San Antonio City Hall, back in another era, looked like this:
(Photo from
Texas Travel)
(Photo by
Ernst Raba courtesy the San Conservation Society hosted by the San Antonio Express-News)
The small but charming 1891 landmark at the center of the city's Military Plaza was a Gilded Age / Victorian Era attempt to civilize and erase the more unsightly vestiges of what had become a dusty, open air, Old West market full of iconic chili stands:
(Photo by
Mary E. Jacobson courtesy of the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, on Flickr)
(Photo by
Mary E. Jacobson courtesy of the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, on Flickr)
(Photo by
Mary E. Jacobson courtesy of the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, on Flickr)
Back in yet another era, this was the Plaza de Armas, focal point of the Presidio San Antonio de Béxar where Spanish governors and Mexican President General Santa Anna drilled and paraded their troops.
(Image from
Memoria Política de México
The city hall actually stands behind another local landmark, the San Fernando Cathedral fronting Main Plaza. Along with the military garrison and governor's palace in the presidio on Plaza de Armas, the church on Plaza de las Islas formed the foundation of Spanish colonial civic life, and that relationship symbolically continued with the new City Hall and the rebuilt cathedral:
(Photo from the
San Antonio Express-News)
The growing government bureaucracy in 1927 thought to expand and "modernize" the city hall with an added floor and Beaux Arts restyling. In the process they removed the turret cupolas and inadvertently broke the clock of the central domed clock tower. Historic municipal government can be just as incompetent as modern municipal government.
(Image from
HipPostcard)
(Photo by
Chuck & Melissa Gregory on Let's Just Go Somewhere)
Bureaucrats will never give up their offices in the historic building nor their reserved parking spots around the plaza, but, if it were up to me, the old roofline with the turrets, cupolas, and clock dome would be restored along with a few more exotic landscape plantings. Preservationist purists would howl arguing that we shouldn't remove one piece of recent history to recreate a piece of older history, but I'm willing to let them keep the arched entry on the backside, as it does have nice details and good human scale.
(Photo by
Kevin Stewart on Flickr)
Perhaps it is a symbol of the new foundations of modern society, but the City Council no longer actually meets in the old City Hall, but now in the former 1920s headquarters of the locally-based Frost Bank, which also stands besides San Fernando Cathedral. The former grand banking hall was brilliantly repurposed in 1995 into the current City Council Chambers:
(Postcard from
Boston Public Library hosted on Texas Travel)
(Image from
Beaty Palmer Architects)
(Photo by
Scott Ball for The Rivard Report)
Being a former banking hall, the council chambers are entered almost directly from Main Plaza, making it theoretically, symbolically, and practically open and accessible for the public.
(Photo by
Ryan Loyd for Texas Public Radio News)
However, last year we horrified with the ugly viral image of a local alt-right militia "deploying" aroung the Municipal Plaza Building and showing off what they think about open, participatory democracy as they stared down and tried to intimidate people going in.
(Photos by
Scott Ball for The Rivard Report)
So much for the quaint Victorian notion of a progressive city hall civilizing the Wild West. Not only over the years did we lose the character of our city hall's architectural roofline, we also apparently lost the character of our principled, Western democratic society.
We're in deep trouble.