River Walk: The Epic Story of San Antonio's River

How San Antonio's river was revived from a sluggish trickle to become a world-renowned model for river development has been long a virtually unknown story. For generations San Antonians spun tales of rescue that rank with the most entertaining of Texas yarns. Outside writers swallowed them whole. This book untangles the historical record, and reveals a quite different saga. As their river began going dry more than a century ago, San Antonians refused to give up on the stream that had nourished them since Spanish times. They pumped in new water, fought floods, and, in 1914, turned the banks into a park, praised by national architectural critics. It remained a park after a disastrous flood in 1921, until, fifteen years later, businessmen got behind an imaginative plan by architect Robert H. H. Hugman. Constructed by Depression era WPA workers and completed in 1941, the two-mile linear park gained rave reviews but was little used. In 1968, nearby development for a world's fair sparked the pedestrian traffic that began the evolution into today's phenomenal River Walk, visited by some five million tourists each year. More than 200 illustrations, a great many never before published, document this improbable development and portray what has been ranked as the top travel destination in Texas. River Walk: The Epic Story of San Antonio's River received the Independent Book Publishers Association's 2008 national Benjamin Franklin Award as Best Regional Book