Deep in the Heart of San Antonio by Char Miller

Author:Char Miller [Miller, Char]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), Architecture, Urban & Land Use Planning, Travel, South, West South Central (AR; LA; OK; TX), Nature, Regional
ISBN: 9781595341211
Google: GkTpCAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2012-08-31T16:16:03+00:00

CONSTRUCTION ZONE

Neighborhood Watch

McCullough Avenue runs north-south between downtown San Antonio and the interior suburbs that lie within Loop 410. It is a vague sort of arterial roadway; sometimes its contains two lanes, sometimes four—an uncertainty that adds to its charm even as it heightens automotive anxiety. It nonetheless offers a less congested means by which to navigate the city’s north-central corridor than does McAllister Freeway (U.S. 281), an elevated slab of concrete that parallels it to the east. That is why many of my Olmos Park neighbors who work downtown prefer McCullough’s rolling blacktop, and the ash, oak, and pecan trees that shade its edge, to the expressway’s sharp curves and jammed lanes. Driving on it might be an adventure, a friend acknowledged, “but at least I feel grounded.”

The avenue is grounded in another sense: along its run out of town it exposes some of the rough edges of contemporary metropolitan life. This is particularly evident as McCullough rises out of the central core and into the elevated terrain of Tobin Hill, site of the city’s first streetcar suburbs. Much of its late-nineteenth-century housing stock has either fallen into disarray or to the wrecking ball. These tottering structures and overgrown lots, scattered amid a now faceless built landscape, make a mockery of what was once touted as urban renewal.

Less visible, but no less significant, is the division McCullough delineates between zones of intense affluence and poverty. As the avenue crests the hills, passes through the Monte Vista historic district—another former streetcar suburb—and crosses Hildebrand Avenue, once the city’s northern limits, it cuts between Olmos Park on the east and Kenwood on the west. These neighborhoods’ status and standing could not be more disparate, probably the greatest in the city.

Incorporated in the 1920s, and one of the city’s first automobile suburbs, Olmos Park has long been perceived as an elite enclave. The perception is sustained by its substantial dwellings, tree-lined streets, and robust average household income. Kenwood, home to many of the Hispanic and African American servants who worked in the nearby manses of Olmos Park, remains among the poorest of districts. Its oldest abodes are of the infamous shotgun variety, their slight wooden frames stacked on cinder-block foundations. Until the 1960s, Kenwood lacked running water and utilities, and its continued destitution is captured in this grim statistic from the late 1990s: one-third of its population then lived on less than $15,000 a year.

These stunning disparities in wealth and shelter are reinforced in educational prospects. Those children who live west of McCullough attend schools in the San Antonio Independent School District. Edison High School serves this area, and its student body is more than 92 percent Hispanic; only three-quarters of the school’s students graduate. Youth living east of McCullough go to Alamo Heights Independent School District; its high school’s population is 70 percent white, and 96 percent of its senior class heads off to college.

Giving physical form to these layers of divergence is the odd streetscape. On McCullough’s western edge is

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