You're right. I should have added, they want to sell at their price and when they're ready.

I'm just hoping some developer with deep pockets gives them an offer to big to pass up.

http://www.lakeflato.com/projects/pearl/05.jpg

http://www.lakeflato.com/projects/pearl/06.jpg

From the lake flato web site

Gorgeous.

Though, is that the Riverwalk or just a water feature?

I think its a water feature in the first picture, since it's a little small to be the river.

I'm pretty sure the little speck in the first one is the river.

Yeah it'll probably be like the water feature they have going through the (old) Hyatt and across from Alamo Plaza.

http://www.sanantonio.gov/historic/docs/HDRC_AGENDA.pdf

Pages 143-167 are for a new mixed use garage (6 stories) for the CIA.

I like the design, I just hope it doesn't block the main building too much.

KSAL,

It's technically a mixed-use building that has a (500 space) garage within it. But yeah, it's a great design and for the Pearl, a great height and will fit in perfectly.

This building will add more retail and more residential space to the Pearl.

I love it! I may block it from the north but from the main east view, there should be no concern.

Well hopefully some of the recent work is an indication of how soon they'll begin this project; they've returned the smokestack to the original red brick, it had been covered for over a couple of months while they were working on it.

I like the look and position of the big CIA sign.

With CIA there and the new kitchenware store opening in the Pearl as well as the new restaurants, I can see the Pearl becoming a major culinary hot spot.

Do my eyes deceive me, or are those trolley tracks??

Those are old train lines that went to Pearl before I believe.

....

Those are for the old street car lines SA used to have. You used to be able to see them on Broadway, but since the last resurfacing they've disappeared (they may still be there, under the asphalt).

If you turn right on Jones from Broadway and look on your right, there is still a few yards of rail right before you get to the river. Perhaps those went to the lone star brewery.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/business...l_Brewery.html


Peeling away history at Pearl Brewery

It's beginning to look a lot like the good old days at the Pearl Brewery.

They just aren't the same days that many San Antonio residents will remember.

As workers remove the cream-colored paint that covered the brick, limestone, clay tile and tin on nearly every building surface, they're unveiling a pre-1950s brewery.

Yellowish brick, red mortar and red clay tile are showing through. The galvanized tin dome roof on the distinctive 1894 brewhouse, built in the Second Empire style popular during the era, is now the original black instead of the gold that appeared midcentury.

“I think people remember the gold dome and the white paint,” said Jeffrey Fetzer, senior associate with Ford Powell & Carson Architects. “We don't know why they painted everything white.”

Fetzer heard an old story about a local paint company coming up with a custom color called “Pearl beige,” which then got slapped onto every building in the 1950s.

Unfortunately, the paint had been trapping moisture in the bricks and causing damage for decades.

Mason Curtis Hunt III said repairing the buildings requires several rounds of paint stripping and washing, followed by an even more tedious process — hand chiseling out the decaying mortar and replacing it with a new mixture. Sometimes, eroded bricks must be turned around or replaced.

“You have to have patience,” Hunt said.

It also takes detective work.

The brick at Pearl Brewery came from Calaveras, near Elmendorf. The brick business is no more, but remnants of its work are still visible in the area, so Hunt and his wife drive around on the weekends looking for pieces to use at the brewery.

Recently, they discovered an old chicken coop and paid the owner so they could take the building apart, brick by brick.

“We hit the roads on the weekends, and we never drive home the same way,” Hunt said.

Meanwhile, Fetzer has been studying historic photos and looking at paint samples under a jeweler's loupe. After he took paint scrapings of the brewhouse roof, it turned out that gold wasn't the original color of the dome. Black was.

“We've been trying to be faithful to what we've found in the buildings,” Fetzer said. “We do a lot of investigation and history beforehand, but once the craftsmen get involved, you always find something unique.”

The restoration has teamed Fetzer, the project architect for the restoration of the State Capitol building, whose firm also has worked on everything from the historic missions to Galveston's historic Strand District; and Hunt, a fourth-generation mason whose family has worked on the Alamo and built the old San Antonio Library, later the Hertzberg Circus Museum. (Now the Hertzberg building is being turned into the Dolph and Janey Briscoe Western Art Museum; and Hunt's company, Curtis Hunt Restorations, is doing the exterior restoration work, while Ford Powell & Carson is overseeing exterior renovation).

The Pearl Brewery operated from 1883 until 2001. Silver Ventures bought the 22-acre site in 2002 and has been turning it into a mixed-use development with restaurants, residential units, retail and offices.

The exterior renovation of the brewhouse is nearing completion. For the repair of its distinctive tin roof, Silver Ventures turned to American Roofing and Metal Co. The company was founded in 1904 and has worked on the State Capitol, the Tower Life building, the Bexar County Courthouse and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower.

The company repaired and replaced rusted tin in some places, a process that required special metal fabrication to match the building's ornate design, Fetzer said.

And work on the top half of the clay tile smokestack has revealed the white tile lettering that reads “Pearl” on two sides and “Pride” on the part of the stack facing the San Antonio River, a reference to the Texas Pride beer once brewed there.

That original lettering, like the black tin dome, now has returned to its full old glory.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/business...ld_Sports.html

Article on the Run Wild Sports running store in the can building at the pearl.

Those are the old tracks of the Texas Transportation Company, a short-line electric railroad owned by the brewery. The rail operated from 1887 to 2001 when the brewery closed. Silver Ventures, the redevelopment owners of Pearl, plan to put almost all of the old track back down throughout the brewery grounds. The line never serviced street cars. KeepSanAntonioLame mentioned the ones on Jones Ave that are still visible. While those tracks were used for tourist trolley a few times, the tracks were officially owned by Texas Transportation Company and Pearl. That segment was how Pearl's trains got from the brewery over to the S&P rail junction on the other side of I-37.

They ran those trains about 5-10 times a day and they were fun to watch. It was like seeing a tiny caboose go by, its bell "ping ping ping"ing.

At the end Texas Transportation Company had two engines, #1 & #2. Engine 2 has been completely restored and now sits in front of Pearl Stables, Silver Venture's event hosting facility. Engine 1 is still owned by Silver Ventures, but it's sitting a couple of miles away in a rail storage yard. Last I heard they want to bring Engine 1 back to the brewery for display, but they're not sure what to do with it exactly yet or where to put it.


http://home.earthlink.net/~shawnbrow...portation1.JPG

http://home.earthlink.net/~shawnbrow...portation2.JPG

The lot across Grayson from the pearl (in between nightmare on grayson and liberty bar), which I think is owned by the Pearl folks, is being paved for parking it appears.