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Crumbling Alamo Spurs Texans To Revive Monument Faded By Neglect

Crumbling Alamo Spurs Texans To Revive Monument Faded By Neglect

By Lauren Etter, Bloomberg News (TNS)

SAN ANTONIO Limestone is missing from the facade, tree roots push up through sidewalks and windowsills are rotting on the only building generations of Texans have been told never to forget.

“We want people to think about the Alamo again,” Rebecca Bridges Dinnin, its director, said in her San Antonio office, sitting beneath the red, white, and green flag of the Texas Revolution.

While Texans are no strangers to tattered public works, with billions of dollars needed for roads, parks, and state buildings, the Alamo’s decay is goading business leaders and public officials to act. They’re seeking millions to revive the fort, which has been the state’s symbolic heart since a bloody 1836 defeat there rallied Texans to wrest independence from Mexico.

On March 12, Texas fired the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, a private organization that has managed the site, after waning gift-shop sales and allegations of mismanagement. State Senator Jose Menendez, a San Antonio Democrat, wants to ask voters to approve spending as much as $250 million to restore the complex. A new endowment board, which includes billionaire Red McCombs, met this month to consider ways to boost fundraising for the Lone Star State’s most famous monument.

“Almost all Texans look at San Antonio as a second home and that’s because of the Alamo,” said McCombs, the 87-year-old auto-dealership founder who helped start the Clear Channel Communications radio-station chain.

During a tour, Richard Bruce Winders, the Alamo’s curator, pointed to the eroding foundations of the chapel, the main attraction, as throngs of umbrella-bearing visitors took shelter from the rain. A study released in February by researchers at Texas A&M University revealed that almost three inches of the limestone facade had been eroded by water damage since 1960.

“What happens here, down at the bottom level, is when it rains real hard the rain splashes up and hits here,” he said, pointing to areas where the rock had worn away. “It takes years and years for that to happen, but it does happen.”

The Texas General Land Office, which is run by Commissioner George P. Bush, the son of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, is asking the Legislature for $1.5 million for the Alamo’s two-year budget and an additional $5 million for preservation projects, such as to replace rotting beams, upgrade storm drains, caulk windows and add wireless Internet service. That’s up from a total of $1.5 million during the prior two years.

The request would use $620,000 to pay for temporary storage of former Genesis drummer Phil Collins’ collection of Alamo memorabilia and artifacts, which includes Jim Bowie’s knife and one of Davy Crockett’s rifles. The British musician, who was made an honorary Texan by the Legislature, agreed to donate the collection as long as the Alamo builds a museum to display it, said Dinnin, the Alamo’s director.

“Texans need to see some of these things,” said Dinnin.

Originally called San Antonio de Valero Mission, the Alamo was built in the 1700s by Spanish missionaries seeking to convert the natives to Catholicism.

It was later turned into a military garrison. In 1836, it became the site of a 13-day siege during an attack by Mexican troops led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. The defeat inspired soldiers who went on to win victory over Mexico with the battle cry, “Remember the Alamo.” Texas joined the U.S. in 1845.

The management of the site was given in 1905 to the Daughters of the Republic, a genealogical society limited to women who can trace their roots to Texas’ independence.

The group came under scrutiny as upkeep lapsed. Because of a slide in gift-shop sales, which almost entirely sustained the Alamo for decades, it had a $225,000 deficit in 2011.

That year, the Legislature voted to give control to the Land Office, which oversees oil royalties, education funds, and public beaches. The Daughters of the Republic continued to oversee the daily management through a contract with the state.

In 2012, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who became governor in January, issued a report criticizing “organizational dysfunction, failures to prioritize historic preservation, and internal disagreements” at the site. The Daughters of the Republic’s contract was canceled last week.

Ellen McCaffrey, president of the Daughters of the Republic, said the group is being unfairly blamed.

“The state Legislature and the governor and all the officials of the state for decades paid no attention to the Alamo,” she said. “They ignored it.”

McCombs, the billionaire on the endowment board, said he and other supporters want to restore the Alamo complex to reflect its original scale. That would require San Antonio to turn over a plaza that covers much of the Alamo’s 4.2-acre footprint.

“A lot of the downtown area’s gonna have to be blown down in my opinion,” said McCombs.

Lori Houston, who helps oversee development for San Antonio, said it’s premature to discuss any changes.

Today a busy street runs through the plaza, where shops hawk trolley rides, t-shirts, and coonskin hats.

“The Alamo over time has become a big letdown for people,” said Gary Foreman, an Alamo historian who’s been pushing to restore the site to its 1836 battleground image. “Instead of asking ‘why are you here’ and ‘how can we make it more rewarding’, we just say ‘what are we gonna sell ’em while they’re here.'”

Photo: Rob Gross via Flickr

A Monument to the ‘Least of These’

This Sunday on the National Mall, the nation dedicates a monument to, arguably, the greatest American of the 20th century. It is, as Lincoln said at another dedication, altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

When heroes die, it is human nature to wrap their lives in metal, marble and granite. We do this that we might remember them, but there is in the remembering also a kind of reduction. The rough and jagged lines of a life lived at the forefront, lived in controversy, conflict and trial, become something smooth and safe enough for children. Thus were the cunning, melancholy, white supremacy, courage and genius of Lincoln flattened in popular memory to a single thing: he saved the Union and freed the slaves.

And thus does King’s 13-year struggle for the redemption of America shrink to a single brilliant speech and a fight to overturn laws that never should have been laws in the first place. The rough and jagged lines have become smooth. His life has become a bedtime story.

Which is why it feels appropriate, necessary, maybe a little seditious, to remember and remind that when he died, Martin Luther King was fighting for the right of workers to form a union and for the dignity of the poor.

That is not a bedtime story from way back when. It is a headline from right now. Unions, after all, are controversial again. Worse, poor people find themselves denigrated and demeaned in ways that shock conscience.

Former South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer once likened them to stray animals one feeds at the back door. Fox “News” pundit John Stossel sees them as the enemy in a battle between “the makers and the takers.” Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning compares them to scavenging “raccoons.” Ann Coulter says welfare creates “irresponsible animals.”

There are people in this country — working people — who must routinely choose between rent and groceries, prescription drugs and electric lights. But we are encouraged by some on the political right to regard them with contempt and save our empathy for the fabulously wealthy.

You’ll have to go some to find a starker example of how morally blinkered this country has become.

Even if you put morality aside, there is still the question of enlightened self-interest. If you are white, you may scorn black people and be reasonably certain you will never become one. If you are straight, you may scorn gay people and be reasonably certain you will never become one.

But any of us can become poor. Ann Coulter could become poor. How do you scorn what you might someday be?

The man we honor Sunday could have died wealthy from speaking fees alone. But he gave that money away and instead died poor, struggling on the side of the poor — garbage workers who came home with maggots in their hair, reeking of other people’s waste, having earned maybe $10, gross, for a 14-hour day.

King died asking America to show a little human compassion for people like those, people the Bible calls “the least of these.” The monument to him seems, in photographs, a handsome and imposing thing.

But one suspects that, given his druthers, he would prefer the compassion. One suspects he would consider that the greatest monument of all.