The Autumn of Alamo Heights
In San Antonio’s most genteel neighborhood, the only frightening sound is the ticking of the clock.
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The grande dame nonpareil of Alamo Heights is 83-year-old Margaret “Mag” Batts Tobin, who walks with a cane—she has had surgery on both her knees—and whose snow-white hair has been that color since her twenties. Fiercely independent, she flies off—alone with her son Robert—to New York City (where she is an honorary director of the Metropolitan Opera) whenever she has a mind to. “I am so intimidated by her,” one of the lesser dowagers told me. “When she says ‘frog,’ there are five hundred people in this town who jump, and I’m one of them. When she’s for you, she’s with you all the way but when she’s against you, you’d best get the hell out of the way.”
Mrs. Tobin’s star barely outshines that of 78-year-old Ilse Frost. She is matriarch of both the Frost banking family she married into and the Herff medical family she was born into. Known for her razor-sharp sense of humor, the six-foot-tall (in stocking feet) Mrs. Frost dresses in the simple, understated tweeds she has worn all her life and maintains two residences: one in San Antonio, the other at the old Herff ranch near Boerne. A heavy smoker, she is said to suffer from “regal emphysema.”
Ramona Seeligson, 79, belongs to an oil-rich clan and is its last living representative from her generation. She is a stunning woman who ordinarily looks 20 years younger than she is, 25 years younger when dressed for dinner at the Argyle, the city’s ritziest, most exclusive private club. She is tall and erect and wears simple jewelry and smart clothes. Mrs. Seeligson is famous for lavish entertainments and hunting parties at her South Texas ranch at Premont. She still bags quail and other birds during the hunting season.
Eighty-year-old Stella “Lulu” Herff is perhaps the most storied of the grande dames. According to one legend, during World War II she employed two young Japanese maids whom she had rescued from California detention camps. She hires a woman to come to her home every morning and comb her formidable head of bluish-white hair. While she was in the hospital recently with a slipped disc, her chauffeur brought fine food from her household kitchen because she considered the hospital food inedible. She goes to Paris every spring and has occupied the same room at the Ritz for sixty years. When asked why, she replies, “Because my servants must have two weeks off annually, and I have to go somewhere.”
These women are all close friends and have been for five or six decades. To neglect to invite one of them to a party is to incur the wrath of all. They have much in common: they are all well coiffed, well dressed, well mannered, well read, well traveled, independent, willful, and generous. None could be described as arrogant or imperious, but all seem to inspire awe, particularly among younger women, and each cuts a wide swath when she walks into a restaurant or a beauty shop or a diamond salon.
The Alamo Heights dowager is no stranger to San Antonio at large. She is, variously, a philanthropist, a socialite, a conservationist and preservationist, a patron of the arts, a businesswoman, a property owner, a landlady, and, in some cases, as with Lucie Keblinger Whitehead, an intellectual who continues to pursue her formal education.
An example of both businesswomen and socialite is 82-year-old Hally Purvis Petiot, who was educated in Paris and keeps a house there but describes Alamo Heights as the headquarters of her life. Mrs. Petiot who also owns rental properties in the city, owns, operates, and buys clothing for the Fashion Dress Shoppe at 4000 Broadway. As a member of the Women’s Club of San Antonio, the French Club, the Business and Professional Women of San Antonio, and the San Antonio Symphony Society, she provides fashions for their style shows. She has dressed—or, in her word, covered—the wives of several astronauts and the wife of one former vice president: Judy Agnew. She flies to Dallas every three months to buy clothes at the Apparel Mart and visits her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter in Florida every December.
The widows have maintained friendships over the decades, but many have not made new ones in several years. As the women die off, the survivors pursue their remaining friendships with desperate intensity. “I can remember,” says MarJo Rogers, 39, of Olmos Park, “that when I waitressed for the Junior League’s Bright Shawl lunchroom, six of the old Texas Chili Queens would come every day for lunch. They would scold me if I hadn’t arranged their chairs so they could all touch each other with their hands as they conversed. I think there’s still three of them left.” Most dowagers claim that they don’t suffer from loneliness, but one prominent octogenarian from an oil family admits, “Loneliness is my biggest problem. My husband has been dead since 1964, and there have been no other men. My daughter lives a block from me and my grandson four blocks, and I see them a lot. I meet old friends at Cappy’s and La Louisiane and Chez Ardid for lunch; I go shopping; I entertain. But it’s never enough. There are evenings I’m on the phone desperately calling every friend I have until I finally get one to meet me for dinner at the Argyle. Please don’t write who I am.”
Grandmother Ann Tobin Rowland, 58, Mag Tobin’s niece, enjoys the stability of Alamo Heights. “We have the American dream of an old-fashioned town in the heart of a big city. I like to go into the HEB grocery on Patterson for a loaf of bread and know it’s going to take me forty-five minutes because I recognize everyone on every isle and have to stop and chat.”
Some of the younger residents are not enamored of the small-town manners of Alamo Heights. “Sometimes the chummy atmosphere can be oppressive,” admits Sharon Baker, a 38-year-old divorcée and mother of two. “When you’re going through a personal crisis like a divorce, you may not want to discuss it with neighbors and acquaintances you bump into at the HEB. Yet they’ll ask you about it. After my divorce, a woman I hardly knew sidled up to me at a high school football game my son was playing in and said confidentially, ‘I just want you to know that I’m praying for you.”
An Old-fashioned Sunday Drive
To a visitor driving into Alamo Heights on Broadway from the south, the area is indistinguishable from thousands of other streets in small American towns. No commercial building may exceed two and a half stories without city council approval. The architecture is unremarkable and eclectic. Many establishments, some operated by the same proprietors for the past 35 years, have deep sentimental value to the residents, but a visitor is unlikely to see Broadway as more than a typical succession of small shopping centers with offices above the stores and boutiques, an abandoned movie theater, a quaint drugstore, convenience stores, a bank, and a fire station. Stands of oak trees grace the curbs.
And churches. One passes church after church, and on Sunday mornings, the bells ring incessantly. There are more churches in Alamo Heights than in any other two square miles of San Antonio (itself an exceptionally devout city), including downtown. There is, however, no synagogue; Alamo Heights Jews must go into San Antonio to worship.
On ecclesiastical subjects, there is no more qualified spokesman than retired bishop Everett H. Jones, 79, who has lived in Alamo Heights since 1910. A graduate of the University of Texas and Union Theological Seminary, Jones was prelate of the San Antonio–based Episcopal Diocese of West Texas for 35 years, during which he baptized, confirmed, married, and buried innumerable Alamo Heights residents. Today he is a red-faced, snowy-haired little man who fairly crackles with energy.
“This community,” says the bishop, “has always been churchgoing, because of a certain wholesomeness here, a love of the clean life. I think our standards are still more wholesome than elsewhere. Religiously we may be above average, but we’re still too casual—not as devout or sincere as the people I remember from my childhood. Church today must compete with society parties, hunting trips, and vacations to the coast. These things are not bad, they’re just not good enough. Often the good is an enemy to the best.”
The homes in Olmos Park and Terrell Hills are more imposing than those in Alamo Heights. Palatial Tudor mansions belonging to old oil families perch atop rises in Terrell Hills; some forested, secluded estates in Olmos Park are valued at $2 million. By zigzagging west off Broadway, then doubling back south on Greeley Street, a visitor can see evidence of the patchwork history and economic integration of Alamo Heights. “Many people here from Dallas,” says a middle-aged realtor who has offices of Broadway, “are disappointed because it isn’t another Highland Park. They say, ‘Is this all there is?’ the cottage mix and the hill-and-dale syndrome and the few eyesores really put them off.”
On streets like Argo, Abiso, Normandy, and Ogden Lane, the “Alamo Heights cottage” dominates. It’s a small clapboard structure with a gray or green shingled roof. It usually has two bedrooms and one bath. In 1968 it sold for $15,000; it costs four times that today, and just $25,000 more will buy you one with three bedrooms and two baths. A two-story cottage with a rock-and-siding exterior goes for $108,000; in 1972 the same house could be bought for $45,000, and on the south or west sides of San Antonio it still can. Obviously, in Alamo Heights a house is an entrée to a community, a way of life.
Along Patterson, Torcido, and Lagos—the heart of Old Alamo Heights, an area west of Broadway that was the original development—one sees what that realtor meant by the hill-and-dale syndrome. A thirty-year-old cottage will be nestled between a magnificent old estate shrouded by spreading oaks and ivy-choked palms and a new 6000-square-foot French château valued at $900,000. The cottage does not depreciate the value of the palaces next door; instead, the elegant homes inflate the value of the eyesore. Many of the yards become botanical showcases in the springtime, with meticulously manicured gardens of snowdrops, redbuds, and irises, islands of pansies, towering palms, dazzling azaleas and camellias and jasmine and mountain laurel, forests of elms and magnolias and pecans and stately oaks.
The Argyle, at 934 Patterson, is within walking distance of homes, no two remotely alike, belonging to families with hallowed names like Straus, Moorman, Zachry, and Maverick. The Argyle itself is the oldest surviving structure in Alamo Heights. The white Greek Revival mansion with wide galleries and burnished-wood dining rooms was converted to a hotel in the 1890s and gained a national reputation for Southern hospitality and sumptuous meals.
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