Historic Doorways Of San Antonio Texas

Doorways, particularly front entrances, are among a building's most significant architectural features. Their powerful visual impact provides a sense of structural design style. The unique and well-preserved historic architecture of San Antonio, Texas, reveals much about the area's history and cultural heritage. Over 180 photographs give a sense of the Coahiltecan Indians at Catholic frontier missions, the spirit of the Alamo, and rush of progress that arrived with the railroad. "You wish you could grab a knob and walk in the past time, when life moved at a slower pace." writes Judge Nelson W. Wolff in his foreword to this book. The broad range of entrance styles also represent many prominent architects who contributed to the city's development. This inventory of beautiful and eclectic doorways will inspire and inform architects, preservationists, photographers, and everyone considering remodeling the front exterior of their home.

Spanish colonial missionary settlements established San Antonio as a junction between Mexico and the developing United States in the early 1700s. Because of its remote location amid both countries and its great distance from other cities, San Antonio became a crossroads for commerce, industry, and strategic military position on the wild frontier. Texas independence and the admission of Texas into the United States in the 19th century established a diverse cultural population and distinctive architecture that remains historically significant across the nation as it continues to gain attention on the world stage. The appreciation of historic architecture among its citizens has enabled San Antonio to retain a remarkably large catalog of important historic structures, which are often saved from destruction through relocation. Three centuries of steady growth, from 1700 to 2000, has resulted in an abundance of buildings that has generated a local legacy of multigenerational artisans and skilled craftsmen.

Few American cities enjoy the likes of San Antonio's visual links with its dramatic past. The Alamo and four other Spanish missions, recently marked as a UNESCO World Heritage site, are the most obvious but there are a host of landmarks and folkways that have survived over the course of nearly three centuries that still lend San Antonio an "odd and antiquated foreignness." Adding to the charm of the nation's seventh largest city is the San Antonio River, saved to become a winding linear park through the heart of downtown and beyond and a world model for sensitive urban development. San Antonio's heritage has not been preserved by accident. The wrecking balls and headlong development that accompanied progress in nineteenth-century San Antonio roused an indigenous historic preservation movement—the first west of the Mississippi River to become effective. Its thrust has increased since the mid-1920s with the pioneering work of the San Antonio Conservation Society. In Saving San Antonio, Texas historian Lewis Fisher peels back the myths surrounding more than a century of preservation triumphs and failures to reveal a lively mosaic that portrays the saving of San Antonio's cultural and architectural soul. The process, entertaining in the telling, has reverberated throughout the United States and provided significant lessons for the built environments and economies of cities everywhere.

Tired of the boring chain restaurant scene? Recipes from Historic Texas will please your palate and nourish your mind. Enjoy a unique bit of Texas history by visiting a wide variety of restaurants located in unusual historic settings-a gritsmill, a Dr. Pepper bottling plant, a church, and a funeral home, to name a few. Two recipes from each establishment are offered to form a well balanced selection of Texas cuisine. A brief history of each of the 70 restaurants is included, followed by basic information such as hours of operation, location, and other important details. The recipes themselves are an eclectic mix of the simple and the exotic, from the Cowboy Omelet at Beaumont's The Pig Stand to the Jicama Salad at Dallas's famous Mansion on Turtle Creek. Two indexes, one to restaurants and the other to recipes, make the book equally useful as both a travel guide and a cook book.

"The richly diverse ethnic heritage of the Lone Star State has brought to the Southwest a remarkable array of rhythms, instruments, and musical styles that have blended here in unique ways and, in turn, have helped shape the music of the nation and the world." "Historian Gary Hartman writes knowingly and lovingly of the Lone Star State's musical traditions. In the first thorough survey of the vast and complex cultural mosaic that has produced what we know today as "Texas music," he paints a broad, panoramic view, offers analysis of the origins of and influences on specific genres, profiles key musicians, and provides guidance to additional sources for further information." "A musician himself, Hartman draws on both academic and non-academic sources to give a more complete understanding of the state's remarkable musical heritage. He combines scholarly training in music history and ethnic community studies with his first-hand knowledge of how important music is as a cultural medium through which human beings communicate information, ideas, emotions, values, and beliefs, and bond together as friends, families, and communities." "The History of Texas Music incorporates a selection of well-chosen photographs of both prominent and less-well-known artists and describes not only the ethnic origins of much of Texas music but also the cross-pollination among various genres. Today, the music of Texas - which includes Native American music, gospel, blues, ragtime, swing, jazz, rhythm and blues, conjunto, Tejano, cajun, zydeco, western swing, honky tonk, polkas, schottisches, rock & roll, rap, hip hop, and more - reflects the unique cultural dynamics of the Southwest."--Jacket

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.