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.
A late-night Zillow scroll landed me on the little house that I now call my own in The Park at Stone Ridge, a small community of mostly garden homes tucked along the far northeast edge of McAllister Park.
I’m a San Antonio native but moved away after high school for a little over a decade. In 2017, a work opportunity unexpectedly brought me back home, and I immediately planted myself in the coolest place to be, the new-to-me Museum Reach. I basked in the enjoyment of River Walk life, taking up residence in the newest swanky apartments, spending weekends at infinity edge pools and enjoying easy walks over to Rosella for overpriced slices of avocado on sometimes-burnt toast. It was indeed fun, hip, vibrant and uniquely San Antonio.
But over time, I yearned for dirt outside my door instead of concrete. I dreamed of a little home with a back gate that opened onto a greenway, or maybe just a quiet patch of woods. So, when I saw a 975 square-foot home for sale at the end of a street whose backyard was quite literally the nearly 1,000-acre McAllister Park, I clicked the “favorite” heart on Zillow and went to go see it the next day.
In my humble, working-class neighborhood, kids ride their bikes in groups after school, people walk their dogs, and folks on mountain bikes are always headed to or from the park. One of my neighbors has Adirondack chairs in their front driveway and it’s common to see a few people sitting together chatting in the evenings. As I drive by, they’ll wave to me and my dog, Teddy, who they know by name, his fluffy body happily draping halfway out the open window. The neighborhood is so small you really can’t drive faster than 10 miles per hour, a great speed for waving and for dogs who like to hang out of windows.
McAllister Park is why so many of us are here. At 976 acres, it is larger than Central Park in New York City, and the second-largest urban city park in San Antonio (Olmos Basin Park is the largest at 1,010 acres). The amazing thing about McAllister Park is its unique composition as both a recreation hub and a place of wildness and nature.
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul,” wrote one of my heroes, John Muir.
You see that daily in McAllister Park, a lush oasis in a city known for too much concrete, a place to restore our spirits after a long day or week of earning that bread. Families, friends, couples and singles come and go, for free, between 5 a.m. and 11 p.m. every day of the year. One of my friends does her daily 6-mile walk in the park. Another friend does his almost daily 15–20-mile ride. I have a friend who trains for his ultra-marathons on the undulating dirt trails and friends who prefer the ease of the flat, paved trails. Other friends who host weekly runs, mommy-and-me yoga, astronomy nights and beginner hiking events for women.
While activities like these are common stories for many parks, the natural backdrop of McAllister Park is what makes these stories unique. McAllister Park is like no other. It sits at the interface of two ecoregions known as the Edwards Plateau and the Blackland Prairie and is also largely influenced by a third ecoregion, the South Texas Plains. Like three wide rivers slowly converging, these distinct ecological zones create a mashup of flora and fauna in the park that swirl together in unexpected and dazzling ways.
Escarpment live oaks dominate the landscape, interspersed with and finally giving way to honey mesquite. Ringtails and rock squirrels move covertly around the shady wooded areas while rare Texas tortoises lumber through sunny fields dotted with prickly pear cacti and agarita. Crested caracara, a tropical falcon of the open country, skim over the treetops while 20 feet below, Cooper’s hawks, a woodland raptor, prefer to cut a fast route through the midstory network of branches and limbs. Walking north to south along Mud Creek, you’ll see the last tendrils of the Balcones Escarpment showing through as short limestone bluffs until this gives way to flatter, deeper soils towards the airport, from which sprays of native wildflowers burst forth in the spring.
Since moving here, I’ve become the president of the Friends of McAllister Park, an all-volunteer nonprofit organization that works to assist the City of San Antonio with all matters that pertain to the park and to advocate for the protection and preservation of its natural features. My hope and efforts center on inspiring our members, my neighbors, city officials and all the people who use and love McAllister Park to pitch in and give back to the park that has given us so much, to keep it healthy and beautiful so one day, whether tomorrow or 100 years from now, someone else can find their grounding in this wealth of dirt and birds and trees in north central San Antonio like I have.
Living at The Park at Stone Ridge has granted me daily access to the wonder and wildness of nature, the peace and beauty of a natural, native landscape and the fun and connection of the outdoors and community, all thanks to the one and only, McAllister Park. This richness that my hard-working neighbors and I enjoy, all while living in the middle of the seventh-largest city in the country, is irreplaceable. Parks and nature, and nature in parks, is essential. I may have bought this house as a starter home, but the land pulls at me for this to be my forever place.
