 Thank you everybody. I've been living in San Antonio for about 35 years now and I'm just kind of getting used to some of the weather here, but what I'm going to present to you today is really kind of a work in progress of my investigation into where we live and I came upon the spark to do this some time back in the 80s I was working on a master plan for Alamo Plaza and I thought I knew most everything you need to know about the Alamo and about the area around there I mean I'd pretty good on history and I'd seen both movies you know John Wayne and the IMAX and when I got into this work I really found out that there was just so much I didn't know about that particular place and about downtown San Antonio and then came to the realization that I really didn't know San Antonio all that well I've been all around it but for some reason my paths my pattern of movement was really fairly narrow along certain corridors to certain places and probably only really had physically been part of San Antonio's landscape in only about 5% of the area so I made it a quest just kind of for myself to actually be in every place you can possibly be in San Antonio which meant driving or walking every street alley easement etc. just to get to know it and over that time I began to kind of formulate kind of understanding the research and the field work of what historically how we developed and also kind of a framework for cultural landscape and house to find for today's session I really thought about and usually this has been really kind of focused on urban form and development and but for today's session I thought about kind of the implications it has for for community health and health in the community so with a couple of things I wanted to spell a couple of myths and the first one is that San Antonio doesn't make any sense the street systems all crooked and irregular and I don't know you know I you know I was here in fifth grade you know back in the 60s or so and I have a fifth grade teacher that said oh you don't want to go downtown to San Antonio streets are crazy and crooked they were laid out by a Mexican on a drunk cow or a drunk Mexican on a cow or sometimes it's both and I heard that intermittently up through college and on and so I finally at one point I realized that nobody goes out and just willy-nilly digs a ditch or builds a bridge or does those things there's intent and purpose so that was the catalyst and I guess the passion for me finding out what was the actual reason that San Antonio has the shape it does and so unfortunate in that many of the records even though they had to be interpreted hadn't been lost in history and so there is how the story that it tells now why do we really talk about cultural landscape in this context it really helps to find the fuller context physically of where we are because it adds to that in terms of time and human relationship and it's important to architects I think every important writer and critic on cities and urban development and architecture at some point has involved some notion of cultural landscape in the way that they think and at the way that describe urban landscape I looked at it as really kind of a series of components of all the components of the natural realm and of that human footprint and then really one of the most telling things about cultural landscape how we perceive it and when you look at the vantage in terms of time scale movement position and involvement all of that influences how we experience a landscape but how one experience here can be very much different than the other experience at the same place in starting with form of the cities when you look at a map at this scale all the cities look the same they got some sort of downtown they got some sort of radial highways coming in they got some loops around it so when you look at cities in this context there's really not much difference unless one is shoved up against the coast or something like that so it really has to occur at that more intimate level and the methodology I used to look at that was really going through quite a bit of archival research doing the ground of us investigation and looking at putting all this to the same scale now I know that this doesn't sound like real exciting but nothing is to the same scale nothing is entirely accurate nothing always points north all of those things and so it's real important for me to try to get that and here just some examples actually a very accurate map although not scale wise in terms of where things are the guy on map this looks great like it's really accurate it's not even San Antonio it's totally mistaken it's another location some of the later engineering the Royal Engineers that actually surveyed and map San Antonio begin to give you more greater precision then up to the 19th century all those wonder wonderful art inherent artist views of cities across the country sandborns becomes more apparent in terms of accuracy and full scope and of course the USGS maps this is what I used in my travels around so after I started getting this information I started drawing things up and this is drawn at a one inch equals 400 feet square the actual drawing is about five feet by five feet and what this shows is really what the initial landscape for San Antonio was back when it was initially settled 1718 1719 of course San Antonio River you see on your right hand side a lot of meanders St. Pedro Creek on the west actually a fairly straight and shallow stream the Presidio was actually located further north in St. Pedro Springs Park 1718 it actually got reestablished here to 1719 and you can see by the convergence of all the water courses there it was really fairly strategic in terms of how it provided some took advantage of the river and the creek as a defense work and then Mission San Antonio which kind of bounced around from north down to the west bank of St. Pedro Creek and finally over to the east bank of the river in 1725 it's located there on the right hand side and really what these are critical to was the road system this was the major settlement in Texas at the time and would be for for the next hundred and fifty almost 200 years so the Camino Realas the regional road system all connected to this point and then the way that this community was able to sustain itself was the Asakia system which I will show a few pictures later a series of irrigation ditches that took advantage of the San Antonio River in St. Pedro Creek to provide irrigation and domestic water through the 17th and 18th centuries so the mission had its own Asakia madre the town actually the Presidio had the Asakia principal and it took its waters from the head springs of the St. Pedro Creek and of course the San Antonio the Asakia madre took its waters from the head waters of the San Antonio River cut by Incarno word college and so that was really the establishment Presidio mission in the fields and the Asakia is to give you an idea of those that aren't quite familiar with it is a ditch okay I remember sending a developer over to look at the Espada Asakia one time and he called me back up after you go over there he was so disappointed he said it's just a ditch says well that's true but these were really fairly these were remarkable systems they were engineered to almost sort of precise point zero three percent grade you really the the Asakia systems of which there were seven in San Antonio really were skillfully built a provided irrigation water you know to be able to make the community more sustainable because there were periods of drought and bad rainfall it also provided the domestic water for households which was really important and you can see on the left this is a Spada still being used on this on the Spada mission area and then of course this is kind of the gates that had mechanisms you had to raise the water in wears in order to divert water from the river or the creek into the Asakia and you know a couple of structures to this was the Spada aqueduct but there are about four or five other aqueducts in the system that actually carried the irrigation water over stream beds and lows and today even we acknowledge that of course the restored section that's in Hemisphere Park when the upper left you can see just kind of a commemorative section built behind the Hampton Inn over there and even a section in Alamo Plaza where it's just marked the Asakia was there it's just marked in blue slate the paving so the Asakias are really kind of embedded created the form of San Antonio and we still look within today the initial settlement was just really by the Presidio mission they weren't obligated to plan in any particular way but in 1733 the Vieta San Fernando was established and it was under the reserve settlers from the Canary Islands came to on the King's Consent to come and settle in San Antonio and create the Vieta San Fernando they're under obligations to abide by the laws of the Indies and those are the planning precepts that really to govern the formation of well of course all the laws and customs in the Spanish dominions in the Americas and the Philippines but also to basically provide the planning precepts for the formation of all settlements and towns they were kind of recodified over time etc but typically you'll see this 1573 and then later under Juan Carlos 1630 or 1680 these provisions and and these are books like you know 500 or so different articles or codes it's interesting that they're all kind of every fourth or fifth code it was always emphasizing respect for native populations these guys didn't get the memo yes they just kind of slept here but this is to say that the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish and the colonization was not always about a two by law and it was not always pretty and it didn't necessarily create ideal communities it did create some splendid cities in Havana and Mexico City but nevertheless I don't want to try to idealize or romanticize this whole portion so this is really kind of one of the important directors out of the laws of the Indies I would read this all the way through but it is really kind of thick and kind of flowery it's in the best language in the translation that it could make but one of the interesting things that it does say and I'll just read that first one that taken to consideration the health of the area which will be known from the abundance of old men or young men of good complexion natural fitness and color and without illness and then the abundance of healthy animals is sufficient size etc etc so when you break that down there was an obvious understanding that health in the community health of people is related to health of place and the components of that meant that you had to have good climate good air fertile soil good land good resources all of those and if you really just kind of get this down to the basics what the laws of the indies was saying looking at make sure you have clean air clean water you have to look at a good site for its location and climate you have diverse resources and you have fertile soil there you go nothing's changed this really all goes back to the trubius anyway the laws of the indies so and today we struggle with clean air right attainment we're struggling with clean water are we not and we can't do anything about the weather or where we are but we certainly can do things about its resources and the fertility of our soil our soil biology so all of these were thought of as important 300 years ago they're still important today there was a very prescriptive criteria for actual town formation to be centered around a plaza a certain optimum size certain prescription for streets and all this was done not by yards or meters it was done in batas which has a kind of a range it was officially 32.89 inches that ranges sometimes a little bit more depending on where you are but in looking at that kind of metric on that that kind of makes helps helped me understand why the street widths and downtown San Antonio are always these odd odd feet so when you look at it alleys were 10 bar as wide streets were 15 feet bar as wide avenues were 20 bar as wide they were even numbers in that system so this kind of gives you an idea of the scale when we talk about a league or the eight league grant coming up this gives you an indication of how big it is so if we slip forward to 1750 the Canary Islanders have already arrived they have settled right here next to the Presidio and they pushed out the civil settlers that were already around the Presidio that were unofficially there the squatters and they centered the community around the plaza and their village of Via San Fernando wrapped around really the Presidio the Bend area was the Potrero it was really for protecting livestock in times of trouble or just a pasture the propios are essentially the immediate boundary of the town and it was determined by really cross axes at the foot of the church diagonal to the cardinal points at which point there was drawn a quadrangle and each one of those legs from the foot of the church to the midsection of the the boundary is 1033 barras why you think just a thousand barras could do it 1033 well 1033 barras times four equals one quarter league so that your quarter section you know that you use in the township or the English system so they had ways of just kind of measuring then and so they could grow the town within the propios without permission of the king but they could not expand into the rest of the grant without permission and that's how it was set up now they of course the communal realas you have settlement across San Antonio this is they're across Texas this is becoming more of a hub there was an expansion of the sake of mothering at that point down further downstream the sake of principal down into this whole lower field area the the labor is a bottle and then to the missions the first one is conception of the sake of paliaz so that begins to establish all these other points are character of land tenure in 1750 and all of this was laid out you know they used compass and they used instruments and they used survey chains and so it wasn't just willy-nilly this is painting by Jean Thiel basically we have a survey party about 70 years later but very much in the same character and so on the greater scale about 1800 you really had San Antonio at the peak of its point of history in the Spanish colonial system there was revolution after that you had Mexican revolution, Mexican republic, Texas revolution you had civil war so really from this point forward really San Antonio is pretty much stressed out for the next 65-70 years so this was kind of its peak at this point this is the greater area which shown in the light green which you see oops see here is the eight league grant to the canary islanders all the rest of the land was owned by the missions and we were into this so it's really the via San Antonio by that point and the Pueblo del Alamo really formed the the dual poles of what was downtown you had Mission Concepción, Mission San Jose, Mission San Juan and Mission Espada kind of leapfrogging downstream and the Ezequia principal which cultivated all the land between its Ezequia and the river really fed the was for the civil settlement the Ezequia Madre was for the Mission Alamo which is Mission San Antonio the Alamo and of course Mission San Jose San Juan and Espada all had their Ezequia systems as well so a whole pattern of ditches sub-latterals senorios which is the maintenance path right next to the Ezequia all began to put an imprint on this place as well as the eight league grant itself and that kind of awkward quadrilateral as it was called in the description by the surveyor himself basically had to move that around he would have preferred a nice neat little rectangle at an angle around that but he got and they got into a dispute with the with the missions so they had to adjust that but interestingly enough really where it's adjusted is that the key strategic points of access to the city itself which is the hilltops on the north and east and the fords across the creeks in the river along the south and west and when you look at those relative to the Camino Rialas all of those points that really about which are defined are key access points and so when you hear the kind of description the seven hills of Rome this is really along the same lines this is what defined this whole geomorphic square around San Antonio where those particular elements now back down to this scale at 1800 the population had grown from couple of hundred to about 2,500 you had additions they expanded Barrio del Norte from the civil settlement the Portrero was settled the mission San Antonio had been secularized and was now Pueblo del Alamo it's own separate Pueblo Barredasur the south and of course Lauderdito across the creek kind of into Indian country but nevertheless there was actually another Seca coming down through there that sustained that expansion the Camino Rialas and then you had massive expansion of the Seca labor of the upper labor of the border of Riva and then you also had substantial expansion of the Seca for the Seca mothering all of this was to feed a greater population so the city is growing it's overtaking some of the immediate agricultural land and it's expanding others and it's this pattern this agricultural pattern of land tenure that begins to establish a pattern which the urbanization of San Antonio really does follow what is the character of San Antonio about this time all these paintings are by Feroz Gentile who's an Alsatian painter living about 1850s up until the turn of the century in San Antonio. San Pedro Springs of course was a cool wonderful relaxing place you're fishing people did use the springs in the room for washing but they did not use the asakias for that that was purely for drinking water for irrigation the plaza didn't have a lot of trees in it didn't have the arcades around it was really a dry dusty place but that's where you had fiestas that's where you had events so you had games the streets were probably like they described them when they would make official visits and they would write about San Antonio saying it's a miserable place the streets are crooked you got all these mud huts it's miserable it doesn't look real attractive here I guess it kind of fulfills the whole idea of how it's being described but it was a very active town it did suffer its disease and drought but it actually moved from pretty much a subsidence type of economy to one that was exporting its agricultural goods and by the turn of the century actually was doing very well again kind of a notion of the character in the street life was going on at that time where everything happened in the street everything happened in the plaza in life occurred there a bit of a reconstruction by George melson kind of a view from the southwest and you see over in the kind of the middle right hand kind of a row of trees there and something interesting happened in 1800 the plazas were a prescriptive part of the plan of the laws of the indies but by 1800 what happened was they expanded the Alameda which really was kind of something a new planning idea that came out of Seville kind of like the cores or the the esplanade essentially it was an Alameda was a walkway between alamos which are poplar trees in Spanish and the poplar trees that we have are cotton woods and so what they did in 18 actually 1818 one on the outskirts of town they planted two rows of poplars and that was a place to go stroll you didn't go do that in the plaza this was a different kind of environment a different kind of setting that was shady that was out in the breeze that had the asafias running on each side of it was actually very much of a comfort zone and this was painted late in the life of those trees cotton woods don't live but about 50 60 years before they start to fail and you had that interesting kind of element coming in now what happened with the city subsequent to that was that of course it was no longer spanish colony or mexican it became the texas republic uh it became a state and by that time there was a dispute over the uh who only owned the city land because the king owned the land the spanish colonies mexican republic said no city of san antonio now owns the land but there were people living on it and there was a big lawsuit about it that basically said excuse me let me go back one that basically said you know all this land um the city does it went to the state state supreme court uh nobody could claim the land except the city so the city held title to it now at that time what the city did was that they surveyed it and they planted it out and they drew up there was two guys one was the painter Theodore Jean Thiel who was actually a good draftsman and the other was a buddy of his uh Francois Giraud who did the he was the first city engineer designed the southwest craft center the old Ursuline academy and they came up with a plan to take all those crazy kind of angles and knit them together so that you really had a series of through streets in downtown and where all of those kind of grids that were turned different ways uh met and connected at some point so it was a really good exercise and then all they did was establish pretty much of a cardinal grid from there out so what happens is once the city gets its land um it turns around and sells it all and not surprisingly I guess um the people that by the majority of that are all the city commissioners and county commissioners so we finally get past uh civil war reconstruction and then 1875 just before the railroads come in the city really has about quadrupled in size now there's about five to six thousand people um you have it's really the railroads coming in along the edges of town this is before it really explodes um you really have settlement that is taking over all those fields agriculture goes further out ranching comes in in a bigger way and you have a series of public squares that were established um san Antonio very much being developed kind of still being measured in vadas still being very Hispanic and Latino and it's in its culture and still kind of building the city according to those uh precepts so you've got for each little neighborhood you really started to get little plazas and parks at that kind of intimate scale around there if we jump forward in 1925 by this time you really have the full urbanization of san Antonio was the only green spots you see in there are parks there's no agriculture in downtown and yet you can see really kind of uh by the streets and the alleys and the patterns that you see uh that agricultural pattern of land tenure really kind of fossilized within the street grid system and within the block geometry at that time the city started to move along faster to develop a streetcar system uh replacing its old meal pulled system of course uh and it channelizes the river because you know those meanders they just slow the water down and we need to get that water quicker out of there so it doesn't flood well that didn't quite happen that way um it flooded for a entirely different reason than meanders because we had cleared so much land that it couldn't you know all the runoff just came barreling down so there's some disastrous floods at that time and also rebuilding of all of bridges new bridges rebuilding existing bridges so what's interesting about the san Antonio river is that the people are always astonished why it's so small you know it's really we're expecting a river but every street has a crossing practically and that is one of the particular characteristics of its scale and charm if we move to 2000 and we're kind of at the end of all of this you really have a city that has in its buildings taken on the shaping of those blocks from those early patterns not just in the shapes of the buildings but also in the way that the townscape has so many offsets and changes it's not just a through grid but what really happens by 2000 this course an expressway system that really comes in on the northeast and the west sides of downtown and it's great improves the regional access to downtown it gets its regional access kind of up and elevated and off of the downtown streets unfortunately what it also does is sever about almost half of the street connect the surface street connections from the surrounding areas into downtown and also there are a lot of us other associated street closures you know expand the school for hemisphere for urban renewal and so really what happens at this point is that the whole character the urban character grain if you will of san Antonio changes from one of the small blocks and narrow streets to bigger blocks and narrow streets okay and that the expressways are not really just regional access they're localized commuter access in the downtown and and that's a little bit tough on downtown west side dies east side dies north side actually starts to fall off quite a bit in terms of just their economic vitality their cultural sustainability also fully developed regional transportation expressway system by that time and and just account for the road the railway transportation systems pretty much see it's all radial and concentric at that point that overlays this form and which i've defined really is kind of a mosaic of geomorphic radial and gridiron street patterns overlay the natural divide between hill country and prairie and it's really results in an episodic and polymorphic city form and then going through this research i basically when i was going around and looking at every place i had a map with me and i'd highlighting every street i was on or every place i was on and then i'd lose the highlighter and i have to use another color highlighter and all so i started to get these kind of this map kind of all colored up and i thought what if what if you color coded the street character and and that would help understand kind of the graphic depiction of it as a cultural landscape and so after some trial and error that's exactly what i did i went through and just kind of codified the camino realas uh all the way down through the expressway as street pattern types and then started to put some colors to it to try to understand it so this was very much of a kind of a trial by error approach the pattern that's most important to all of this is really the the terrain pattern which is expressed here just in the stream beds the the topo lines being too complicated to show and then accounting for you know the streets that derive from the isekia patterns streets that derive from the land graph from the laws of the indies downtown uh going through these ranch grants that were made after the texas revolution secularization of the missions for the mission land grants the cardinal grid the camino realas and then the more modern things like the expressways the drainage streets the hilltop streets all those curvy little streets in the subdivisions those types of things and of course the railroads so this was my attempt to kind of understand form but also cultural expression of san Antonio as an urban landscape um can you tell me quickly how much more time you left 15 minutes oh yeah i'm getting ahead of myself thank goodness so what is this all kind of mean to health and everything and i i think my concern first of all i wanted to dispel the myth that san Antonio has a bunch of irregular nonsensical streets there's not one street in san antonio that wasn't built without a real purpose and i think what happens uh san antonio having this episode cultural episodes um where you get spanish colonization over an indigenous population you get an american anglo-american uh invasion over a spanish and hispanic population you get this kind of overlay of dominating cultures that you see long term all across the rest of the world like in europe where there'll be the fourth or fifth or sixth dominant civilization in the same place when that happens the the dominant culture basically just you know says the previous culture didn't know what they were doing you know it's terrible it's awful so you see a lot of bad things uh you know it's the pejorative about you know it's a classic case of course i had a i had a you know a white or anglo fifth grade teacher was telling me you know that it was a drunken mexican on account laying off the streets that's the way of saying they didn't know what they were doing until we got here you get the spanish accounts of the indians just building miserable mud huts and when you go back and look at the archaeological record which probably is starting to get known a little bit better now there's actually was a building culture in san antonio going back to at least 2,500 bc so probably many of the hukals and the early structures were perfectly capable of being built by the people who lived here for several thousand years and so the succession of each of these tends to glorify their their work that they do and to look down upon the work that was previous to it so the myth that i really wanted to kind of get to was number one there's a real purpose here and and it has meaning and so let's take that into consideration it may not be relevant but let's take take into consideration as we're going through and amending this landscape and the second thing and i'm sure you how many here how many here are planners okay and so everyone has heard you know been in a situation where the developer will say oh that's crazy we're not going to build sidewalks what nobody's going to be walking that's a hundred and six degrees in august right did everybody hear that from playing for it i just heard it in there too and so the other thing i'd kind of wanted to attack was one of the biggest impediments to people being active and being just walking as a normal part of day i'm not talking about sports and all this thing just normal part of the day is a really a terrible walking environment is an awful walking environment san Antonio you can find no sidewalks crack sidewalks next to the best streets in town in san antonio it's it's it's very hostile when it comes to a pedestrian environment we are worse than houston we are worse than austin we are worse than dallas we're even worse than san bonito texas which has a great walking culture surprisingly to me and so what i've always heard is that it's too hot to walk in san antonio so i wanted to go to a psychometric chart to basically kind of understand where we are which is in our latitude and our temperature in all the records that we have from 65 degrees to 85 degrees basically from eight in the morning to eight in the evening all the days of the year it's comfortable about 28.4 percent of the time sounds pretty bad doesn't it only a third of the time and we get out there and walk comfortably and when you look at it month by month you say okay you know what it's it's really it's really bad in in august i mean it's just below our average but the reality is is that most of our discomfort days are cold days in san antonio not warm days all right it's too damn cold here go walk can't do it so that's insane i'm thinking you know how do we look with everybody else because we're on the same latitude as kairo for goodness sake you know and and people in there at least dress okay for the hot weather and so i like to kairo and look okay where are the four most walkable cities in the united states new york san francisco boston philadelphia the same chart says that when it comes to climate it's less hospitable to walk in that climate than it is here in fact it's not as bad as kairo and the nicest place i've ever walked in my entire life is niece i mean who wouldn't get out and walk any day of any any time of day any day of the year in the riviera and that's at 24.5 percent those are the wet bulb dry bulb humidity temperature etc okay and everybody watch the news watch tv news watch the weather caster when it's going to rain what is the weather caster saying it's going to be nasty watch out there's going to be accidents the rain's going to kill you the rain's going to make you have an accident it's going to make you have an accident and i don't want to keep expounding on that except to say that a steady diet to people well you're constantly hearing weather's bad but it's raining it's bad it's too hot it's bad it's too cold it's bad and children hear that and they don't walk to school anymore and they don't ride their bikes anymore they have to be driven to school anymore and the weather guy says that the brain's going to kill you and all this we are creating putting weather as really kind of an enemy just being outside weather and climate is being used as a reason to not build sidewalks because why would you walk in the heat anyway and to me that the cultural aspect the cultural uses and the cultural interface between cultural landscape and cultural use and cultural attitudes happens at these points and so i don't wonder if out of this conference there can't be something that starts to address in a very fundamental way not just we need more shade trees you bet we need a shade tree over every sidewalk in san Antonio you gotta have it it's a hot place there should be shade trees over every sidewalk in chiral but they don't have a water okay but along with the notion that we have to be outdoors more and that we have to be more active and that that puts some pressure on that i really feel that there needs to be kind of a not just community health not just health care that addresses the community but a community wide discussion and appraisal of where we are relative to other people's climates come on get off it we can relate about congestion go to san francisco we complain about climate go to philadelphia man i mean we we really have a good here and we complain a lot and people everywhere complain from new york to cairo i bet they complain to me all the time about the damn weather so the next time i hear a developer i'm going to give him this and tell him he's full of it and i hope the next time you hear that that you'll tell them that too and i hope you tell anybody that knows a weatherman they ought to shut up they ought to like their job and talk about the weather as if it was interesting and they enjoyed it instead of they couldn't get the sports job or the anchor man so anyway that's my mad man spiel i hope this has been interesting for everybody it's not it's more of an approach to the urban design of things but i think health in use has a lot to do with really what makes cities be what they are and i would just kind of like to leave you with quote this one of my favorite guys and bacon that we really can't think that we're going to design everything and capture it we really have to kind of keep an open end to everything that we do so that the next generation the next great idea has a little bit of room to move in it so thank you very much questions anybody yes the alameda i'll show you on the map you recognize the alameda was this section of commerce street really pretty much between alamo and buoy right in there because the assaicula there was a west branch the assaicum modere that came down that's what you see the little uh in the back of the alamo it came right down through here and that's why alamo street has that bend and then there was an east branch of the assaicum modere that came down here that's why and then it joined back here in hemisphere park so that stretch between those two assaicus was the alameda and it was called alameda street for many years until it was turned into east commerce i think about 1895 yes i had a question on a friend comrade true uh with the walk and talk and breathing psychopathy about some kind of conservation society so oh he had comrade yeah well the river extension for hemisphere uh that's what you see that little uh kind of coming out here's the natural bend of the river um and then this was the extension of the river walk into hemisphere here and that was actually between the two assaicus but so it wasn't an it wasn't an historic feature at all it was simply excavated in the 1960s to carry the water over there was in a river at one time no no never and the other thing is that the a lot of people will mistake the bend as as being artificial and that the river went straight through and it's just the opposite of course the previous maps you know that the bend was natural and the bypass channel was put in back in the 20s as part of the flood control improvements most of the people that joke about the crooked streets here are talking about st mary's and i finally came up with a theory as to why that was like that sitting over at the the driving range one day and i'm just looking across at the area where the sunken gardens and all that is and it's the stack there it smokes that from the old cement plant correct right and i thought well that was what it was that all that that rock that was quarried out of there and hauled downtown in these great big heavy carts where there was no road to begin with it was just a you know an open pasture between up there and down there and if you've ever been on a deer lease or someplace where you've got rows going out through the pastures you know they get blah blah lesion so you have to move the road over and then you have to move it back over here and i think they just kept by you know avoiding the areas that they'd already gone through in the low places and then wound up with a road that just meandered all over the place because of the cars that's my theory anyway well it's wrong i'm sorry you know it is i mean st mary's it was it was basically because there were there were it was a path that followed property lines up to that whole area that that was an access to get up to the headwaters so there was a path going up there who knows quite where went but once those parcels were platted up there it followed that line that basically followed the line of the asakia of the upper labor of asakia that came down from the headwaters on the west bank down to about where um lubies is now just north of downtown and then went back up to um centipede springs park so what it does is actually follows that gradient that the asakia was course the course of the asakia but at some distance to it i looked at some old maps that had nothing quite about that now i would say that when they dug the asakia they probably did have to scoot around to avoid things and created they usually try to create a pretty straight line but they would also cut to where it was if they had some you know really tough material they would try to move you know cut a little bit further what was softer so the variances in there could very well have been something that you described anybody else? Yes? It's actually the san fedro creek company and they did an alameda theater not the alamo but i was talking about the theater. Oh i'm sorry alameda theater i'm sorry say that again then. I think it's san fedro creek it's not basically the drain ditch the san fedro yeah san fedro creek then are they going to renovate that? Yeah that's actually a project i'm working on did i miss that? I missed the beginning probably uh yeah it was at the very beginning basically showing san fedro creek right right here and it was a natural course of the creek until it was channelized but it was channel it wasn't greatly diverted when it was channelized they pretty much just went right on the existing stream they went deeper and wider to create a larger ditch or a larger channel for for the creek and the interesting thing about san fedro creek um and interesting about san Antonio the first environmental legislation um was actually in the 1750s and after they had been working the land for about 20 years they noticed that the the sakes were getting washed out and silted up it was becoming a really big problem they investigated why that was happening and they had been clear cutting wood in modivista area of course just north of that for years and years and years and years you got you know wood for fires wood for construction wood for fences wood to make line just you know burning gobs and gobs of wood they cut down so much of it that um they really were making the slopes unprotected and the rainfall was just washing out the top soil and at that point they said you know what we gotta stop cutting the wood they stopped they had a law that said you're forbidden from cutting a tree like within two miles of san Antonio so you had to take your gun and go out there where the unions were going to scalp you to cut your wood and then come back you couldn't cut it in close to the town you also they also um went ahead and did a lot of work on the asecias to protect them better and bank them and then the third thing they did is they planted trees all along the asecias and the river just to stabilize the banks so those guys are on top of it you know like about 200 years before we were they knew exactly what to do anybody else okay well thank you