(Image from Alamo Trust on the
San Antonio Report)
I'm still dismayed that they are taking functioning, historic, street-level commercial buildings and gutting them for a limited-access, chintzy museum, all while downtown is still struggling to just maintain what remains of its street-level retail. Why are we demolishing what already urbanistically works? It makes me wonder which museum trust bureaucrat's offices will get all the windows looking out onto the Alamo while the actual museum displays go to the windowless back.
Worse still, the plan also requires the facade of the former Palace Theater to be demolished to make a fanciful glass arch entry for this museum. We should instead be pushing to restore the exterior of the former Palace Theater.
(Photo from Zintgraff Special Collections, Z-1216-I-1, from UTSA Libraries Special Collections found on
The Top Shelf blog)
Additionally, adding the extra glass level above the Crockett Block and merging the block into a giant building radically changes the roofline in a way that I am not convinced preserves or augments the integrity of the plaza as a historical urban outdoor room. However, the State now owns the block, the currents occupants have been given notice, and the architects are hired.
What they really should have done is refurbish the already stately and limited-access Federal Building at the north end of the plaza into the museum. This is would preserve the Crockett Block while enhancing the existing powerful sequence of the existing plaza from the Torch of the Friendship, the Alamo Plaza Gazebo, the foundations of the South Gate, Plaza de Valero, the Alamo Cenotaph, and the ultimately the new Alamo Museum. The actual Federal offices can move to a new, modern building to be built upon any number of the empty parking lots in downtown as part of Federal infrastructure and revitalization investments.
Lastly, I would still move the Alamo Cenotaph, but this time 80 feet northward to stand at the northern end of Alamo Plaza closer to the current Federal Building. This opens Plaza de Valero for use as an actual plaza, or for re-enactment drills, or for memorial observances, all while still keeping the cenotaph in a memorializing position over and within the plaza while further connecting the refurbished Federal Building museum to the plaza.
Here is a rough photoshop mock up:
(Image from Google Earth with edits)
(Image from Google Earth with edits)
Those shocked by the idea that commercial buildings on Alamo Street will have commercial uses inside them can look at a possible tree line instead. Perhaps one day we can encourage outdoor café culture and further push the historical living plaza of people rather than the dead terrarium plaza some seem to want. The original impetus for foolishly expelling the cenotaph completely came from the ghastly design to close off the Plaza de Valero with glass walls and bind it as a controlled space under the museum. As a contained space, the plaza would have been awkwardly filled by the bulk of the cenotaph in its center. The walls are gone, but the problem remains that the cenotaph was designed as the centerpiece of a long traffic circle, and that traffic circle devours the space of what should be a plaza. To restore the plaza, we need to remove the traffic circle, and without the traffic circle, the cenotaph loses the basis for its current positioning. I suggest no longer treating it as a traffic circle installation, but as an actual memorial overlooking the inner plaza, and the best place for it to do that is at the northern head of the plaza.
Here we see the cenotaph is a traffic circle mostly surrounded by undefined dead space:
(Images from Google Maps)
(Image from Google Maps)
Maybe some Disney cannons here or something. Which reminds me, instead of the platformed cannon pointing goofily into the north wall of Ripley's Believe It or Not!, why not fully restore the facade of the former Grand Opera House? After all, if we are going for nostalgically historical recreations...
(Painting by Xiang Zhang on the
Art Renewal Center)
Actually, we should do that anyway.