[KeepSanAntonioLame]

From today's EN.

Reviving HemisFair Park focus of development summit

Forty years ago, a historic neighborhood was razed and residents left the property that became HemisFair Park.

Now the city would like to bring people back — if it can only figure out how to do so.

Plans to re-create HemisFair — the downtown property that hosted the 1968 World's Fair and has been used less successfully ever since — have moved slowly since the city approved a master plan in 2004.

“Quite frankly, since 2004 there have been incremental changes,” said Colleen Swain, the city's assistant director of downtown operations.

Now, a plan developed as a volunteer project by Overland Partners Architects has jump-started the conversation again about how to bring some life back into the park.

Participants in a roundtable discussion Monday at the city's 2008 Community Development Summit at the Convention Center talked about the park's history and threw some ideas out there — including opening some of HemisFair's streets to cars, adding parking to make it more accessible, extending the River Walk into the park and privately developing some properties on the perimeter.

“HemisFair needs to be done at the highest level,” said Madison Smith, partner at Overland. “This is no place for mediocre development.”

Hosting the World's Fair at HemisFair has long been touted as a turning point in San Antonio's history, positioning the city as a tourist and convention mecca. But those involved in the event wring their hands over the park's chronic underuse.

“It seemed to be that San Antonio kind of coasted for a long time on that energy,” said Sherry Kafka Wagner, founding executive director of the Women's Pavilion at HemisFair Plaza.

Boone Powell, partner at Ford Powell & Carson who worked on the original plans for the park, said the city has a long history of ignoring the HemisFair property.

“The fair really did invite the city, but the city didn't come,” Powell said. “That's the problem we have today. That's the biggest single thing that went wrong.”

Now that's changing, Powell and others said a “grand vision” could revive the park.

Smith suggested that connecting the park with the Lavaca neighborhood and creating a mixed-use boulevard along Durango Boulevard could help remedy the somewhat confusing experience that people now have with the park.