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Originally Posted by KevinFromTexas
I don't remember them mentioning the river. I had emailed them with the question and they went a step further and sent me an information packet about the residences, and they included a note with the height.
I also don't think that the old Frost Bank Tower is 300 feet. I'm not sure where that height came from officially. Where I got it from was from a friend from Chicago who has been collecting building heights since the 1970s. He's maintained a list of thousands of buildings during that time. The World Almanac even contacted him for their high rise reference pages. I don't know where the height came from, and I'm not sure he did either. It may have been from an earlier issue of the World Almanac. They used to include buildings over 300 feet, but as more and more cities have added taller buildings, they started edging out the height tiers. Now I think they only include buildings over 400 feet. It's been a while since I've gotten an updated World Almanac, so they might not even list buildings over 500 feet. The height that I have for the "old Frost Bank Tower" is 277 feet, and that came from Google Earth. A lot of San Antonio's building heights from that list were wrong. It said the Marriott Rivercenter is 546 feet, but I also recall an old height listed for it of 441 feet. The tallest I've been able to measure it was 455 feet, same for the Weston Centre. I also remember the height for the Nix Professional Building was 375 feet, but I think that was including the flagpole. I've only ever been able to measure it at 307 feet. I'm not sure why there are so many incorrect heights for San Antonio. I mean, it happens. Typos happen, and building designs can change between the time that their construction is announced to when it actually starts construction. And there wasn't always a standardized way of measuring buildings. Flagpoles and signs/masts were counted, but now they aren't officially.
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I think the discrepancies come from the difference between street level and river level. For some reason, and I don't know that I've seen confirmation of this, but I think buildings in the DT core were "officially" measured from river level, maybe to make them seem taller in publications leading up to Hemisfair '68.
Depending on how you measure river level, it could explain the variances in height you are finding. I think we can agree that SA is not as tall a city as "official" heights would have people believe.
(And I would love your friend's job. I'm assuming a lot of rooftop access comes with it from buildings all over.)