lease” between the city and the state. Political battles at the state level between GLO Commissioner George P. Bush and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, the Texas Historical Commission’s denial of the plan to move the 1940 Cenotaph, and the departure of most of the project’s high profile private donors have put the whole project in question.
Cenotaph Stays for Now
The meeting started at 9 AM and ended at 7 PM with a 12-2 vote by the Texas Historical Commission NOT to approve a permit to relocate and restore the Cenotaph in Alamo Plaza. This relocation had been characterized by the City and Alamo Endowment as essential for the success of the entire plan.
That characterization is curious – one would think that the development of the museum – which has a timeline imposed by donor Phil Collins – would be the key element of the plan. Or the closing of the streets. Or even the relocation of the entertainment zone facing the Plaza, which seemed for years to be the key negative motivator for the Alamo Reimagined Plan. But there has been no movement on that issue at all.
The Conservation Society of San Antonio has been primarily focused on the preservation of the Crockett and Woolworth Buildings, as I have blogged about many times. It was interesting to hear the Texas Historical Commission debate the Cenotaph relocation. My first takeaway was: These people know what they are talking about. Laurie Limbacher displayed a razor-sharp knowledge of concrete and armatures, and several other Commissioners made it clear that they understood the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards which discourage relocation unless it is needed to safeguard a structure.
Which brought everything back to the curious logic of “this must happen first”? THC Chairman John Nau was not buying it. He said the site is too important “to suggest that the entire project depends on granting a single permit.” Were they giving themselves a way out? The project started six years ago and has been fueled entirely by public money so far. It was stated during the meeting that no private fundraising had been done yet, something I wondered about last month.
Meanwhile, the Alamo itself has reopened after nearly half a year, although it and the Cenotaph are still surrounded by barricades.
Museums in Old Buildings
For the last five years, the Conservation Society had advocated for the preservation of the Crockett and Woolworth Buildings and their re-use as the new Alamo museum. Without every saying so, the Alamo has favored a new building, partly because they want to reveal where part of the western wall was, which I discussed at length last month here. I ended that blog noting that the Woolworth Building was to be a museum of airplanes a little over 20 years ago.
The San Antonio Museum of Art, the Briscoe and almost every other museum in San Antonio is in a historic building. Some, like the McNay and the Witte, have new additions, which is what we proposed for the Woolworth and Crockett.
How are world class museums made? Perhaps you recognize some of these.
You can throw in the Prado, the Alhambra and the Hermitage as well. Locally, we have….
The Alamo museum intends to focus its interpretation on the famed 1836 battle. So, their illustrations have lots of cannons, which, while smaller than airplanes, do need a little space.
Some of the unpublished museum images show the cannons safely indoors and many of the outdoors one will be replicas. In the absence of imagery, perhaps the museum will look like this?
Hmm. What does the outside of this museum look like?
Oh! It’s a historic building! How about this display replete with conquistador astride a horse:
What does this museum look like on the outside?
Kinda looks a lot like the Woolworth Building. Except in both of these cases the column spacing is not as flexible as the Woolworth Building.
The Alamo is warning that it is do or die time for the Alamo Reimagined Plan. The next hurdle? Texas Historical Commission will decide whether the 1940 Cenotaph can be moved a few hundred feet to the south.
Stay tuned…..