City leaders are thinking about the future of the San Antonio River Walk.
Now an advisory board tasked with looking after one of the state’s top attractions is reviewing a strategic plan, a year in the making and the first of its kind ever drafted for the top attraction.
Intended to help city staff recommend what projects are needed next, the plan comes at a time when major changes are planned for the urban core, including an improved Alamo Plaza and a sweeping sports and entertainment district.
How the River Walk connects to those areas is one focus of the study.
“What we’re going to do is, we’re going to literally draw you a picture of what that could be like, and … what could be achieved if we really think about this in terms of the next 100 years of the River Walk,” said architect and planner John Louden of the San Antonio firm Work5hop.
He’s tackling the project to create a big vision.
“This is the project of a career, and we’re going to do it right, and so we’re going to design conceptually what that could be … to give people that vision.”
With surveys, public meetings and studies now complete, and the input of various experts gathered, Louden’s team came up with five guiding principles that everyone can agree on, maxims to consider when making design and budget decisions.
First, history and tradition are the core of the River Walk experience, he said. “We need to keep that in mind. It doesn’t mean that we need to keep the River Walk in a black box … but we need to keep that at the core.”
Another principle Louden listed covered the aspect of safety and keeping the River Walk’s family-friendly character. It should also continue to be an attraction for both tourists and residents, and commerce, recreation, housing and natural beauty should be in balance.
Lastly, the River Walk must remain a unique place authentic to San Antonio.
The Work5Shop team is also putting together a study of existing conditions and analyzing what areas need capital improvement.
There are 12,300 hotel rooms along the River Walk and 4,850 residential units, Louden said.
In addition, there are 38,000 public and private parking spaces, in garages and surface lots, with a majority concentrated along the north end of the River Walk. There’s another 7,000 on-street parking spaces.
The perception that there’s not enough parking downtown near the River Walk is not necessarily accurate according to Louden’s analysis.
“There’s a familiarity-with-downtown problem amongst locals,” said Cory Edwards, interim director and historic preservation officer for the city’s Office of Historic Preservation.
“It’s a scary, unfamiliar place,” he said, moreso when the visitor doesn’t know the roads well, where to find parking, and there’s a lot of construction going on. “How do we get out of that experience?”
The consultant group also looked at pedestrian movement patterns between downtown attractions and lighting around the River Walk.
“It’s a pretty tremendous and incredible spot that is not treated like that physically right now,” Louden said. “The River Walk is not set up to receive people well from Alamo Plaza, from Hemisfair.”
How people traverse downtown also is a factor influenced by nighttime lighting. The team analysing light data has so far found that some of the brightest lighting comes from the bridges that span the River Walk.
“One of the outcomes of this is going to be recommendations to re-level the light as you move along, so you don’t have those big contrasts,” he said.
Several in the group supported the idea that the bridge sections of the River Walk, often unimproved areas used to tuck away utilities, could be improved.
Louden said he has identified several ideas, including incorporating art and sculpture, restrooms, bars and food booths.
The team also looked at the character of different sections of the downtown segment of the River Walk. Some sections are active with people strolling and dining and drinking, primarily in the historic inner loop, while other sections are primarily used for recreation — for example, running for exercise or walking during lunch breaks.
“That implies things for us about how you treat different things in different areas, and we want to be able to say in a relatively objective way what those different characters are,” he said.
The strategic plan incorporates a previous report on accessibility that the City of San Antonio commissioned in 2007 and resulted in $18.7 million in capital improvements, completed in 2022.
The latest plan is expected to be completed by late summer or fall with recommendations provided to a council committee soon after.
Elements of the plan could be recommended for funding during the next bond process, Edwards said, and other capital projects could be paid for through the River Walk Capital Improvements Fund which is projected to have $2.7 million at the end of the year.
The fund collects about $500,000 a year from River Walk business owners.
