Brackenridge

When the great park maker Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. visited San Antonioin 1854 he noted: “We have no city, except, perhaps New Orleans, that can vie, in point of the picturesque interest that attaches to odd andantiquated foreignness, with San Antonio. Its jumble of races, costumes, languages and buildings; its religious ruins, holding to an antiquity, for us, indistinct enough to breed an unaccustomed solemnity; its remote, isolated, outposted situation, andthe vague conviction that it is the first of a new class of conquered cities into whose decaying streets our rattling life is to be infused, combine with the heroic touches in its history to enliven and satisfy your traveler’s curiosity.” Five years before his life changed with his competition-winning Greensward plan for Central Park in New York City, the thirty-one-year-old Olmsted experienced firsthand a young San Antonio—a relatively inaccessible city whose diverse residents had affected, influenced, and literally shaped its built and natural environment.  This is what a cultural landscape looks like. In 1850, a few years before Olmsted’s visit, the city’s first census was under-taken. It documented 716 families with 3,168 people living in San Antonio. Demographically, the population was mixed: 53 percent Hispanic (including 24 percent Tejanos and 29 percent native Mexican), 23 percent “natives of Europe,”and 23 percent “natives of the United States.” By 1850, slaveholding had increased; 8 percent of heads of households were slaveholders, and 220 people, represent-ing about 6 percent of the population, were enslaved. (It’s worth comparing this statistic with the state during the same period; 27.4 percent of the state’s population was documented as enslaved at the time.)  Today San Antonio’s population of more than 1.58 million is Texas’s secondlargest after Houston when suburban areas are excluded from the count. According to the recent census, San Antonio’s demographics are as mixed as in the 1850 census: 64.2 percent Hispanic, 24.7 percent White, 6.95 percent Black, and 2.83percent Asian. For this reason, the city is a cultural landscape steeped in a continuity of ethnographic associations that go beyond material artifacts.  I believe the definition of a city includes cultural lifeways and their associated significant historic resources. For example, the five missions in San Antonio were listed as World Heritage Sites in 2015 because of their geographical and functional relationship with the San Antonio River Basin and the irunique and deep natural and cultural histories. The four-hundred-acre Brackenridge Park has a similar relationship as chronicled in Lewis F. Fisher’s Brackenridge, which recognizes that the park’s cultural landscape displays a remarkable twelve thousand years of documented prehistoric and human engagement with the upper course of the San Antonio River.  “The San Antonio Spring,” Olmsted wrote, “may be classed as of the first water among the gems of the natural world. The whole river gushes up in one sparkling burst from the earth. . . .The effect is overpowering. It is beyond your possible conceptions of a spring.” Olmsted’s cultural observations were penned four decades before Yosemite became a national park in 1890 and half a century before Brackenridge became a municipal park. What Olmsted described, and Fisher illuminates, is central to the work that the Brackenridge Park Conservancy is today advancing through a holistic way of seeing the park—a way of seeing that recognizes that nature and culture are inextricably intertwined and that presentday stewardship (from interpretation to how we assign significance and value) must recognize and support this.  Brackenridge Park’s place in American landscape history is not only little understood, but also largely absent from most textbooks. The same can be said of San Pedro Springs Park, which Olmsted described as a “wooded spot of great beauty” following his 1854 visit, four years before Central Park opened to the public. Furthermore, San Pedro Springs, like Brackenridge Park, is not the creation of a nationally recognized designer like Olmsted and Vaux (Central Park). In fact, if we were to ask the general public or students of landscape architecture to name three iconic American parks they would likely cite Central and Prospect Parks (New York City), Fairmount Park (Philadelphia), or Golden Gate Park (San Francisco). People from the heartland might mention Jackson Park (Chicago), Swope Park (Kansas City), or Forest Park (Saint Louis). All of those parks can be attributed to pioneering landscape architects, and each reflects its respective practitioner’s design intent.  This book, when coupled with the recent Cultural Landscape Report for Brackenridge Park prepared by Reed Hilderbrand and Suzanne Turner Associates, represents an interdisciplinary systems-based approach that is foundational to reconsidering Brackenridge Park today. It is the most significant urban cultural park owned by a local municipality, as opposed to the state or federal government. Thanks to this book and the purposeful efforts of the Brackenridge Park Conservancy, we can gain a deeper understanding of how this cultural landscape has long served as a gathering place, from the time Native peoples first inhabited the area through the sixteenth century when Spanish settlers established a sophisticated water system, traces of which remain today.  Fisher’s rich narrative also reveals George W. Brackenridge’s extraordinary act of patronage in 1899 when he donated two hundred acres to the city for recreational use. While similar contemporaneous civic gestures can be documented in Dallas, Houston, and other cities, that work involved the creation of new parks by landscape architects like George Kessler and Hareand Hare, not the retention of built historic fabric.