Are AI The Sea Peoples?
Remember in the olden days for doctor’s visits you had to fill out all of these forms 15 minutes before the appointment and then fill them out again and then repeat them verbally after that? Thanks to technological advances, it now takes 30 minutes to fill out the same forms the same number of times because you also have to download two apps and create two passwords and four identity queries only to have the doctor tell you to lay off the technology because you have carpal tunnel syndrome.
Oh, and then they want you to fill out a survey. The process is demonstrably slower thanks to technology. That’s not precisely true – it is demonstrably slower because of all the ads and popups and other digital demons trying to monetize the technology. And then there is the technology trying to monetize itself by creating unnecessary layers. I get to update this website in WordPress, but with another website I work on, it was constructed in WordPress with another app called Elementor that someone got someone to pay for because it did something that the original app didn’t do and now we are back to 30 minutes for a 15 minute task.
There is so much sludge on the internet now that opening links takes forever – I was trying to register for a conference and by the time the form came up there were three because I must have hit the button three times in my impatience. Here’s my favorite: If you ever try to look at once of these listicles on Ranker or Weird History you better be sure that the list is no more than 12 items long, because otherwise the endless hulking sludge of ads will kill the listicle before you ever get to Number 13, leaving you with a whiteout screen with nothing on it. Only way out of the whiteout is to quit the app and reboot.
I think Odysseus was surfing the web rather than the Aegean and Tyrrhenian because he got whacked by more popups than my YouTube account. He goes from the 15 minute task pre-AI to the 30 minute task post-AI to 10 years getting from Troy to Ithaca without even visiting Saratoga Springs. At least at the movie theater all the ads were before the movie.
And since Odysseus the movie had a minutelong scandal a couple weeks back, here is my take:
As a historian, I am sometimes critical of movies that are replete with anachronisms (Braveheart) but on other occasions (Elizabeth and Marie Antoinette) they aren’t true to historical events but they somehow manage to capture the essence of the historical figure. So, I am not a purist, and I am less likely to be a purist about a lengthy lyric transmitted orally for five hundred years. The tiny fragment from the third century BC currently on display in New York City has three lines that aren’t in the standard text, so we are not dealing with hard evidence here. I do agree that Nolan removed the humor (and most of the sex) from the lyric, but he didn’t pervert or subvert the essence of the story. (also John Leguizamo steals everything he is in.). He also avoided a surprising amount of CGI, like in the Giants scene where he used actual people tall and short.
The Odyssey is set at the beginning of the Bronze Age collapse, caused by the ill-defined “Sea Peoples” referenced in the movie, which leads me to posit: AI are the Sea Peoples of today. AI are doing their best to precipitate our collapse through misinformation and the pandemic of endless mediocrity. Not to mention making everything take longer and go slower.
Now, if this is a parallel to the Bronze Age collapse, we should have first seen the collapse of the palatial economies and ensuing diaspora of craftspersons and landscapers. But the damn McMansions are still there with their armies of workers. Everywhere.
Nowadays we have a very visible ultrarich predator class, which would seem to parallel the Bronze Age rulers on their own private islands throughout the Aegean and Mediterranean, and, indeed, private islands are a thing. But their economic collapse has not happened. Granted, the predator class has seized power and is trying desperately to win a culture war by making everything dumber and gaudier.
And more boring. AI will like totally try to sell you the most popular thing even when you instruct it otherwise, because it is impressed ONLY be quantities of data. Not by quality. Quality can be singular and special and lonely, which is the opposite of a big dataset. So, I asked AI for “museums that only had a few objects.” AI gave me “tiny museums” like the Mmuseumm in New York which is an elevator shaft full of ordinary objects. I corrected its error and AI was very apologetic, acknowledged I was correct and then came up with a couple museums in the UK. So I had to prompt AI for a third time, telling it to look in Japan. It finally came up with the Teshima and Chichu, which is what I was looking for. It also corrected me that the Miho (below) actually has a large collection, even though it only displays a small number of items. So, three for me, one for AI.
Ok that AI adventure was a bit of a slog – hard to get away from the stuff that is highly advertised and thus a bigger dataset. I mean you could fix that, but that is not necessarily in the interest of the predator class – they need you dumb. And they need you to think AI graphics look good. If I was 13, I would think they look good. If I was a gamer, I would think they look like game graphics, which have a cachet. So, a contemporary counterpart of the Bronze Age collapse – a dumbing down of culture – does seem plausible.
Teshima art museum – home to one artwork. The artwork is also made of water. Like AI is. But less water.
Just learned today that AI can manage country and pop songs, but is a complete disaster with Baroque counterpoint. I guess music isn’t math after all…
America 250 One Nation Under Roofs
This is the title of our new exhibit in Villa Finale Museum & Gardens Mathis Gallery building, which features items from the permanent collection that relate to the history of the United States. As the nation attempts to meet this milestone, our museum, under the direction of Curator Sylvia Gonzalez-Pizaña, has pulled both fine art and patriotic artifacts from the house. Some of my favorites include a collection of memorabilia from the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876. It is nice to view these items – normally arrayed on the second floor of the house – with more room to breathe and be seen.
There are also artifacts from the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and 19C Stafforshire flatback porcelains that purport to be Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They look a bit more like Prince Albert and Benjamin Franklin, but hey.
The founder of our museum, Walter Mathis, was a genuine World War 11 hero, flying 65 missions in the European theater – primarily B-25s, and earning a series of medals, some of which are on display in the gallery and some of which are still on display in the house. He also collected Currier prints of the Mexican War 1846-48, some of which are now on display in our America 250 exhibit, along with examples of his excellent collection of early maps of New Spain, Mexico and Texas.
Not all of the artifacts are antique – Among a collection of busts of U S Presidents is one of Abraham Lincoln from the 1970s – manufactured by Avon to contain aftershave!
One item I encouraged Sylvia to include was a signed portrait of William Howard Taft, the only person to serve as both US President and Supreme Court Justice. It is a family heirloom given to Walter Mathis’ grandfather who founded the Coleman Pasture Company along with the Taft family. Taft’s brother had a ranch house called La Quinta where the President stayed in 1909. The photo of Taft was signed in 1924 when Walter Mathis’ aunt was wife of the La Quinta superintendent.
Some of my favorite artworks from the collection are also in the Mathis Gallery for the America 250 show, including the stunning Julian Onderdonk painting of Matagorda Bay, which is my favorite of the several Onderdonks in the collection. My top favorite artist is Mary Bonner, and some of her amazing graphic prints are visible in the show. She had a knack for creating dynamic motion out of line and contour that reminds me of Windsor McCay among others.
You can tour the exhibit for FREE during normal hours (10-4 Tuesday-Saturday) and also of course see “the rest of the story” in the museum for the price of admission. Or, if you are a Friend of Villa Finale, the house is free! While 250 years is no Han Dynasty or Roman Empire, it is still a major achievement, and it might go on even longer!
Truth is no stranger to fiction
There is actual information on the internet amid the drivel and some of it challenges our basic conception of how media works. The idea is that something happens in real life, and then it is conveyed through media. From 30,000 year old cave paintings to AI modified images, we assume that the message and the medium are antecedent to the act. Except that the message IS the medium, and there are a surfeit of examples where the media created its own reflection in real life and then people perpetuated it as ritual or tradition. In other words, the media message came first and real life second.
Peer pressure c. 1000 BC
I was just reading on History Facts about how the practice of kneeling on one knee (ahem, the left please) became a tradition in marriage proposals. While kneeling to a superior power or religious entity (ahem, the right please) goes back to Alexander the Great and infused the feudal era, the modern marriage proposal actually derives from … the movies. Specifically, silent movies, since the economy of kneeling action meant you didn’t need to waste dialogue cards on the act. Yes, kneeling was an aspect of courtly (often Platonic) love, but the specific association with marriage proposals postdates film.
A more recent example is illustrative. In the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, the titular character’s opening sequence happens within Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parade. Except there never had been one. Then the Mexican government launched an actual Day of the Dead parade – inspired by the movie – in 2016. In the decade since it has become a huge tourist attraction. The scene was also a nod to the Junkanoo scene in Nassau Thunderball (1965), but of course Junkanoo already existed.
Twenty years ago, the book The Da Vinci Code inspired mass tourism to various sites in France, Scotland and Rome to the extent that places like Saint-Sulpice Church had to post signs countering the book’s conspiracy theories. Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland got 38,000 visitors a year before the book, 80,000 a year after and 176,000 after the film came out. It still gets 140,000 visitors a year, with over half citing the book and film as the reason.
Twenty two years ago the movie Sideways caused California vintners to rip up their Merlot vines and replace them with Pinot Noir due to the character’s preference. I still prefer Pinot Noir, so that film definitely changed my behavior.
It took over a century for someone to finally create a real 221B Baker Street in London, now a museum to the most portrayed literary character of all time, who has statues on multiple continents. Kinda like Hercules or Athena Nike.
Just do it.
Everyone has heard of Leonardo da Vinci and many museums have one or more of his paintings from the Italian Renaissance. Which is the most famous? If you said “Mona Lisa” then welcome to the world after 1911. 1911 was the year the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Its image was plastered on newspapers throughout the world until its recovery in 1913, elevating it from one of many Leonardos to OG status, which it did not have before 1911.
I mean this one’s pretty good. Ermine is pretty good too.
Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act
Last week the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation put out a call for review of the Section 106 process. What is Section 106? Well, it is basically the federal review process for properties listed on (or eligible for) the National Register of Historic Places. I have taught this process to public officials for decades, and I have been party to the process in many cases, including several projects here in San Antonio.
Foundations of 1875 St. James AME Church as uncovered in 2020. Below is the result of the Section 106 process, completed 2022.
In a time characterized by assaults on civil institutions small and large, a “review” of this process, which has existed in some form for nearly 60 years, is cause for concern. Section 106 is a type of regulation, and regulations are often categorically opposed by self-styled populist politicians and struggling subpar businesspersons. The nuanced reality is that any consultative process will tend to improve outcomes.
With the notable exception of the Milton Historical Society, a Section 106 review that was a perfect storm of bad outcomes. I was hired by the National Trust to figure out what went wrong here 20 years ago. Architect, client, and agency were all at fault. In that order.
Almost a year ago, the Executive began trying to get around regulations like Section 106 through imaginary energy crises, military readiness, and other performative red herrings. Heck, they even demolished a federal building illegally (and of course performatively, without a long-range plan – see my blog about it). But this is not to put Section 106 under one political banner, because in 2024 Section 106 was being challenged as an impediment not to knuckle-dragging capitalists, but to progressive causes like climate change and renewable energy. And bike lanes. I blogged about it here.
There is also an exception being drawn up for military housing, which makes sense intuitively.
Well of course I’m going to pick an architecturally significant example of military housing.
Your intuition is not wrong, but it has no context. The context is that military housing is like all things military – it never has to justify its budget. That means that the housing got “improved” regularly in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. That means it has lots of layers added, with each having the potential to become a unique mold biome. And of course those of us involved in actual Section 106 reviews in a city with lots of military bases knows that this has been an issue for more than a decade. Not new.
Tile looks 1930 but that sink looks scallopped in the awful 80s.
Here is how Section 106 works:
1. There is a federal project. This could be obvious, like a highway or a building, or it could be a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to build along a navigable waterway.
2. There is – or is not – a historic resource.
3. There is – or is not – an effect on that resource.
4. If there is an adverse effect, you oughta try to do something about it.
5. If nothing can be done, you go ahead anyway.
Here is one of my favorite results – the Solomonic baby sliced in half:
The LITERAL bottom line in the process is that the project can proceed, something the Post Office knew back in 1991 when the above article appeared. They knew they could tear it down after they went through the process. (BTW photo proves that I was out standing in my field).
Or you can just repackage the project into different phases that do not engage Section 106 as much.
At her request, I spoke to National Trust for Historic Preservation CEO Carol Quillen last summer about this issue and what should be done. After all, Section 106 has not been revised in over two decades. The conclusion I shared with her is the same I reached years ago in the effort to get the National Register of Historic Places to reflect the diversity of American history. The issue is rarely the law or regulation itself, but the practice of its implementation.
Ah yes, Federal Building West. We encouraged them NOT to worry about the original 1974 bathroom in the basement.
As with many current initiatives from the federal government, it appears that they are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. In over 40 years of dealing with historic preservation review at the federal, state and local level, I have consistently seen that at least 97 percent of reviews are dispatched in a few days. My friend and Washington State SHPO Allyson Brooks provided statistics from last year. They did 5,371 reviews with a response time of 3.7 days. 45 of the projects were “adverse affects”. It could be that there is not a problem, or perhaps there is that one guy with a problem who wants to make everyone pay for it.
Moreover, most federal agencies have executed Programmatic Agreements that essentially resolve potential Section 106 issues in advance, and provide an agency-specific and resource-specific process for dealing with the rules in a more streamlined way. But that doesn’t play well in a media landscape designed for third graders.
Our National Historic Landmark army base is a decade older than Fort Sheridan in Chicago.
So what specifically is the ACHP looking to review?
1. Defining the undertaking and establishing the area of potential effects
I suppose this is to fend off surprises by limiting the scope of the undertaking. The old newspaper clipping above is a case where the new building did not require the demolition of the old building per se. It’s just that, in order to stage the construction of the new building, the old one had to go.
2. Assessing indirect and cumulative effects
I guess this is to try to limit the review to immediate effects rather than long-term or indirect ones. I can’t imagine this affects a large number of cases. One of the interesting ones I witnessed – which was resolved by the Advisory Council in favor of the military, was the issue of cutting trees at the 1930 Randolph Air Force Base. The Air Force wanted to cut down trees to limit bird strikes, and the SHPO wanted them to keep original trees. The Air Force won, and yes, it took a while.
3. Managing review/scope of review for long linear projects with limited federal involvement
This could be for projects like San Pedro Creek or Brackenridge Park that are primarily projects of state and local agencies and the federal role is a permit. Again, Programmatic Agreements can help with this.
4. Managing timelines for review.
Yeah, well that would be good. In fact, this is the big one. European countries have more stringent regulations than we do, and their businesses are used to going through the process. It must be worse there, right? No. See, they have a process which has an endpoint. The US has so many lawyers that projects can get tied up forever not by the regulations, but the ancillary and attendant lawsuits. There is no endpoint in a litigious environment. That doesn’t happen in Europe.
They are better at trains too
You can tweak the regulations all you want, but unless someone sets an example of NOT filing frivolous lawsuits, the timelines will get longer not matter how short the laws are. Anyone know anyone who could set such a noble example? Bueller? Bueller?
My prediction is that the review will cause more problems than it solves. If you go digging into a legal process that is slow 3% of the time, you will reduce the quality of outcomes at the very least, and likely harm that high-performing ratio.
JULY UPDATE
Well, the Advisory Council has flouted its own process, in order to flout the process. Like a suicide bomber! See my latest blog and the preservation community response.
Ease of movement
One could argue that the whole of human history is a journey toward ease of commerce and communication with hydraulics on the side. Roman roads and aqueducts remain two millennia later to underscore their importance to that empire. Endless layers of burnt and polished lime forming walkways still snake through the Guatemalan jungle as testimony to the communications link of the Classical Maya. The Tayrona of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta built arguably too many stone walkways in an attempt to maintain commerce and communication in the obtusely moist and mountainous high jungle. The incomparable monuments of Angkor existed only because of the massive barays that held the water that made civilization possible. I suppose you could add the US interstate system to this list, which we cling to and amend daily, defying its manifest obsolescence.
In architectural history, the 20th century styles of Art Deco and Modernism celebrated the continuity of materials and lines, visually and materially embodying the ethos of commerce and communication and free-flowing hydraulics. The train and the automobile sought to symbolize sleekness and speed and the mythology of the unencumbered in their relentless windswept contours. You can still see it in the modern trains of China and Japan.
I’ve had a Mayan archaeologist comment on the hubris of their lime walkways and compare it to our own material profligacy. Each civilization burns itself out on the hulls of its kernel concepts, lost in materiality because they invested too much meaning into the thing and were afraid to let it go, confusing gross domestic product with wealth and wealth with the economic everyday. Upon its invention, the thing – the walkway, the road, the car, the chariot – meant commerce and communication and control. That meaning remained even as it drifted into obsolescence, so the civilization invested even more in it because of what it meant, not what it could do.
Civilization literally comes from the word for cities, and commerce is both the source of wealth and an end in itself, an activity that is the economic everyday. Stadtluft macht frei, nicht wahr? Six years ago I wrote about cities and the logic of concentration and how every event from the telegraph in the 1840s to the telephone in the 1870s to COVID in 2020 spurred hyperbolic predictions about the end of concentration that were wrong, as they always are. Commerce is civilization, and it means much more than money and goods, it means ideas and inventions, and new ways of smoothing surfaces, increasing speed and building up. We want to be on top of each other because that is where new and interesting things happen.
It wasn’t a wall, it was a road. And it’s name means Long City.
Photos copyright Vincent L. Michael 1996-2025
Disappearing original houses
I was always enamored of the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas house in Springfield, Illinois, built in 1903. In what became a familiar scenario, Susan Lawrence Dana had to wait for her father to pass away before she was able to engage the pioneering architectural innovator. Not only that, but she had to promise to keep the original two-story Italianate house her father had built, including his bedroom fireplace. That fireplace is pretty much all that survived Wright’s restless creativity, as the original house vanished into gabled wings of geometric modernism.
Fun fact – AI can not manage to figure out the other FLW examples of this! So here are some remodelings that Wright did in Oak Park in the first decade of the 20th century, from knowledge.
Hills-DeCaro House 1906. The process of modernizing old houses with ribboned windows and continuous stucco finishes became so popular lots of local Oak Park architects and builders did it.
Young House, Wright redesign 1908 – mostly the wraparound porch creating horizontal emphasis with the Tudor gables still sticking up.
Now in my tenth year in Texas, I am surrounded by examples of houses that swallowed up earlier houses, shifting from simple rock houses and cabins into Victorian extravaganzas. Thanks to Professor Kenneth Hafertepe I now understand better how single-pen rock houses grew into double pens and then added upper levels.
You can see the earlier roofline. This is near Bulverde.
The King William Historic District – the oldest in Texas – is rife with big houses that swallowed up little ones. I was recently quoted regarding the Joske House, which is a masterclass in Renaissance Revival, where no pediment is unbroken, no balustrade unbowed and no basket arch unornamented.
But this was a 1900 remodeling by architect Solon McAdoo of a four-room stone house built in 1881. The famous Villa Finale – the only King William house open for tours – also began as a one-story limestone house in 1876. In 1881 a new owner added a two-story brick wing but the big change came in 1896 with the front porch and tower, which is the bulk of what attracts the eye today.
If you look beyond the porch and tower you can see the earlier houses. This actually happened a lot in King William – on Madison Street you can see several houses that began as a single story of stone and had stories of brick or frame added later, like the Elmendorf house, c. 1885 with a 1917 second story.
There are quite a lot of these on Madison Street, including this Wagenfuhr House, of which there were two and each grew a story later. This one was a one-story German rock house in 1870 that had a frame addition perhaps a generation later. Its neighboring Wagenfuhr house added a nice Victorian second story and can be seen in the featured photo for this blog.
Just down the street the Martin/Van Derlip house started as an 1870 limestone one-story and got a brick second story about 1886, smoothed together with a stucco rendering.
The famous Oge house which looks like a Southern plantation was a one story plus basement home built in 1857 and completely made over by architect Alfred Giles in 1881.
On the first block of King William, you have the Ball houses, which were identical in 1868 but one got a second story about 1904.
Abundance and Scarcity: Not pie.
China has built tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail in the last two decades. When I traveled in rural Yunnan in 2004 it was an all-day drive from Kunming to Dali and another few hours to Weishan. By 2014 it was a few hours tops by road or rail. High speed rail is so successful that Chinese airlines are complaining that too few people fly from Beijing to Shanghai. Meanwhile, California’s high-speed rail proposal from the 1980s will probably never happen.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have written a book called Abundance that provides a structural reason for our drop from first-world status. They argue that the nation’s institutional architecture prevents things from happening rather than facilitating things. Klein in a podcast said we have prevented good people from achieving things, which makes bad actors who promise to break the rules popular. Hence, the political reason for our drop.
Now, this might seem like the anti-regulatory banner-waving of YIMBYS and neocons, but the Klein argument is – like I said above – about structure, not politics. Not flags but terra firma. Put simply, the regulatory web is not designed to make things happen but to study and litigate them forever. And ever.
When Sara Bronin, in her role as Chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation from 2022-2024, tried to make historic preservation more amenable to achieving things that would help society, like affordable housing and energy efficiency, she stumbled into a few canards. Turns out the preservation infrastructure has been a lot less clogged than environmental and habitiat issues. Even in her area of great expertise – zoning – preservationists have been ahead of the games, arguing for ADUs in SFR districts since the early 1990s.
And many have been there much longer – King William district, San Antonio.
One of the smartest things Klein and Thompson do is ask about where and how things get done. In China, you can relocate a million people to build the Three Gorges Dam because public input is extremely limited. In France and Spain you can build high-speed rail because while there is a public process and bureaucracy, approvals can happen and there is not endless litigation.
They also make use of two economic writers I appreciate – Ed Glaeser and William Fischel, who help explain that strange 1970s transformation when homes became expensive primary assets. We have a housing problem that is intractable because we want two things that are structurally opposite: We want housing to be cheap enough for all, and we want housing to be our primary source of tax-advantaged wealth. Can’t. Have. Both.
Now of course Fischel and Glaeser take their shots at the regulatory world as well, and a few land but most don’t because they aim at the anecdote. Klein and Thompson note the changes we are seeing to traditional single-family zoning and give a couple of good examples where projects got done – one by having a private entity build affordable housing and the other by a governor using emergency powers to rebuild a bridge in record time. These locally rare examples are what the Chinese do daily.
At the end the book was not a deep-diving revelation but a useful provoking of thought. What are our systems designed to do and not do? I myself was hoping for a clearer definition of an abundance Weltanschauung, rather than a staid critique of the regulatory web that doesn’t add much to what Fischel and Glaeser gave us over a decade ago.
Come on guys, tell us it isn’t pie. And why. The Chinese figured that out, clearly.
Conservation Society sues to halt demolition of Texas Pavilion but it goes on
April 26, 2025 the Conservation Society of San Antonio filed a lawsuit to halt demolition of the 1968 Texas Pavilion in downtown San Antonio. The only downtown building by a Mexican-American architect, the pavilion was home of the Institute of Texan Cultures and Texas Folklife Festival for over 50 years. Owned since 1973 by the University of Texas at San Antonio, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places AND as a State Antiquities Landmark last year. And it is being demolished.
LEARNING MOMENTS:
- Yes, you can tear down buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. How could a federal designation get in the way of a local building permit?
- The National Historic Preservation Act gets triggered if there is a federal undertaking (which includes funding) to demolish a National Register property, which the City claims there isn’t. Except their public statements say there is, so … lawsuit.
- State Antiquities Landmark designation CAN stop a demolition by the State, unless the Texas Historical Commission approves it, which they did. Without a hearing. Not even by the Texas Historical Commission. So …. lawsuit.
We have spent the last two and a half years trying to get these two designations for this building, ergo you can read about the background here, here, and here. As with most preservation cases, the odds are stacked against us, a mere David standing across from the goliaths of UTSA and the City, who have recently joined with the County to discuss the implementation of Project Marvel, which envisions an expanded Convention Center, new hotel, Spurs (NBA) stadium, revamped Alamodome, revitalized Confluence Theater, and a land bridge over I-37. I covered Project Marvel and all one of its illustrations here in December.
We have received a lot of supportive comments and President Lewis Vetter has been interviewed in many media. As we have said for years, we support the downtown Spurs stadium and Project Marvel. BECAUSE the Texas Pavilion is a Marvel-ous building to use as part of the project! Check out our website for updates and membership information here!
AND, A WEEK LATER it seems they may be accelerating the demolition. They have ripped down (not removed, done with a backhoe) several of the iconic concrete panels from the building. We went to court to get a TRO and UTSA is claiming that they are only doing remediation and removed the panels to access things they had to remediate. Ummm, that doesn’t jive with the visuals:
APRIL 16 UPDATE
On Monday, April 14 UTSA and the City had ten lawyers in the courtroom as they successfuly convinced Judge Tina Torres that both entities had “sovereign immunity” and that the court had no jurisdiction to even HEAR the suit. The Conservation Society filed a notice of appeal to the 15th Court of Appeals on Wednesday. Meanwhile, destructive demolition has continued without pause.
MAY 16 UPDATE
The 15th Court of Appeals denied our motions for an emergency relief and an injunction. With a heavy heart and recognizing the effects of three months of demolition, the Conservation Society decides to end its pursuit of a hearing on the merits of the case. Goliath won.
The return of digital billboards
Another recrudescence! Almost a year ago, a company called Outfront Media tried to circumvent the newly minted Sign Ordinance by proposing “Urban Entertainment Districts.” It is part of this blog from last May. By fall, the outsider effort had been renamed “Digital Arts Media Pilot Project” and was promising not only that revenues go to the Department of Arts and Culture, but that the digital billboards would be accompanied by permanent artworks stuck on the side of buildings or parking garages. A survey found 75% of people against the proposed pilot program, and a City Council hearing was delayed five times but then finally held last Friday and shockingly, voted forward.
Blade Runner, here we come!
What was most surreal about the City Council Planning and Community Development Committee meeting was the crazy reason the Council Members came up with to vote for it. Lighting and Public Safety. I kid you not. This is at least five kinds of stupid.
Stupid #1 – Lighting?
If downtown has a problem with lighting, shouldn’t it be solved by, I don’t know, streetlights? The “pilot” project will have up to two (2) billboards per district, and downtown is a maximum three districts. So, maximum six digital billboards, none of which stays on all night. Seven new streetlights downtown beats that nonsense.
See how the Crockett Hotel neon illuminates the Alamo?
Stupid #2 – “Pilot”
Even Centro, which was in favor of the “pilot” program, testified that if a pilot fails, you need to remove it. The media company said they would not, and our experience with the digital kiosks six years ago was the same. Once they go up, they stay up.
Even in front of the oldest unrestored stone church in North America
Stupid #3 – San Antonio
Not too disparage the cities that have taken up this craven combination of culture and advertising, but none of them (Denver, Cincinnati, Atlanta) have the two biggest tourist attractions in the state (the Alamo and the River Walk). None of them have World Heritage status. We have a concentration of historic buildings and sites that exceeds most cities and will be actively and financially harmed by having little Times Square wannabes blinking around the corner.
Move along, nothing to see here….
Stupid #4 – Revenue
The johnny-come-too-lately company proposing this is promising revenue sharing of up to 20% and screen sharing (for arts or city postings) of up to 20%. Again, like the kiosks. Word on the street is that Denver saw no revenue for years and when it finally came it was a fraction of the millions promised. Atlanta reported $760,000 in 2021 of which $330,000 went to artists and that is with 14 signs downtown. The revenue is not enough for a budget line in Cincinnati.
Stupid #5 – Art
San Antonio has recently added a lot of mural art to downtown, thanks to new technologies that allow you to do so without permanently affecting brick walls and the like – removable film. If you walk from Houston and Losoya two blocks west you will encounter three or four of these. I can’t imagine any of them not harmed by having a digital billboard attached to them.
JUNE UPDATE:
The lame duck City Council approved the pilot of up to 10 digital billboards last week in a 7-3 vote. Thanks to D1 Sukh Kaur, D5 Teri Castillo and D7 Marina Gavito for voting against this travesty. Now we will see what actually happens and where – since landmarks are off-limits and downtown will require HDRC approval. Maybe the digital demidemons will be limited to Port San Antonio and the Ferris Wheel/Alamodome district.
World Heritage Center – 10 years of World Heritage in Texas.
In 2015, the San Antonio Missions were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, becoming the only World Heritage site in Texas and making San Antonio one of three U.S. World Heritage cities. I celebrated this event in my blog at the time – not knowing I would move to San Antonio a year later. I had made a point of touring the missions carefully in 2010, and I am pleased that my blog from that visit remains accurate. I still tour them – took three visitors out last week. Never boring. This is a landscape with deep cultural resonance.
Mission Espada at night.
Last week, the City of San Antonio’s World Heritage Center opened near Mission San Jose, and over 500 people turned out to celebrate. The Mayor said the turnout was twice what they had for the new airport terminal! San Antonians LOVE to celebrate culture. A lot of those in attendance were Mission descendants whose families have been here for many, many generations.
The effort to achieve World Heritage status began in 2006 at a Conservation Society Board Meeting when it was suggested by former President Virginia Nicholas. Soon the Society had engaged the services of author/historian Dr. Paul Ringenbach, who wrote and rewrote (and rewrote) the World Heritage nomination. Experts were brought in and we coordinated with World Heritage USA (then called US/ICOMOS).
The inscription took nine years from start to finish, but that is actually pretty quick in World Heritage time. The Frank Lloyd Wright sites also began to work on World Heritage inscription in 2006, but did not achieve it until 2019 – four years after San Antonio. I did not move to San Antonio until 2016, but having spent years working on World Heritage sites worldwide, and having toured the missions in detail, I was excited and impressed. Which is why I blogged about it. I’m still impressed.
The new World Heritage Center has a screened veranda by Adriana Garcia that takes its motifs from the flowers, waterfowl and nopales of the San Antonio River. The interior features specially commissioned works of art and provides many layers of people-based interpretation. Many Conservation Society leaders are included in the first exhibit area, which focuses on the voices that helped make this special place happen. A large video details not simply the significance of the mission in world history, but the experiences of those who have lived here for generations and generations. Indeed, a “gift box” exhibit focuses exclusively on the voices of the mission descendants.
Unlike many World Heritage sites, the San Antonio Missions are not archaeological ruins. Not only are all five mission churches still extant, but four of them are active Catholic parishes! While the mission walls have vanished at the Alamo and Mission Concepcion, they survive in part at the other three missions, having been rebuilt at Mission San Jose 95 years ago. The landscape is still there, with two of the mission acequias still operating as working irrigation systems.
Labores at Mission San Juan, last week. Irrigated by an acequia built in the 1740s.
Most importantly, the people are still there. And they are at the center of the exhibits in the new World Heritage Center. At the opening, many wore badges identifying them as mission descendants, and throughout the exhibits there are opportunities to hear and see their stories. In the missions the indigenous Pajalache and others joined with the Spanish Franciscans to create a confluence of cultures that is legible to this day.
Even the preservation history of the San Antonio Missions goes back a century! The first item that the Conservation Society purchased in order to save it was the embossed wooden door to the Mission San Jose Granary, which you can see on display at the Mission today. We saved it 99 years ago, in 1926.
From a preservation point of view, the Missions are a lesson in persistence. The ladies of the Conservation Society managed to purchase and restore the Mission San Jose Granary (above) in the early 1930s. This led to the reconstruction of the entire Mission San Jose complex and to the Archdiocese deciding to restore the church, which had been without a roof for a century.
The Conservation Society persisted. In 1941 the four southern missions became a State Historical Park thanks to our efforts. In 1978 the Conservation Society lobbied tirelessly behind the scenes to get the missions listed as a National Historical Park. In 2006 we led the World Heritage effort. That is persistence.
Besides persistence, the other word I keep coming back to when I think about the missions is partnerships. How do you get entities as diverse as the National Park Service, Archdiocese of San Antonio, City of San Antonio, Bexar County, State of Texas and at least four not-for-profits (Conservation Society, Mission Heritage Partners, Los Misiones and the Alamo Trust) to work together to create a singular World Heritage Site? Partnerships. And practice. San Antonio has been practicing these partnerships for most of a century and the Conservation Society has been at the center of it the whole time. You can see the annual reports of this multi-level partnership here.
Matachines celebrating the Virgen at Mission Concepcion, 2017.