Too bad if you were looking for Crockett, Travis, or Bowie. No doubt you have visited the Alamo and perhaps recognized John Wayne, Lawrence Harvey, and Richard Widmark in the painting just inside the museum. The odds are great that you have already discovered the pleasures of San Antonio, just as you have learned that vacationing in Houston is impossible and math is never easy. The instantly recognizable images of Texas history-the Alamo, the missions, the San Antonio River-give resonance to the present and, therefore, hope for the future. If an urban vacation is possible in Texas, it is here in a city that can have fun with style, a city that is a charming anachronism in a world of gathering conformity, a city that lives with its history. Neither a puffing, clanking, screeching industrial city nor a place where the really serious business of life is making big bucks, San Antonio has mastered something much more difficult: the art of gracious living, of relaxing with a siesta, of strolling rather than running. For 262 years-since 1718-it has endured travelers and tourists, and somehow it has prevailed. It has survived war, siege, occupation, famine, plague, floods, HemisFair, and the Shah. San Antonio is a sensual, sexual city of easy movements, serpentine, even slithery. The compulsive play that has become the acceptable alternative to compulsive work in Dallas and Houston is absent here. San Antonio is something different, standing above the others, on its own rung among Texas civic hierarchies. Read more here about our archive digitization project.Ĭompared with San Antonio, other Texas cities just don’t measure up, no matter how many tall, ugly, shoe-boxlike bank buildings or trapezoidal oil-company headquarters dot their skylines. ![]() We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives.
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