Down By the River

When Hank Lee opened an art gallery next to the San Antonio River in 1989, his new neighbors in San Antonio’s Southtown area included free-ranging flocks of chickens scratching the dirt. Women who lived across the river from his gallery were always giving him oranges from backyard trees. And the river itself—the alluring, spring-fed stream that had sustained human life for some 11,000 years—was all but a memory, having been replaced by a concrete drainage ditch. One mile downstream from the heart of the city, San Antonio’s world-famous River Walk did not yet extend this far south.

“It was just a dirt trail,” recalls Lee, who still owns and operates San Angel FolkArt Gallery at Blue StarArts Complex on South Alamo Street.

For decades in San Antonio, there was the downtown River Walk: the “American Venice,” with its sunken gardens, wide promenades, and colorful boats to ferry tourists along a ribbon of green water, all of it winding gently through the middle of the city. The rest of the river was more of an after thought. “It was an embarrassment,” says Frates Seeligson, the executive director of the San Antonio River Foundation. “Everyone thinks of the river as what we call the downtown loop, which is where the majority of the restaurants are and most of the tourism takes place. But if you’re from San Antonio, you know that there were other parts of the river