The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk
practical.engineering
practical.engineering
Sure you can walk the streets but getting around via the Riverwalk is actually extremely pleasant. I really love how convinient of a convention city San Antonio is.
The best time to visit is during the riverboat parade after Thanksgiving. Everything is lit up and many restaurants along the route offer dinner and nice views. Going during the summer can be incredibly hot and uncomfortable.
We were simply walking along the street downtown and saw some stairs leading down and many people taking them so we went down and a whole magical world opened up. (I went back later and it wasn't nearly as magical).
But few are worth making them the centerpiece of an entire trip.
But is it special enough to make it worth a trip to San Antonio just to see the it? No, probably not. You probably live near a river, and there are probably restaurants with a deck you can sit on while you eat lunch. Go to San Antonio to see the Alamo and remember all who died for your freedom there, then as long as you’re in the area go to the river for a leisurely lunch.
The Mexicans or the Texans?
Probably not your freedom specifically, but the vague concept.
The small force there knew they would eventually be massacred by the thousands of troops surrounding them. The defenders held them off for 13 days. When they requested parley, Santa Anna signaled no quarter. Legend has it that Davy Crockett was on the roof, fighting to keep the horde from coming up the ladder, but he died with the rest of them.
Santa Anna ordered the execution of the six surviving prisoners of war. The Alamo defenders fought bravely and died in support of an idea: that men can govern themselves and live in freedom. It would take another 30 years before the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, would sign the Emancipation Proclamation and free the slaves.
None of this was politically palatable after the American Civil War and people certainly weren't going to focus on the non-anglo sides of the revolution that weren't so deeply proslavery, so the narrative that's taught in schools was sanitized.
That makes it a lot easier to understand the claim that folks often make, that any system is "propaganda free" when disagreements can be publicly stated with no governmental reprisal, is trivially false.
At the same time, it's been pleasantly horrific to look at how objectively bad the reflexive assumptions most of my cohort hold about the world and then try to draw conclusions about how terrible and mistaken my own views have and probably continue to be.
Thanks, Texas!
The name for post civil war revisionism is the Lost Cause Movement, by the way.
I too attended Texas public schools during that period and did not encounter any such revisionism. It was there that I learned succession started by 14 planters in South Carolina and spread to other states. I have since completed a history minor in college and completed book reports on the subject for military education professional development. Looking back the slant you speak of wasn’t there for me.
The political slant I do remember, though, is that the American Revolution was all about freedom. Not wanting to pay taxes hardly came up.
The taxes were core to supporting freedom among the colonists. These were not ordinary taxes. The Boston Tea Party, where they tossed the tea into the ocean as a mostly non-violent act of protest, was directly related to the Tea Act which followed the Stamp Act and other Acts that not just directly levied taxes onto the colonists, but actually made other sources of tea that weren't purchased from the British East India Company illegal.
Even worse, the colonists had no representation at all in Parliament or in England at all (hence the cry, "no taxation without representation"). Those accused of even heinous crimes or abuse in the colonies would simply be sent back to England to stand trial rather than by 'a jury of their peers'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act
This was in 1773, more than three years before the Declaration of Independence, and it marked a crucial turning point in the colonists' reaction to the Crown's acts against them, which had been ongoing for more than a decade at that point.
This was followed by the 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, which you should read in its entirety (it's only a few pages), because it again predated by a year the final straw -- the "Declaration of Independence" in 1776.
The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, written by Thomas Jefferson, is a crucial document that is often overlooked. In it, the colonists again gave the Crown multiple warnings that they were not going to be abused like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Causes_and_...
Why did the King ignore it? He led the most powerful empire in the world, and probably the most powerful war machine that had ever been seen in history until that point. He was, literally, almost invincible. What did colonists thousands of miles away really think they could do to him? Why would he pay any attention?
That document is quite explicit as to exactly what crimes the Crown supported or directly undertook against the colonists (a bit old English and hard to read, but worth the read). And, unlike many other British colonies and subjugates such as India itself, the colonists were armed and they could make their own guns, which they did, beginning in the Connecticut River valley, in which could properly be understood as the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The founding fathers recognized that guns in the hands of ordinary citizens were a bulwark against tyranny, which directly led to the drafting of the Second Amendment less than 15 years later (easily ratified in 1791).
Not coincidentally, the banning and seizing of small arms during the American Revolution were also what helped foment the Texas War for Independence as well, many decades later, and which led to the "Come and Take It" from Gonzales in 1831 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_take_it) and finally led to the Alamo and the Goliad Massacre in 1836 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliad_massacre), where the Mexican Army executed, en masse, the defeated Texian Army.
There is indeed a lot of revisionism going on, so the best way to resolve that is to actually read the contemporary documents from that time period and understand what people actually thought (or at least what they were brave enough to write down!)
Thanks for reading, even if you disagree.
It’s just hard to express how small it is until you’ve been there. Once you are there, it’s just underwhelming.
Really only the chapel is left, and that was never intended for anything other than church services for a few hundred people.
It was originally a quickly fortified missionary complex which is a large plaza surrounded by walls.
Brownsville and Houston would like a word… (Texas is a huge state and coastal Texas is not dry.)
Besides the ever-pleasing view, including the casual peeks from the window, I spent a lot of time, pretty much every day, walking on the sides of many other canals — that engineering is something to think about.
I read somewhere that it is even more beautiful and breathtaking in the outskirts and beyond the city. I need to revisit to experience those.
If you're ever downtown, checkout the Chihuly installations in the main library. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/fiesta-tower
As for the river walk itself, living in Amsterdam predisposes you to treat the bone-dry, car infested asphalt and concrete jungles we call cities as weird places where humanity aggregates for ritualistic suffering. Discovering that San Antonio is different was a great and pleasant surprise.
It's the transcript of a video (at the top), so there is little reason to bother with pictures: if you want visuals you can watch the video, or use it as a slideshow.
I assume there's many more currently in the works, based on how long this one was in production during the replacement of the flood gates. I'm glad that the city, engineers, and contractors let him document the construction process and make a video about it.
I also thought it was pretty cool in a strange sort of way to see each of their logos in the video's credits. Not something I'm used to seeing from independent (if you ignore nebula studios) youtubers.