San Antonio River Walk

The River Walk exists because San Antonio chose not to pave its river. After the flood of 1921, engineers wanted to clear the trees from the nearly half-mile Great Bend downtown and turn its bed into a flood channel. The city instead built a bypass channel with a low dam to carry floodwater around the bend. In 1929 a young local architect, Robert H. H. Hugman, saw that gates at each end could keep even ordinary high water out, so shops could open straight onto the banks.

It took the Depression to build it. With a riverside tax district, Congressman Maury Maverick's federal money and the Works Progress Administration, ground was broken on March 29, 1939, with Hugman as architect. He lined the channel with irregular limestone, laid meandering walks, cedar benches, two arched bridges and stairways down from the streets, and replaced a junkyard with the Arneson River Theater, where the audience sits on grass steps across the water from the stage. After quarrels over the bright new stone, his committee fired him in March 1940. In March 1941 the WPA handed the city 17,000 feet of sidewalks, 31 stairways and some 4,000 trees, shrubs and plants.

The shops Hugman pictured were slow to come. A 1968 extension for HemisFair brought the Hilton Palacio del Rio, the first of the hotels that now line the banks, and the walk later stretched north on the Museum Reach, opened in 2009, and south to the missions on the Mission Reach in 2011.