A chance encounter in 2010 with Lerma’s Nite Club co-owner Gilbert Garcia at the old Roosevelt Bar downtown started community advocate Susana Segura on a long, arduous and expensive journey to bring the onetime neighborhood anchor back to its former glory.
Thanks to more than a decade of stewardship by Segura and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, Lerma’s will reopen with a celebration on July 23 in its old space inside the 10,000-square-foot building on North Zarzamora Street, as a cultural center for neighborhood groups, community activities and events.
“It’s the culmination of all the work that the community has pulled together to help preserve the building,” said Segura, who served as the Esperanza Center’s project development coordinator organizing the $2 million Lerma’s renovation.
Bexar County has committed to opening a BiblioTech digital library in the northern part of the building, and up to two other tenants will eventually occupy the remaining space, though the timeline for occupancy is uncertain.
‘Abatement’ abated
In 2010, the City of San Antonio shut down the bar and music venue because of numerous code violations, mostly from a dry cleaner that shared the building and damage to the roof and interior walls that had gone unrepaired.
Garcia recognized Segura as an ardent fan who had danced many nights away to conjunto bands such as Bene Medina y Su Conjunto and Eddie “Lalo” Torres y Su Conjunto and asked her to help with a fundraiser to pay for repairs.
What he didn’t realize was that the city’s then-Dangerous Structure Determination Board had issued an order of abatement, which she told him meant that the building was to be demolished.
“I could see all the color come out of his face,” Segura said. She helped him gather paperwork and galvanized more than 300 community members — 100 of whom signed up to speak for two minutes each — to show up at the board’s hearing three days later in an effort to prove they could save the treasured building.
The effort won a reprieve, and the building was saved. But as projected costs mounted for a new roof, new concrete floor, restoration of windows and walls and other repairs, Garcia and his spouse, Maria, decided to donate the building. The Esperanza Center took them up on the offer, first raising $500,000 from the City of San Antonio in 2015 with the support of then-Councilman Roberto Treviño (D1), then an additional $500,000 in 2017 from Bexar County.
Deep history
Lerma’s began life as the El Sombrero Nite Club in 1948, built by a consortium of owners from San Antonio’s Chinese American community. The Esperanza Center’s executive director, Graciela Sanchez, said the building’s signature elongated octagon windows originated with the original owner’s design, which has been maintained through multiple owners and iterations, though most recently they’d been covered up.
Pablo Lerma took over the space in the early 1950s and created a conjunto music mainstay, treating audiences to popular bands from around the United States, several of which would offer their advocacy when Segura sought support for saving the building.
That deep history helped her and the Esperanza Center achieve an important first step, working with the Texas Historical Commission to achieve landmark status through the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.
A second step was to undertake remediation, a two-year process to test for any ground contamination caused by chemicals used by the former laundromat. Once the building was cleared, Segura hired architects Richard Mogas and Alex Gonzales to plan the renovations.
A new life
The coronavirus pandemic added to the usual delays in permitting and construction, but the first phase of renovations is now complete, more than a decade after Segura met at the Roosevelt Bar. One renter, Conjunto Heritage Taller, has already been in the refurbished space teaching music lessons.
“It’s a 10-year endeavor, from saving it from being demolished to at least opening this part of it,” Sanchez said during a recent tour of the building. She said a staff member would be hired to schedule events and other community uses of the space.
To Segura, reopening Lerma’s “signifies the beginning of something great. It’s the beginning of a new life for the building, the beginning of a new future history that’s being written by the community.”
Sanchez said the July 23 grand reopening is already sold out, but the Esperanza Center is considering additional ways to offer the community a glimpse inside its newly restored Westside hub.
