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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By the late thirties, San Antonio was preparing to expand northward and annex everything in its path. Olmos Park, which had been developed by an expansive man named R.C. Thorman (who liked to crash through its brush in his Cadillac as if the car were a tank), was in its path. Clifton George, Jr., who built the third house in Olmos Park, told me about a day in 1939 when he and another developer, Albert Negley, were walking in Olmos Park and Maury Maverick, Sr., who was running for mayor of San Antonio, pulled up in his car to chat.
“Hear you boys been thinkin’ about incorporatin’,” said Maverick.
Negley and George honestly denied that they had.
“Well,” Maverick went on, “no need for you to. I would never annex this place if I were mayor.”
Negley and George glanced at each other uneasily. That night, they started making plans to incorporate Olmos Park. Residents in an adjacent area, Olmos Terrace, across the railroad tracks to the west, begged to be included. But the incorporators (including industrialist Henry Catto, Sr.) felt Olmos Terrace had too many homes to service. “We incorporated Olmos Park without delay,” George recalled with pleasure, “and when Maury got elected, know what he did? Annexed poor Olmos Terrace the first thing.”
Terrell Hills, separated from Alamo Heights by New Braunfels Avenue, incorporated the same year for the same reason. Originally the city was the cotton farm of Dr. Frederick Terrell, a native of Indiana. In 1920 a group of nine men who called themselves the Community purchased 22 acres of Terrell’s farmland for home sites. Straightaway they built tortuous roads intended to discourage traffic. To design the houses, they hired the best San Antonio architects—Alfred Giles, for example, who also designed some of the most venerated buildings downtown.
After World War II, Alamo Heights deteriorated while San Antonio (which by then completely surrounded it) boomed. New businesses were not encouraged; the economy faltered. Most of its original houses fell into disrepair, and the many low-cost houses that had sprouted up during the war were eyesores. Younger families left. Property values plummeted. In the fifties, the businesses along Broadway began to move out to suburban shopping centers. In the sixties, even the Alamo Heights News folded. It looked as though the town would turn into a seedy retirement community.
But Alamo Heights recycled itself. In 1971 Lewis Fisher, a transplanted New Yorker, started the North San Antonio Times. The same year, Fisher, T.R. Fehrenbach, banker Paul Aschbacher, and pharmacist H.C. “Pat” Patteson began plans for a celebration of the town’s golden anniversary in October 1972 that would feature a play depicting the community’s history, parades with marching bands, and barbecues. The celebration was not a financial success, but it did result in a resurgence of village identity and pride and in two parades that have become annual events—one a Fourth of July parade, the other a “Macy’s Day” parade on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
The celebration also spawned a merchants’ group, the Alamo Heights Business and Professional Association, to fill the void left when the Alamo Heights Northeast Chamber of Commerce folded in the sixties. The association managed to attract several stores back to Broadway, and small shopping centers like the Stewart (which had been called the Chadwick) began to thrive again. New centers—Oliver Square, the Exchange, Cambridge Place—filled up.
In the late seventies, the business renaissance inspired a residential one. Many houses in Old Alamo Heights—particularly on Patterson, Argyle, and Westover streets—were renovated by young couples who had grown up in the village, left for a while, and then returned. Other houses were torn down and new ones built on their lots. Property values began to rise again. Children wore T-shirts reading, “I’m an 09” (78209 is the zip code for Alamo Heights and Terrell Hills). “I feel sorry for anyone who didn’t grow up in Alamo Heights,” says a dowager who has seen seventy years of community history. “I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t live here now.”
Family Matters
On a recent Sunday evening, two second-generation Alamo Heights matrons with blue-rinsed coiffures sat in La Fonda on Broadway, gossiping, sipping margaritas, and daintily eating North Side–bland chalupas compuestas with their forks. They were joined by a well-dressed couple in their late twenties. The conversation was spirited and cheerful. They did not talk loudly, but a listener at a table nearby could hear much of what they said.
Abruptly this party and just about everyone else looked up at a woman walking though the room. Clad in a smart but simple dark dress, she had long honey-blonde hair, high cheekbones, and almond eyes. She was beautiful and moved with extraordinary grace.
When she had left the restaurant, the man at the matrons’ table asked, “What is her name?”
“She’s the Ritterbach* girl,” said one of the matrons. “Meridel.”
“Are her people Alamo Heights?” asked the young woman.
“Oh, yes. An old family.”
“Do they have money?”
“Some,” said the matron. “I think there was a line of bankers on her mother’s side. I’m not positive.”
“Doesn’t she live over on Morton?” the other matron asked.
“No. You must be thinking of her grandmother. She’s lived on Morton for years and years. Anyway, Meridel’s thirty-nine years old and never been married. Can you imagine? Anyone so pretty?”
“Unbelievable,” said the young woman.
“I hear she is getting married finally,” the second matron announced. “To a rancher from West Texas.”
“Really?” said the first. “I heard she was seeing the Winston* boy.”
The young woman asked, “Wasn’t his father King Antonio a few years ago?”
“No,” said the first matron. “You’re thinking of another family. I know the Winstons well. The daughter is just precious. She was a princess last year in the coronation.”
“Not last year,” said the second matron. “It was year before last.”
“Oh, well,” said the first, “that’s what I meant.”
In Old Alamo Heights it’s all in the family. Wealth is less important than name, kinship, and how far back one can trace one’s people. In this respect San Antonio seems less like a Texas city than like a town in New England or the Deep South. One can even be poor in Old Alamo Heights society so long as one maintains one’s address, church attendance, and club memberships. “I dated a guy from one of the old families,” says a self-employed San Antonio public relations woman, “and he was in a quandary every month over whether to pay his rent or his club dues at the Argyle. He was always broke, but no one knew.”
San Antonio has never displayed wealth in the ostentatious manner of the Dallas and Houston rich. In Alamo Heights especially, that’s considered bad manners. Old Alamo Heights money is old money, with nothing to prove, no one to impress, and it is possibly a little embarrassed to be in the midst of one of the poorest major cities in the United States.
Who are these old families? They include the Oppenheimers and Frosts (banking), the Zachrys, Brownings, and Steveses (construction), the Franks and Calverts (retailing), the Moormans and Seeligsons (oil), the Browns (timber and oil), the Herffs (medicine and land), the Tobins (aerial surveys), and the Strauses, Mavericks, and Wests (ranching and oil). As with the royal families of Europe, there has been considerable intermarriage among them. A genealogy of the Tobins, for example, reveals that blood, marriage, and money link the Rotes (as in Kyle and Tobin) to the Tobins to the Armstrongs (as in Anne) to the Steveses to the Gillespies to the Mathises to the McClellands. The Tobins can be traced back to a woman from one of the original fifteen Canary Islander families that settled San Antonio in the eighteenth century, and she married the last messenger dispatched by Travis from the Alamo. That’s old San Antonio.
The role of the outsider marrying into an Old Alamo Heights family is seldom an easy one. One such newcomer, now a 37-year-old divorcée still living in Alamo Heights, is bitter about the treatment she received from her ex-husband’s family: “My mother-in-law thought only a barbarian would walk around her own house barefoot, like I did. My sister-in-law was scandalized because I chose to nurse my first baby. The whole family was horrified that my ears were pierced. Even the family dog was not to be petted; a black servant cared for him completely. And the worst thing I did was be kind and polite to the black servant. You weren’t supposed to ask him to do things, you were supposed to tell him.”
Lucie at Lunch
Over lunch at Chez Ardid, Lucie Keblinger Whitehead asked Lucile Helland, “Is Marie going to Bible class with us tomorrow?”
“It’s doubtful,” said Lucile.
“Beg your pardon?”
“I said, ‘It’s doubtful,’” Lucile repeated louder and took a bite of her veal kidneys. A plain, short-haired, sixtyish woman, who like her aunt Marie, had never married, she had been a flower girl at Lucie’s wedding. These days, Lucie saw more of Lucile than of Marie Helland, her oldest friend. She and Marie had ridden the streetcars to school together. Now Marie suffered from muscular ailments and couldn’t get out much.
Lucie clucked her tongue. Poor Marie. She had missed last week’s class, too. She lived in pain. Once she had been so active, so beautiful. Queenly. Now she was almost immobile.
Chez Ardid is a rose-carpeted, white curtained French restaurant north of Alamo Heights on Broadway. It’s a favorite of elderly women from the sister cities, who fancy its people-watching intimacy, its unhurried pace, and the fawning solicitude of its owner-chef. Today Lucie could have done without the Muzak Christmas carols that sounded from the ceiling, but her veal kidneys sautéed with fines herbes were delicious.
Lucie changed the subject to Waldine Tauch, the sculptor. She had once been a protégée of Pompeo Coppini’s and still lived in his old house. She was even older than Lucie.
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