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.
The amplified notes of a late-aughts banger resound off the walls of this river bend. Cultural catnip for aging millennials, this new-age siren call summons puro flâneurs — strollers or beers (or both) in hand — wandering this reach of river whose namesake-cum-lodestone punctures the sky with fairy-tale turrets.
This stretch I frequent didn’t always draw such a crowd. It was, for decades, an overgrown open-air sewer, parts of which resembled a “trapezoidal ditch with a trickle of water,” as architect Irby Hightower would have it. What a difference from the once “rich blue and pure as crystal” river that Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmstead beheld on his travels through Texas in the 1850s. Such is the tale of progress, I guess.
Walking around, I wonder what this place might’ve been like to experience before all this, well before we named it. This length of river wasn’t always the Museum Reach, and this “rapidly developing neighborhood” wasn’t always River North, though the new aqueous logo that emblazons area parking lots — horizontal temples to the car’s supremacy — has all but baptized it as such. Through either normal evolution or brute top-down force, it’s a moniker that’s sticking. What’s in a name, really? A rose is a rose is a rose, I guess.
While coming into my own as a teen at the home of the Buttons (an incidental constituent of the neighborhood), a master plan for this district was released. In it, grand visions of a Broadway “transformed into an elegant urban avenue” were proposed. La Rambla, a Barcelonan street that one poet wished “would never end,” was the model. Development of what could be a “desirable urban address” was, one could say, just around the river bend.
After voters approved an $850-million bond in 2017 with money earmarked for a reimagined Broadway, such hopes appeared within sight. Yet for many years, construction cones populated the historic corridor, eyesores that mocked our dreams of better. A pandemic and a few council members later, the project was finally realized; the cones are now gone, the memory of which lingers but fades by the day.
We’re told progress takes time, though that’s the one thing we don’t have much of. This tension would be funnier, perhaps, if our lives didn’t center on it. I laugh anyway.
Through all these years, there’s been one towering constant. It’s that castle of curios known as the San Antonio Museum of Art, a decades-old fortress of art and artifacts that backdrops my apartment’s view if not my life. It is the civilizing center of this “rapidly developing neighborhood.” A proud member, I enjoy ambling its halls and attending its events. Its collections, which include approximately 10,000 pieces of Latin-American art, always piqued my wonder as a child. They still do. Some things never change, I guess.
Attending the occasional lecture there rekindles my curiosity about the world and makes me feel connected to my fellow San Antonians — or my idea of what they can be at their best. This is a city with apparent potential, the fulfillment of which is far from guaranteed.
Yet change plows on — my neighborhood keeps growing. The list of establishments that have opened in recent years sounds incantatory. Elsewhere. Idle. Commonwealth. Roadmap. River Sun. Nola. Hops and Hounds. Shiro. And Make Ready Market, to boot. Make ready, indeed, for even more hangouts, like Hot Joy and Pumpers and others, whose names are whispered among the many who crave all that is new and different.
That’s the draw here, anyway — for bars and restaurants, at least, the de facto marker of what makes a place livable or, short of that, entertaining at day’s end. Just don’t call it “world-class.” That term has always smacked of insecurity draped in poor marketing. True “world-class” cities don’t call themselves as much; they simply are.
I can’t help returning to some of the same questions. Whom does development serve? What could’ve been here? What could be? I understand the area’s industrial history assumedly complicates investment. But those parking lots. Along with abandoned warehouses, they hug the river tightly and refuse to let it go. Change seems slow — too slow for one ready for its promise.
There are, of course, murmurings of future multifamily projects; if only such projects could be built as quickly as new bars (or leastwise more quickly than Broadway was redeveloped). Perhaps a new Broadway will catalyze such development. Time will tell, they say. But what will it utter? Somewhere in the world, a Magic 8 Ball is shaken, replying “Better not tell you now.”
Does it sound as if I don’t find my chosen quarter good enough? Should I leave it if I don’t love it? I can’t, for now; I’ve found too much to cherish about this place, like the paired-off ducks my partner and I have named, their presence as expected at some landings as the ceaseless din of neighboring highways. The same goes for the chorus of Gulf Coast toads that call for mates on summer nights—a sound that is already a relic of another time, considering the intrusion of those siren calls I mentioned. This is existence in a “rapidly developing neighborhood,” I guess. But it doesn’t have to be, I believe.
For all that, River North is what I’m calling home these days. Perhaps much wouldn’t change with a move to some other River North in a different city—except everything, of course. This must be what living here means: days filled with nothings, collected like wildflowers, stratified along a dreamy river bend.
