Craig Glendenning started renovating the Hedrick building with only an idea of what the 1920s building looked like without the metal cladding that covered its front. Weeks into removal efforts, what he found underneath was a gift.
“God couldn’t have hid anything better,” Glendenning said. “It’s a great blessing.”
Sheets of red, white, and silver metal covered a warm terra cotta colored facade lined with intricately carved designs wrapping around the front of the building. Brick columns stack ten stories high to a top featuring carvings of Spanish colonial conquistadors.
The decades-old cladding was introduced as part of a modernization effort carried out in the 1960s.
“That building won the innovation for revitalization and modernization of a building in San Antonio,” Glendenning said. “It was the number one rehab project in San Antonio that year, and five years later it was obsolete.”
The building has stood vacant since 1987, making it an eyesore in the downtown landscape. But Glendenning and his partner Uri Villarreal are restoring the structure and surrounding buildings for residential and commercial use.
The Hedrick building will become The Flats On St. Mary’s, home to 54 high end apartments close to the River Walk, Weston Centre, and Tobin Center for the Performing Arts. Commercial tenants are expected to fill the ground floor. A restaurant, rooftop venue, and coffee shop will be built into the Voss building situated behind the Hedrick. There also will be some apartments inside that building as well.
Glendenning says nearly 80% of the removal efforts are finished. Moving forward with the development, he says its now time to start working on the nearly 400 windows located around the property.
“Each one of those has to be historically replicated with a wood clad window,” Glendenning said. “We’re trying to do something that’s going to last 100 years and not 20 years like the first one did.”
So happy to read a report on the revitalization of some of the beautiful architecture in San Antonio. This city is unique and the buildings are a treasure to be enjoyed in the future.
It is refreshing to see a developer who is truly sensitive to preservation and willing to take the extra steps to go so. This is especially important in our downtown where more often than not it has been more common to simply femo and rebuild something with no connect to SA’s. unique architectural history. The Conservation Society appears to not have been a factor this time and that is good. Kudos and Thanks.!!!
So glad to hear that people are willing to invest in these vacant buildings which have been an eyesore for so long. For the last several years, you could look up about 8 stories on the Hedrick Building and see that a single steel panel had fallen and that underneath was a very artistic facade. Now if only we could figure out how to get the Greyhound Bus station out of downtown, maybe this area could experience the renaissance it deserves.
Agree on the bus station. It is an eye sore, but also a good place for lower income travelers…San Antonio needs to build a one stop Train, Via Bus, Greyhound etc, Train, Taxi and any other transportation HUB……A one stop for all Station…One location should be considered is close to the Airport. with an underground tunnel connecting them.
People who take the bus tupically arent going to the airport. San antonio needs a great central station terminal downtown for greyhound, megabus, and those great buses from mexico that use that station on broadway.
I have to strongly disagree with the assessment that the historic downtown Greyhound terminal is an ‘eyesore’ — an argument that the Rivard Report has tried to advance in the past. Far from a ‘problem’, the historic Greyhound terminal is one of the few buildings downtown that demonstrates how generous our sidewalks and building sidewalk awnings used to be. Not to mention how cool our above awning lit signage was back in the day when downtown was thriving.
In contrast, newer buildings around the historic Greyhound station on Martin and St Mary’s are awful. The surface parking lot by Bill Miller is a wasted opportunity (I can only imagine what was torn down), and the Bank of America Financial Center parking garage is a nuisance — with no awnings, no seating, narrow sidewalks, a void for a facade on St Mary’s and air handling units facing Martin that are awful to look and that seem to operate beyond a safe dB range. It’s a blight, including compared to historic architectural gems like the Greyhound terminal — which showcase how our urban design has in many cases deteriorated since the 1960s.
At least,we’ve been losing particularly historic sidewalk awnings left and right downtown as well as sidewalk width and above awning illuminated signage and sidewalk lighting since declaring it downtown’s ‘decade’.
In recent years, San Antonio Greyhound has become one of the most frequent and affordable and comfortable direct travel options between downtown San Antonio and Monterrey. Our downtown is extremely lucky to have this direct link to Mexico, which is used daily and throughout the day, generating foot traffic and business all around the station.
From using Greyhound at least a few times a year to travel to other major Texas urban centers (I moved to San Antonio by Greyhound after falling in love with downtown on another Greyhound journey), the historic downtown Greyhound station is clean and well managed (although signage and announcements inside could be much better) and boasts useful downtown amenities including lockers, affordable freight shipping and a cafe.
Cutting Greyhound from its historic downtown roots (just as Dallas-based Greyhound has improved its buses, online booking and connections with Mexico and bus travel is experiencing a renaissance throughout the U.S.) is a terrible idea and a mistake that cities like Dallas, Houston, El Paso and Laredo would not make. It would be yet another strike against downtown walkability, visitation, business and historical architecture as well as San Antonio’s connections with the world.
If you are passionate about improving San Antonio’s downtown regional bus offerings, I suggest you contact your Council member and ask WHAT HAPPENED to downtown Megabus service? Megabus has been moved this summer from Broadway to a terrible ‘temporary’ location waaaaaay down Probandt and with no sidewalks by likely the same development interests that keep trying to blight the historic Greyhound downtown — in the same year that Austin established a low-rise downtown Megabus stand-alone terminal near our state capitol (recognizing the mistake of pushing the Austin Greyhound out of downtown).
San Antonio has attempted to build two ‘intermodal’ stations downtown in recent years and both — VIA’s Robert Thompson and VIA’s Centro Plaza — have been colossal and costly failures. Megabus at either or at VIA’s Ellis Alley might improve any of these sites as well as current Megabus service. However, Greyhound — like Omnibus (on Broadway) and Turimex (on Alamo Street) and Vonlane (on Commerce) and Zima Real (on Frio) — works just fine in its present location on St Mary’s downtown, including as one of the few buildings that actually brings visitors into downtown.
San Antonio could follow other U.S. cities in establishing regional bus stops at SAT airport (or VIA’s North Star Hub, establishing a shuttle van to the airport) in addition to downtown (similar to offerings in Mexico City, Atlanta, and Miami), but for that to happen, the attacks on downtown San Antonio’s regional bus riding community have to stop.
See:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/attachments/san-antonio/59240d1268071234-gone-but-not-forgotten-san-antonio-greyhound-station-nite.jpg
http://www.roadarch.com/bus/tx.html