BY ALEX MARSHALL
SEPT. 5, 1996
Metropolis Magazine.
The fat man in the Budweiser T-shirt and shorts gawking up at the Moorish inspired arches of the front porch of the palatial home was one sign of why life in this elegant neighborhood is not always easy. Despite his admiral interest in historical homes, the man and his companions were not the easiest sight on a Saturday morning if you had just climbed out of bed.
And keep in mind the Budweiser man was one of the good tourists, or at least uncontroversial ones. He was on foot, not in a belching tour bus.
King William is a sweet honey of a neighborhood, a tasty blend of elegant mansions, decrepit Victorians and more non-descript homes nestled down amid the scarred landscape of freeways and vacant lots on the edge of San Antonio’s downtown. A slum at one time, it was rediscovered in the late 60s and 70s. Since then, many of its palatial mansions have been renovated, and their residents live in harmony with the more middle-class denizens that reside in the smaller homes and apartments there.
The neighborhood, built largely between 1850 and 1890, was developed by successful German immigrants who swept into this part of Texas in the 19th century. The Germans were a strong influence in the part of the state. An old photo from the 19th century San Antonio shows a sign warning people to walk their horses across a bridge. It’s written in three languages – English, German and Spanish.
What’s nice about King William is that it’s still very diverse. A guy living an an apartment with a battered car, is down the street from the stockbroker in the mega-mansion. Plenty of homes still need renovating. As I talked with one woman in lovely restored mansion, I watched an old man across the street, wearing a white T-shirt, and sitting on the front porch of a house with peeling paint. He and the house looked equally old and near collapse. Despite its beauty, King William might be just another inner-city, gentrified neighborhood were it not for its position on the edge of San Antonio’s tourist machinery. Both a convention city and a historic tourist town, San Antonio receives some 10 million visitors a year who trot through The Alamo, wander the River Walk, and increasingly, make their way to King William to look at the houses.
This is a mixed blessing. It is one shared by many historic neighborhoods that are in cities like Charleston, Alexandria, and Savannah. The tourism helps keep the city as a whole healthy, and also justifies historic preservation in dollars and cents. But for people living in the neighborhood, it can be a hassle.
Tourism was not on the minds of those who homesteaded the neighborhood back in the late 1960s and early 70s. The godfather of this movement is Walter Mathis. When his home elsewhere in town was put in the bullseye of a freeway’s path, Mathis moved into King William in 1968, bought a crumbling mansion, and then – he says he wanted to assure himself of having good neighbors – bought 14 other homes.
“Everyone thought I was craze to do gown there, because the neighborhood was so terrible,” Mathis said. “People were parking cars in the front yards, and the big houses were all broken up.”
Mathis, an investment banker, says he had 16 men working 18 months to renovate his mansion. On most of the other homes, he had the foundations repaired, put on new tin roofs, and then sold them as is to young couples eager to renovate the homes themselves. Like many people who subsequently moved in, they then spent years or even a decade or more slowly renovating their homes, a la This Old House.
The tourism debate has developed over the last few years. It has centered on two items of tourism: bed and breakfasts, and tour buses.
Of the two, the tour buses are clearly obnoxious. In King William, the full-sized city buses glide through the neighborhood at a crawl in the middle of the street, forcing regular drivers behind them to wait or try to squeeze around them. According to residents, they often sit and idle their engines after they have disgorged their passengers for a stroll. Sometimes they stack up, two or three at once. My visit to the neighborhood was not during the high-tourist season, but I could tell they are obnoxious as hell.
“I’ve had times when right in front of my house, I’ve had two buses and one trolley parked, and I didn’t feel I could work in my bathing suit or shorts on a hot day, because people are staring at me,” said Karen Van Nort, who lives in a palatial residence on King William street, the main drag for tour buses. ”
The bed and breakfasts are the flip-side of the coin, arguably more of a blesssing than a curse. There are roughly a dozen, formal B&Bs in the neighborhood now. They have little opportunity for friction with their neighbors. Despite ample street-parking in the neighborhood, all B&Bs must provide off-street parking. Their overnight guests are seldom seen. Their ownly advertising are tiny wooden signs placed usually on the front porch. Most important, their presence has helped renovate a variety of homes that otherwise might sit crumbling. These 19th century homes are often difficult to work economically for a contemporary household. The Yellow Rose bed and breakfast where I stayed was a 10-room apartment complex before Jennifer and Eric Tice bought it a few years ago and renovated it into a five-room bed and breakfast.
The debate over B&Bs and tour buses was at a high simmer a few years ago, but appears to have quieted. A city committee has proposed, and the neighborhood has accepted, a new ordinance that limits the number of B&Bs to no more than 20 percent of the homes on any one block. The B&B operators are comfortable with this, as are the homeowners. At the moment, only one block is at this level. I couldn’t find anyone during my visit who complained about bed and breakfasts.
“They are my neighbors like anyone else,” said Karen Van Tort, after complaining bitterly of the tour buses. “They take care of their homes. I dont see any big advertising. I see it as more of a positive. I certainly don’t see it as a problem.”
The tour buses are another story. Although some limits have already been set – they are not supposed to cruise before 11 a.m. or after 6 p.m., they still bother some people. The problem is more difficult in that they generally only bother one street – King William – where most of the mega-mansions are clustered.
What many there want is to create a parking lot on the edge of the neighborhood, where the buses could park and then its occupants disembark and walk on foot through the neighborhood. Failing that, they want limits on the size of the buses, and the number that can go through at any onetime. A committee is studying the issue now. It’s using as its model, among others, the ordinances in place in Charleston which not only set limits on buses but on horse drawn carriages.
That tourism is both a problem and a blessing there can be no doubt. Last year, (November 1995), the Historic Anapolis Foundation held a seminar entitled “Living with Success: Managing Residential Life and Tourism in Historic Communities. Among its participants were San Antonio, Newport, Charleston, Santa Fe and Savannah. The report’s conclusions were common-sensical – there must be a balance between tourism and the indigenous life of the neighborhood – but no less true because of this.
What comes across when looking at tourism is that there is often a tension between long-term and short-term gain. If King William is overrun with tour buses, or San Antonio’s River Walk is overrun with chain restaurants, they will both lose some of the charm that makes them successful. But in the short run, the profits from such ventures – should we say predatory ventures? – are tempting.
But neighborhoods also have to guard against being too picky. Urban neighborhoods are meant to have a variety of uses, from a small coffeeshop, to a dentist’s office, to a bed and breakfast. As long as size and scale is managed, uses should not be worried about. Even in King William, most people had nothing to complain about, when I asked of how tourism affected them.
The original homesteader Mathis takes a fairly sanguine attitude toward the tourism fuss, even though a view of his home with the two carved lions out front is one of the prime targets for tour buses.
“Personally, the tour buses don’t bother me because I work all day and I don’t see them,” Mathis said. “Most of the bed and breakfasts are well-run businesses and are very attractive.”