Six years ago, I learned that Brackenridge Park is more than a park.
I’d been in San Antonio a little over 6 months, working as a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News covering the environment and water. That April, I covered what I thought would be a fairly humdrum meeting about the city’s plans to make major changes to the park. The city and its hired consultants pitched a proposal to push cars out of the park, replacing them with a tram shuttling people between parking garages and a “grand lawn” in place of the parking lot near the San Antonio Zoo.
Brackenridge Park
Offers: Walking, running, biking
Location: 3700 N St Mary’s St. San Antonio, TX 78212
Trail miles: A little more than 5 miles of paved, gravel and dirt trails.
Restrooms: Toilets and potable water at pavilions on the north side of Tuleta Drive.
This did not go well for the city. Many residents pointed out, accurately, that it would destroy the longstanding tradition of Easter weekend camping and cookouts, when the park fills with predominately Mexican-American families celebrating the holiday. But I could tell there was more than cars and camping to this debate. Many residents saw the move as an effort to push them out. The outcry led the city to back off most aspects of the proposal.
As a newcomer, I was confused at the time about why this issue seemed to draw such a fervor, but I understand better now. I’ve spent almost seven years in San Antonio interviewing all kinds of people about this land, its long and I would argue often brutal history, and the ways that history still shapes our lives today. When we talk about Brackenridge Park, we might on the surface be discussing cars, roads, walls, rivers, trees, birds and buildings. But that’s only on the surface.
When we’re talking about this park, what we’re often actually talking about is the past 300 years, which included many episodes of oppression and pain. Brackenridge Park has borne witness to all of it. For example:
– The park still bears the remains of acequias — gravity-fed irrigation ditches — where Spanish colonizers forced indigenous people to do the heavy labor of building channels to water crops.
– During the American Civil War, the Confederate Army used the site as a tannery, creating leather to equip its soldiers to fight in defense of slavery. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of a stone sluice from the tannery in 2012.
-The Japanese Tea Gardens and Sunken Gardens used to be a stone quarry and the site of the second cement plant ever built in the U.S. The building materials industry remains a powerful industrial lobby, and its cement plants and quarries are some of Central Texas’s biggest air polluters today.
– George Brackenridge, a banker and merchant who donated the land to the city in 1899, was an earlier commodifier of water — the source of life itself. I see many parallels between Brackenridge’s efforts to raise locals’ water bills to pay for infrastructure that he thought was necessary for progress, and the Vista Ridge pipeline, a $2.8 billion project whose main objective seems to be avoiding severe lawn-watering restrictions during drought.
– Lambert Beach, a former swimming area at the park, had a segregated pool — whites only. It speaks to a broader issue in our city’s history: I have interviewed multiple San Antonio residents with vivid childhood memories about not being able to visit entire parts of the city because of their skin color.
Brackenridge Park is a place where, to borrow the famous Faulkner quote, the past is never dead; it’s not even past. I witnessed the same phenomenon during a couple years spent covering the redevelopment of the Alamo, another public space that’s a subject of perpetual debate.
It no longer surprises me that conversations about birds and trees and retaining walls and river channels often elicit intense emotions. Texas — indeed, the entire U.S. — has never fully reckoned with its history. We, particularly white people like myself, shouldn’t be surprised when discussions about wildlife and park features become loaded with deeper meaning. We shouldn’t be afraid when these conversations make us feel uncomfortable, instead we should see it as an opportunity to ask more questions and seek a deeper level of understanding.
I would argue that we should even embrace the most recent conflicts at Brackenridge Park, over migratory birds and heritage trees, as being both substantive and symbolic. There may actually be no better forum to discuss these issues than with our neighbors and local city government.
It’s not for me to say what justice or reparations for all these historical wrongs would actually look like, but I can say this — better to bring more of it into the open then let it remain a festering, unspoken hurt.
When I think about all this, I take a little bit of comfort in the notion of deep time. Archaeological research has uncovered evidence of 12,000 years of continuous human use at what is now Brackenridge Park. That means it’s not out of the question to think that ancient people used to have cookouts there where they feasted on mammoth barbecue.
The 300-year history of San Antonio unfolded over one-fortieth of the timespan of the archaeological record at Brackenridge Park. If those people living 12,000 years ago could take a time machine to the present day, what would they say about our current conflicts? Fast-forward another 12,000 years — what will the people who stand on this ground be talking about then?
Oh wait, this is the Trailist — so let’s talk about the trails, too.
Brackenridge Park has several, though mapping them proved a little more difficult than I expected. I started with Avenue A, the remnants of a former street along the east bank of the San Antonio River south of Mulberry Avenue. I often enter Brackenridge Park via the low water crossing connecting Avenue A to River Road, on the west bank.
The three main trails in the interior, forested part of the park are the Waterworks Loop, Wilderness Trail and Wildlife Trail. This week, I ran along all of them, stopping multiple times to consult digital maps and signs to try to distinguish one from the other. The map in this story is my best effort to delineate them. The important things to note are that they all connect together at multiple points and include a mixture of paved and gravel trails.
Tuleta Drive, a paved street, bisects the park’s northern half, forming a barrier between the more naturally forested area with the three aforementioned trails and a more traditionally landscaped area.
The trails north of Tuleta are mostly paved and parallel the river. Near the Witte Museum, the trail passes the remnants of a former Spanish colonial weir dam, built to raise the river’s level to channel water into an acequia. The also passes by the former pump house that Brackenridge had built to push water uphill to a reservoir at what is now the San Antonio Botanical Gardens. The structure is one of the oldest industrial buildings still standing in Texas.
On the northern end, the trail makes a fork. To the right lies a bridge that will one day allow visitors to cross the river and visit the Miraflores sculpture garden. To the left is an intriguing tunnel made of concrete poured to look like wood, one of many of San Antonio’s examples of the faux bois sculpture technique.
From there, staying on the north side of the river, visitors can see the remnants of the Upper Labour Acequia and an associated sluice gate unearthed in 2013. What I call a trail — really just passable semi-paved ground — continues southward along the northern bank of the river, passing the area once known as Lambert Beach, now screened off after the tree protection and recent protests related to migratory birds and the cutting of trees along the bank.
Rounding the corner near the San Antonio Zoo, a bridge connects the northern bank to the Waterworks Loop on the south side of the river. Keep going straight, across the roundabout outside the zoo’s entrance, and visitors can access one of the best views available of the downtown skyline.
The former Alpine Drive is closed off to vehicles but accessible to pedestrians. It climbs a steep hill that climbs to the top of the Japanese Tea Garden. A long-gone gondola used to shuttle visitors there from the bottom of the former quarry. Alpine Drive connects to Stadium Drive via a gap in fence and concrete set of starts just north of the San Antonio Water System headquarters.
All told, I mapped about five miles of trail at the park. I spent about two and a half hours tracing all of them, the whole time worrying about how I could write this Trailist in a way that does this place justice.
I’m sure that I have fallen short. But that’s OK. Many stories have been written here over the past 12,000 years, and many more will be written long after mine have crumbled into dust.
