Trevor Boddy
SAN ANTONIO'S RIVERWALK
TREVOR BODDY
From Friday's Globe and Mail
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April 18, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — The Lower 48 has few urban experiences to match a sultry evening's stroll along San Antonio's Riverwalk. These waterside pathways attract millions of conventioneers, distraction-seeking locals, vacationing families, and sauntering hipsters because Riverwalk is a secret realm — close, but not part of the rest of downtown.
The first large American city to have a majority Spanish-speaking population, by Southwest standards San Antonio has a lively and healthy downtown, with a particular richness of converted movie palaces and Art Deco buildings. But downtown's heart is set 20 feet lower than sidewalks and cinemas, along a lazy loop of the San Antonio River.
Riverwalk consists of several kilometres of lushly landscaped but quite narrow pedestrian paths lining both sides of loops in the slow-moving river, a creek by B.C. standards. These walkways lack the handrails required in infrastructure-crazy, protection-obsessed Vancouver. Patriarchs of civic virtue in our parks department, alas, would never give waterside permissions for so many demonic restaurants and dastardly drinking establishments as San Antonio.
"River" is a more a concept than a reality here, as it is city tap water flowing within its stone-lined banks, the entire watercourse drained for maintenance every January, and its depth limited to four feet (so those over-imbibing district sales managers from Akron and Athens don't drown when they fall in the drink!). But the power of water to transform urban spaces is ever-evident here. Descending to the water's level on stone steps of various vintages, then arching over the tiny river on Venetian-style small pedestrian bridges, is half the thrill here.
The other half is Riverwalk's continuous string of pulsing bars, restaurants and Tex-Mex cantinas along the pedestrian-only pathway. One end of this walking strip (active lunch through late night) is tied to large convention hotels, the other, quieter, end has such new boutique hostelries as the Valencia Hotel, which features one of the best high-end Mexican restaurants in the United States.
Freed of their cars, Texans and their guests from all over revel in the rare luxury of seeing and being seen outside their automotive armour. The key reason for Riverwalk's success is actually the narrowness of its public space. One can safely gawk, gossip and check out the guys and gals mere yards away on the other bank, framed by mature trees, flowers and shrubbery, empowered by a wonderful combination of being both close and far. In a delimited space, you can get close enough to other human beings to notice décolletage, footwear brands, the curl of a smile — details lost in workaday Wal-Mart parking lots and corporate lobbies.
Like many European squares, it is the continuous definition and enclosure of this urban space that is its attraction. We open-space-loving Canadians need to understand this. One reason Vancouver does not have a zone as fun as this is that we do not have a space as defined and delimited as Riverwalk.
What Vancouver has is the ever-tackier bar strip along Granville Street downtown, a disastrous legacy of one-and-only-one-activity-at-a-time land use planning. In architecture school, one of my teachers used to make satirical cartoons of what our meals would be like if we organized them in the same manner as zoning-obsessed city planners and politicians: April 18 to 25, boiled potatoes; April 26 to May 2, chocolate pudding; May 3 through May 10, ham hocks. Only.
The Granville civic diet is nothing but bars from Robson to the bridge. This bar concentration policy was pushed by former city councillor Lynne Kennedy, who should have known better, as she had watched the same policy lead to public disorder problems along Calgary's "Electric Avenue" when she lived there in the 1980s.
What is worse, Ms. Kennedy's policy effectively removed the strong encouragement for bars to feature live music, under pressure from penny-pinching Granville landlords and bar-owners.
One need only to drive over to San Antonio's sister city of Austin to see what we might have been on Granville Street.
Austin's Pecan Street is a concentrated bar strip with music of every possible stripe: blues; jazz; hard core punk; barnyard bluegrass; Brazilian samba; honkin'-good country. In the same way the landscaping, water and visually delimited public space tames the nightlife crowds along Riverwalk, Pecan Street attracts music lovers of every age and income. Live music has a catalytic and fun-engendering effect on bar-goers there.
Meanwhile, back in Vancouver, I have just learned the only remaining venue along our Granville for live music-loving geezers like me — the Yale Hotel's blues club — will soon shut down. The shuttered bar has already been slated for use as — wait for it — a condo pre-sales salon for a tower to rise next door. There is a vague promise that this space will be eventually upgraded into some sort of nightlife venue acceptable to the millionaires who will buy next door.
Vancouver, watch the music die. Single-use condo-mania is the cause of death.
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