San Antonio Demolitions Increase
By Margaret Foster | Online Only | Aug. 7, 2008
Lost: San Antonio's Jorrie Furniture Building, which opened as the Lacks Building in 1929.
Credit: San Antonio Conservation Society
This summer, some San Antonio residents are fired up over a spike in demolitions of historic buildings. In June, the owner of a 1929 Spanish-style stucco structure tore it down without the approval of the city's Historic Design and Review Commission. The city has ordered the emergency destruction of several houses without first notifying the owners.
Sidestepping the city's usual demolition review procedure, former planning director Emil Moncivais signed off last October on the demolition of the Jorrie Furniture Building, which was covered with siding in the 1960s.
"We're devastated. If this building had been allowed to go through the process, they would have discovered a little buried jewel underneath," says Marcie Ince, president of the San Antonio Conservation Society. "So many historic structures are just going down here. … The demolitions have almost tripled in the past year."
The city says it inspects each building before it issues an emergency demolition order, but the buildings aren't reviewed by a structural engineer. After the order, the city has 72 hours to demolish the property, with or without the owner's knowledge. "We're not going to wait for somebody to get killed. Once it's been identified as a dangerous premises, we move forward very quickly," Gerald Roebuck, code-enforcement supervisor with the Housing and Neighborhood Services Department, told the San Antonio Current in April. The city's Historic Design and Review Board did not return phone calls from Preservation.
This summer, a Mexican restaurant, Karam's, closed this summer after 62 years in business. The building will be replaced by a Walgreens.
Two years ago, the city's Historic Design and Review Commission voted to allow the demolition of the 1890s Walgreens building, a designated local landmark, and the adjacent 1925 Stuart Building. Although the society sued the city to halt demolition of Walgreens, both buildings were torn down last year.
For now, the city of San Antonio has backed off on plans to raze the 1928 Hedrick Building. On July 2, the city ordered the owner to repair the empty, vandalized downtown building.
As for the lost Jorrie Furniture building, Ince says her group hopes someone will file an ethics complaint against the planning department. "We want to make sure that this doesn't happen again. We want to turn this into a positive."
Subscribe to the Today's News RSS feed
Comments
Submitted by Bicultural at: August 14, 2008
This news is nothing new. I lived in San Antonio from 1998 to 2002. During my time there, the city government allowed or promoted the demolition of a number of historic structures, and the justification was always the same: "public safety." There was always a sense that developers could get whatever they wanted from the city. (One can read between the lines.) The San Antonio Conservation Society is toothless--always seeming to oppose the destruction of San Antonio's historic heritage but never being able to win against the city/developer alliance. The conservation society seems more like a social club than an organization serious about fighting for historic preservation. While San Antonio has remarkable stories of historic preservation, the prime factor in this success is that the city never became a major economic hub. It was therefore spared the kind of redevelopment that turned downtown Houston and Dallas into corporate ghost towns after dark. But San Antonio is fast losing the battle to save its historic structures, and once they're gone, they're gone.