The Where I Live series aims to showcase our diverse city and region by spotlighting its many vibrant neighborhoods. Each week a local resident invites us over and lets us in on what makes their neighborhood special. Have we been to your neighborhood yet? Get in touch to share your story. If your story is selected and published, you will receive a $250 stipend.
We fell in love with San Antonio 40 years ago. It’s a city with history and character, and you just don’t see that in other Texas cities. We love that it’s bicultural and that the Mexican culture is so integral to the fabric of the city. And we love all the green spaces there are to explore.
When we first moved here, we lived just south of what used to be Central Park Mall and worked at UT Health San Antonio. We would drive through this little neighborhood surrounding the Denman Estate thinking it was very rare but we’d never be able to afford a house there.
One day, we saw a handwritten note tacked to a bulletin board at the university that advertised a house for sale on Donore Place with concrete sculptures. We weren’t even thinking about buying the place, but we made an appointment just to see the sculptures. We toured the amazing two-acre property with 100-year-old oak trees and magnificent trabajo rústico sculptures and fell in love.
That was in 1992, and we’ve been living here ever since. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were built in the ‘40s and ‘50s on large lots when there was nothing else around. This whole area was split up from the Manuel Tejada Ranch in 1918 and has managed to survive the growth surrounding it.
While not much has changed in our neighborhood since we moved in, the area around us has really transformed. Many new additions have been convenient, but we’ve definitely felt the blow of some of the losses. Calcutta Coffee House was one of them. We got to know the owner there and other people in the area who would hang out there, and it was a place where we made real connections.
The neighborhood is quite walkable and will be even more so when the city finishes putting sidewalks in. We’re near Sprouts and a diverse selection of restaurants on Fredericksburg Road (Dry Dock and India Palace among our favorites), as well as our favorite coffee shop, Merit Coffee. And if you need to go downtown, you can hop on a bus along Fredericksburg.
Five years ago, the house next door, which is also on a two-acre lot, came on the market. It had been abandoned for five years, the roof had been leaking for 20 years and the person who was going to buy it was going to raze everything — the house as well as the trees — and build apartments. The owner, Ginger Diaz, was reluctant. She had grown up there and hated the idea that the house and trees would be razed, so she talked us into buying it.
The home was built in 1946 and despite needing a lot of work due to years of neglect, it has good bones. And the property still has remnants of the Tejada Ranch, like a cabin and barn. The huge task of renovation and renewal was achieved by the work of Harry Geyer, our contractor, architect Billy Lambert and landscaper Fernando Gonzalez.
We’ve started a community garden in the back and are working on a nature learning center. By partnering with Two Hoes Gardening, we’ve been able to offer a range of programming for children and adults. We’re also a hub for Green Spaces Alliance.
To help pay the bills, we rent out the home for vacation stays on Airbnb and offer event space. We named the property Hacienda Tecolote after a family of owls that have lived on the property for years and still watch over the land.
In the home where we live, we’ve added a new wing that we call the sports entertainment pavilion. It has a gym with a loft for meditation, a covered patio and an entertainment room. We decided to add the wing when we retired about nine years ago. This structure was conceived and built thanks to architect Rick Burleson and contractor Harry Geyer.
When we first moved to San Antonio, we thought we might spend a few years here before moving to the East Coast to be closer to France. Then when we retired we considered moving to Oregon. But, ultimately, we realized we loved San Antonio too much to leave.
