Brackenridge Park: 125 Years Old –With a Future in the Making
By Berit Mason
Photographs courtesy of Brackenridge Park Conservancy
Brackenridge Park is wild, murky, and dense; an old urban park people drive through on the way to the San Antonio Zoo, the Paul Jolly Center for Pet Adoptions, the Brackenridge Park Golf Course, Tuesday Musical Club, or the Japanese Tea Gardens.
It was December 4, 1899 when George W. Brackenridge donated 199 acres of land to the City of San Antonio, to become Brackenridge Park. Originally, it was a “driving park,” where horse-drawn carriages and later cars tootled about.
Owned by the City of San Antonio and operated by Parks and Recreation, the park itself mostly goes unnoticed and has suffered significant decline. Driving in, one can get lost in its dimness. Roads wind around and around, its borders are porous and birds clustering at the riverbanks leave a real stink. There are hazards which can be easy to stumble into.
George W. Brackenridge
“One thing – you need to know where you are,” says Lewis F. Fisher, author of Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park. “You are never told when you come into the park that you are in the park. You need better traffic flow with the closing of the low-water crossing.”
He says the park needs clear road signs and better pedestrian walkways, to bring it connectivity and cohesion.
Fisher writes in his book, “It seemed in the 1940s, that Brackenridge Park was drifting down some sort of rabbit hole.” A 1970s park train robbery was a real low and “years of municipal budget cutbacks had taken their toll.”
“There is a whole lot that can be done!” he says. “The riverbanks need to be upgraded, invasive species and plants need to be removed, and the grounds need to be maintained. It can be raised to a world-class urban park standard.”
But Brackenridge Park has always struggled for funding. A $7.7 million bond was passed in 2017 to address some of its needs.
A project in the works is the River Road Ecosystem Restoration by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, supported by the San Antonio River Authority and Bexar County. Infrastructure enhancements are coming south of Mulberry, set to restore banks of the stretch of the San Antonio River traveling through the park and stabilize the health and function of the riparian and aquatic ecosystem. This includes removing non-native and invasive species and reintroducing native aquatic plants, which can mitigate erosion and improve channel flow, fish passage, and avian habitats. Aside from enhancing the natural health of the environment, the River Road project aims to increase recreational opportunities like birding and fishing.
This winter, city officials invited citizens to the D.R. Semmes Family YMCA TriPoint Center, to collect their ideas on how to gussy up the park’s nearly 400 acres.
“More than 130 people attended each meeting, and the survey generated participation from more than 2,100 individuals with nearly 30,000 unique responses. The public engagement campaign was part of a Reconciled Plan effort,” reports the city’s Office of Historic Preservation. “The public expressed the greatest interest in preserving the natural setting of the park and the rehabilitation of historic buildings and structures.” One resident insisted the park honor Native American hunter-gatherers who first passed through here some 12,000 years ago. About a dozen archeological discoveries have been unearthed here, as old as 9200 BCE.
The Brackenridge Park Conservancy is onsite in the park, in a small neat building next to the San Antonio River. Here, interim CEO Terry Brechtel and her officers care for the park’s history, and its preservation.
“It was a healing process in a lot of ways,” she says of the meetings, “because of, let’s say, the many false starts.” Throughout its history, the parks only had money for a patchwork of upgrades, leaving it with a lost feel.
“The park needs significant improvements, dollar-wise, to make it all happen,” says Brechtel. “This isn’t an undertaking that is just a few million dollars. To do this right, it’s a few hundred million dollars.”
The lower Broadway corridor is being completely redone, developers erecting lofts, high-rises, with a river revival and architectural restorations. Part of lower Broadway, Brackenridge Park also deserves attention.
“There needs to be some kind of Broadway cultural corridor marketing plan, that defines the corridor in a meaningful way, that helps visibility so all of the partners on the Broadway corridor benefit,” says Brechtel.
Another project in the works is an “all-inclusive natural playscape area that takes the best from playgrounds and makes them natural, creating a space of play and exploration.”
Salvaging and reuse are themes of today’s environmental mindset, so they’ll build the playscape with existing park materials.
The 1878 Lambert Beach pump house was an original source of water for the city. It became a bathhouse in the 1920s. “It is an historic structure that needs to be reimagined so it can be reused,” she says.
Of the 30,000 suggestions, there was an insistence on safety measures. There’s park police, but trail improvements are useless if walkers and hikers feel unsure.
Already, the Conservancy rented goats who munched their way through tangled foliage to clear trails and overgrowth.
Collaborations make a group stronger, so the Conservancy partnered with the McNay Art Museum on the Birdsong Brackenridge Birdhouse Exhibition.
“The McNay is proud to partner with the Brackenridge Park Conservatory showcasing architects’ concept-driven birdhouses throughout our campus. The birdhouses ignite curiosity and inspiration as visitors of all ages connect with nature and art,” says McNay director, Matthew McLendon.
Artistic birdhouses were donated to the Conservancy, which they installed on the McNay’s cultivated grounds.
Natural settings, parks are home to nature. Birds and egrets live here, as do cats. Yes, cats. Kind volunteers tend to the many scattered cat colonies, sprung up from people who dump them here. Felines are tucked under tarps, bushes and trees, while volunteers in boots and jackets tromp through the park’s backcountry to feed them, maintaining food and water stations.
The park has sports, golf, baseball, hiking, and in the old days, there were polo matches. In the 1930s, founding member of the Texas Horse Racing Hall of Fame and Chairman of the Texas Racing Commission, Hugh Fitzsimons, Jr., organized polo matches at the park.
“Polo was a big part of the Fort Sam Houston cavalry program,” says son, Joseph B.C. Fitzsimons. “At one point, the Fort Sam Houston army had over twenty teams. They would lead the horses from Fort Sam Houston, down the hill and across Broadway on Sundays, and play at the park.”
When the polo players went off to WWII, the matches stopped, resuming on their return. The last polo game was in the late 1980s.
In May, today’s generations of the Fitzsimons family brought polo back to the park for a champagne event, part of a yearlong schedule of park activities to attract visitors.
Eclipse and Sips provided prime solar eclipse viewing atop the historic Alpine Drive overlooking San Antonio’s Japanese Tea Garden. Saturdays are Fitness at the Park. There’s Brackenridge Story Time for children and Urban Wild is a new group to engage young community leaders, introducing the park to the next generations. ■
In the fall, Parktoberfest is occuring September 29.
The park’s 3rd Annual Family Fishing Day is on November 2!
The official 125th birthday celebration for Brackenridge Park is the Big Brack Bash on November 16, with vintage cars, paddle boats for the public, pony rides and donkey petting, harkening to the park’s early days.
On December 4, Party in the Park will celebrate the park’s inaugural day.
Brackenridge Park is your park — so the city wants to hear from you. Visit saspeakup.com/bpplan to share your ideas.
Footnote:
On June 20, 2024, the Brackenridge Park Conservancy announced their new CEO, Chris Maitre, who begins the job July 8.
“I’m honored to be joining the amazing team at the Brackenridge Park Conservancy,” said Chris Maitre. “Brackenridge Park is a historically significant and culturally rich park. I’ve been fortunate to visit Brackenridge Park during prior family vacations and on trips to see my son during his Air Force training. It was during these visits that I came to truly admire Brackenridge’s unique setting for San Antonio residents and visitors. Parks are places for people to escape the day-to-day grind, enjoy the company of others, and make lasting memories. Brackenridge has done that and more for the last 125 years. Every great city deserves a great park and San Antonio has Brackenridge Park.”
Maitre comes from New Orleans where he was Chief Operating Officer for City Park Conservancy in New Orleans, in charge of day-to-day operations for their 1,300-acre urban park.
