This story has been updated.
Two City Council members have made a request to designate San Antonio’s North Main Avenue corridor as a cultural heritage district, honoring the area for being a cultural hub for the LGBTQ+ community.
Located near San Antonio College, the corridor known informally as the “gay strip” is clustered with bars, restaurants and other businesses. You know you’ve entered the area when you see rainbow stripes painted onto business signs, the Main Avenue-Evergreen Street rainbow crosswalks and colorful banners hanging on street lights.
That’s why District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur and District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez filed a Council Consideration Request to designate the area as a cultural heritage district.
The area north of downtown has been “a vital focal point for San Antonio’s LGBTQIA+ community for decades,” with bars including Pegasus, Sparky’s Pub and Heat, they said in a statement.
The corridor is also the host of the annual “Pride Bigger than Texas” Pride Festival and Parade, which began in San Antonio in 1982.
The request now heads to the city’s Governance Committee for the next steps. It could require additional review, or go forward to City Council. As of Wednesday, it was unclear whether the request will make it on the November Governance Committee agenda. The entire process to recognize the area as a cultural heritage district could take more than a year, since the Office of Historic Preservation’s process alone takes about a year, the city said.
“I am honored to be a part of this historic moment in San Antonio’s history as we celebrate the past and the future of our friends in the LGBTQA+ community to enrich the city of San Antonio and continue to provide a place of safety, love, and equality that make our city so special,” Kaur said in a statement.
The city’s cultural heritage district designation was established in 2005 to honor and recognize designated corridors for their heritage and the cultural stories told there. There are no design review requirements, but the designation promotes neighborhood pride, economic prosperity and well-being of the community, discourages demolition, and identifies potential historic resources.
It doesn’t change or regulate a neighborhood like a historic district does. Instead, it’s a tool to recognize an area’s special history and stories and holds the city accountable for celebrating that and sharing information about the area.
It’s honorific, said Jenny Hay, manager for Scout SA, the city’s resource program under the Office of Historic Preservation that identifies potential landmarks and districts in San Antonio.
“It’s [cultural heritage districts are] not the right tool for everything, just like historic districts aren’t the right tool for everything, so it’s really unique that we have that cultural historian position,” she said. “It’s really important for them to be constantly engaging with the community, ears on the ground, trying to make sure that we’re understanding what the needs out there are.”
Anyone can ask the Office of Historic Preservation to honor a cultural heritage district. There is no application process or a webpage about the program, but so far, no requests have been denied, Hay said, mostly because of the work of the city’s cultural historian, who connects with the community making the request to identify which designation best fits them.
“We work hard to make sure we’re matching people up with the right tools to help them meet their goals,” Hay said.
The city has designated a cultural heritage district to the Jefferson Heights neighborhood in 2005 and Old Highway 90 in 2018, Hay said, which are similar to how the gay strip will be honored, by recognizing properties that have frontage on the corridor.
“If it’s very important for those areas to be visually recognized in some way, then [we’re] working with that community to figure out what that looks like for them, and then figuring out how to find opportunities to fund whatever that is,” Hay said.
The gay strip already has a rainbow color scheme as an identifier, Hay said, so there’s no need to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel — it’s already visually distinguished from the rest of the city.
Once the request makes it to the Office of Historic Preservation, the historian will gather oral history, cultural mapping and host intense community listening sessions to understand the living heritage of the community, Hay said.
One ongoing cultural heritage district designation currently in the works is the Silk Road Cultural Heritage District in Northwest San Antonio. The designation is set go to the Historic and Design Review Commission sometime in the fall and will later be recognized by City Council.
This story and its headline have been updated to correct that a proposal is seeking a cultural heritage district designation for the North Main Avenue corridor.
