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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After World War II the Argyle sank into decay, like so much else in Alamo Heights. In 1955 it was purchased by the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education and restored to its former grandeur as a private club. Today it is the site of wedding receptions, debutante fetes, and private parties, and members can rent the plush old suites upstairs for one night or for the weekend.
The membership is mainly couples, but of the single members, women far outnumber men. One Argyle employee confides, “We’re a home away from home for many members, particularly the old and lonesome. Even the widows and widowers don’t come alone, though. They always drag someone, usually another member, along with them. The old ladies come more for lunch than dinner, though they’re here a lot for dinner, too. Some come seven, eight times a week.”
Seven blocks from the Argyle on the same street, a vacant seventeen-acre plot has become the subject of a community controversy. Four of its acres are being cleared for two condominium towers, one six stories, the other ten. Such heights violate a long-standing zoning law, but the developer, Robert Callaway, appealed to the city council for a variance and got it. The Old Alamo Heights Neighborhood Association immediately filed suit against the city. At last report, the community forces were losing. Historian and Alamo Heights resident T.R. Fehrenbach, in one of his guest editorials for the village’s weekly newspaper, the North San Antonio Times, wrote, “It may be that ‘park cities’ such as Alamo Heights are a futile dream doomed to be steam-rollered by inexorable forces and tides. Perhaps the future lies in mass concentration, traffic, and neighborhoods of strangers living cheek to jowl.”
Five years ago Callaway developed the 4001, a high-rise condominium near the San Antonio Country Club, just outside Alamo Heights, that caters to the elderly rich. Prices on his units at 200 Patterson Avenue will start at $300,000 and skyrocket from there. The unspoken fear among younger residents is that the Callaway project will set off a chain reaction of high-rise condo building “adult living” that will make the village older still.
Lucie at Midmorning
By midmorning Lucie Keblinger Whitehead’s mansion felt warm and secure. From downstairs came the reassuring hum of Mabel’s vacuuming; from outside, faintly, the clip-clip of Bill’s pruning. Lucie’s garden was famous in the neighborhood. Every week Bill planted something new: this week he was digging up caladiums and putting out pansies.
Lucie sat at a desk in the incandescently bright upstairs room that she used as a study. She was opening her morning mail and reading each item with a magnifying glass, craning her neck almost to the desktop. The only way she could see to attend to her business was to brighten the room with the three-hundred-watt bulb in the lamp behind her. Her friends tried to persuade her to let somebody help her, but who would it be? If there was anything she couldn’t stomach, it was old ladies who had to have people do everything for them.
Today was the only weekday she didn’t have a continuing education class. At nearby Trinity University she took a course called “Books and Coffee”—the students read assigned books, them everyone sat around drinking coffee and discussing them. She also took the “brown bag” literature course—the class talked about the classics over sack lunches—and an art course there. In addition, she took a course on government policymaking at La Mansion del Norte motor hotel. Mabel drove her to and from most of her classes. But tomorrow was the Bible scholarship course she attended with her old friend Marie Helland and Marie’s niece Lucile at University Presbyterian Church, and Lucile would drive them to that one. Lucile drove Lucie lots of places, including Canyon Lake.
This morning there was a letter from her lawyer in New Braunfels (her lawyer in San Antonio had died) about her log cabin at Canyon Lake, a quarterly report on six of her nineteen West Texas farms, an astronomical utility bill for the house, and some tax shelter tables from her fiduciary, in print so small she couldn’t read it, squint her eyes and peer through the magnifying glass though she did. There was also a letter from a man in San Marcos who wanted to buy the Lantern, her little restaurant on Canyon Lake. Lucie blinked and wiped her eyes.
She would answer the letters tomorrow. With mounting effort she opened and read the rest of the mail: announcements from the Conservation Society and the Symphony Society. On the calendar beside her desk she scrawled the days of forthcoming meetings. She then opened her copy of the North San Antonio Times. Many of her friends read Bonnie Sue Jacobs’s “Social Notes”—a treacly mix of society gossip and area history—before anything else, but Lucie always turned to the obituaries first. She read, and sighed with relief. No one she knew had died since last week.
Finally, though her neck ached and her eyes blurred intolerably, she read four more paragraphs of the notorious piece in the Atlantic on David Stockman. Economic policy fascinated her. So did politics in general. She was an independent voter, as her father had been. But Laurence, her husband, had come from rabidly Republican Indiana stock and voted a straight ticket. Sometimes they had disagreed on presidential candidates. “Let’s not vote in this one,” Laurence had suggested when Eisenhower ran against Stevenson. “We’ll only cancel each other’s vote.” But Lucie had refused, afraid he would sneak out and vote anyway. She had always revered independent thinking. During her career as a college professor she had stressed it above everything else.
After reading the four paragraphs, she turned off the lamp and put her Talking Books record of Hardy’s Return of the Native on a phonograph in the corner. That was coming up next month in her “Books and Coffee” course. Who would know she’d heard the novel instead of read it? She chuckled to herself. It was almost time for Lucile to pick her up for their lunch date at Chez Ardid, but she had time for one side at least.
She sat at her desk and listened. “A Saturday afternoon in November,” read a male voice, “was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.” Lucie turned the volume up. She was hard of hearing, too.
A Lot of Pioneer
One need not, of course, be widowed or elderly to live in Alamo Heights. One need not be wealthy, either, though wealth is indispensable in most of Terrell Hills and Olmos Park. Indeed, for a neighborhood regarded as elitist, Alamo Heights is remarkably heterogeneous—a condition that makes it more interesting than monolithic enclaves like Houston’s River Oaks and Dallas’s Highland Park. Alamo Heights was not settled at a specific time for a specific age group or economic class. It is the product of a series of developments, most of them unsuccessful.
In the mid-nineteenth century a Kentuckian named Charles Anderson built the mansion that later became the Argyle. In 1861 he was arrested as a Union sympathizer and escaped to Ohio, where he eventually became governor. His land is now the heart of Old Alamo Heights.
Subdivisions were first attempted in the 1890s, when a Denver-based investment firm, the Alamo Heights Land and Improvement Company, planned a suburb in the area. It converted the Anderson mansion into the Argyle Hotel and apportioned lots for homes around it. The hotel marked the southern boundary of the Loop—the area now known as Old Alamo Heights—which was laid out as a horse-and-buggy neighborhood.
It was a marvelous development, but it failed. It was too far from town, there were no graveled roads, and the only way to get there was an arduous trip by horseback, buggy or canoe. Nevertheless, a few frontier families stubbornly stuck it out. Between 1891 and 1893 a dozen homes were built.
In 1907 a second development, north and east of the Loop, fared somewhat better. The fashionable residents of San Antonio, most of whom lived south of Commerce Street in an old German enclave called King William, began to toy with the prospect of country living combined with city money-making. It was quieter “up there” and cooler in the summer, and the land was firm for foundations. A few more families took the plunge.
In 1909 a go-getter named Clifton George, Sr., from Oklahoma, bought up the Loop properties and most of the acreage west of River Avenue (later Broadway). George became the area’s main developer; he was a reckless, gutsy hype artist and risk taker who converted his losses with profits from his Ford motorcar dealership, the village’s first. Under his design, dusty, dinky roads were built to San Antonio, and a sizable number of King William families traveled them to relocate to Alamo Heights. By 1920 the development was solid.
A mule-drawn streetcar that struggled around the Loop furnished adequate transportation to San Antonio and back, but city services to the suburb were inefficient and life there was primitive. Last December, a month before his death, the developer’s son, Clifton George, Jr., told me, “You had to have a lot of pioneer in you then. I remember being told ‘Sonny, if you see a rattlesnake, don’t run away. Kill it!’” Alamo Heights cried out for better services, but the big city seemed indifferent to the needs of those new suburbanites a mile north of its northernmost limits. Already, perhaps, the elitist mystique had aroused the city’s resentment. According to some old-timers, there were even a few suburbanites who asked the city to annex Alamo Heights; San Antonio wasn’t interested.
In 1922 there was a rumor that San Antonio would at last annex Alamo Heights and tax the suburb to pay for the new Olmos Dam. Alarmed, Alamo Heights residents called an emergency meeting on June 4, 1922, and held an election at the Argyle Hotel three weeks later. The vote was 289–8 for incorporation and against annexation.
The following year, the Alamo Heights Independent School District was created. By 1928 all Alamo Heights streets had been paved and were humming with motorcar traffic. Sewer lines had been dug and connected to the San Antonio system. New shops along Broadway flourished. Prominent families like the Judsons, the Bairds, and the Sheridans moved in. (Jack Judson, of the Judson candy family, served as mayor for eighteen years at a salary of $1 per year.) The crazy-quilt pattern of different age groups, income levels, and architectural styles characteristic of a village continued.
My Library
