The storm comes, the storm goes. Storms bring destruction and life to our city.
A centuries-old oak tree in San Pedro Park was uprooted by storms in May. The same storms brought rain and lots of it, enough to awaken several springs in the park. For the first time in eight years, the San Pedro Springs are flowing again. Go experience the park and springs now.
My son and I used to fish for crawdads at the main spring north of the swimming pool. These crustaceans can survive periods of drought, only to reappear when springs resurface. In the memory of my childhood, the San Pedro Springs were always flowing.
In the ’20s, enough water flowed to completely flush the swimming pool at San Pedro Park three times every day, such as Barton Springs does today at Zilker Park in Austin. But the demand for water in San Antonio eventually caused our springs to flow more sporadically.
San Pedro Springs flowed for a few months in 1992, when the Edwards Aquifer stood at its recorded high level of 703.3 feet, and again in 1996 after heavy rains. The springs then entered a long dry period. The last time the San Pedro Springs really flowed tremendously was 2007.
Today, the crystal waters invite a dip, but a “No Swimming” sign discourages such a notion.
Before Francois P. Giraud became San Antonio’s mayor in 1872, he was the architect for the Ursuline Academy (now the Southwest School of Art), the original campus of St. Mary’s University (now the Omni La Mansion del Rio), and the 19th century ‘Gothicfication’ of San Fernando Cathedral. Even before all that, as city engineer, he furnished plans for the San Pedro Creek and its irrigation system. Records of early park development are sketchy so it is unknown what features he introduced.
Did Giraud design the oval lagoon just northwest of the pool? The surface today is littered with debris but it doesn’t take much imagination to visualize a clear wading pool for children from another time.
The son of French immigrants, Giraud studied architecture in Paris. I wonder if the trail by the trickling brook, just west of the bathhouse, was another of Giraud’s features.
Picnickers today can cool their heels in the bubbling stream. A small stairway leads children to wade in the wetness, to marvel at their reflection against the sky, and to launch tiny ships as big as a five-year-old’s imagination.
Pay a visit to San Pedro Springs soon. The sparkling waters will nourish your soul and lift your spirits.
*Featured/top image: San Pedro Springs. Photo by Kay Richter.
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Gabriel Perez
San Pedro park/springs was a family traditon. We would play in the water. The family would go swimming at the pool. I hate to see it in such disrepair.
Enjoy the springs while they last. I plan a trip very soon.
Thanks Don. Here are a few more things about the Park. Keeping the Park in good shape is a constant challenge. Hector Cardenas and the Friends of San Pedro Park have worked for many years to help keep it in good shape and to help get the funding necessary to make it better. Diego Bernal worked to get the Park the new amenities under construction now. Roberto Trevino picked up where Diego left off and will further efforts to protect and enhance this local treasure. Rick Grimm, one time librarian at the branch library there (the first branch library in San Antonio by the way) self published a booklet on San Pedro Springs Park that goes all the way back to the Native American residents in the area and takes it up to the 1990s. I think Cornelia Crook wrote a book on the Park and the Springs earlier as well. These sources tell readers a lot about this place…the origin of the first community that became modern San Antonio. Today, when the water flows from the Springs, it forms the beginning of the San Pedro Creek, flows from the Park through the VIA property, under the Five Points intersection, skirts the Five Points neighborhood and goes under the expressway, and into the tunnel under the dry San Pedro Creek you see downtown. That means the clear water from the Springs ends up in the tunnel 150 feet below downtown! You do not see the water! The community needs to get together and work on a new project…after we finish the San Pedro Creek Improvements Project currently underway…to connect the Park and the springs so we will have a complete creek and linear parkway from the Springs all the way to the confluence of the creek and the San Antonio River at Concepcion Park!
Guess the rain also brought out all the folks wanting to use a park to drink, do drugs and litter. Wish the city would clean it up.
At times it takes a storm to make things flow.
Sorry about the tree but happy about the springs!
Something good comes out of…