{"id":40573,"date":"2025-07-05T10:55:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-05T10:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/40573\/"},"modified":"2025-07-05T10:55:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-05T10:55:11","slug":"where-i-live-lavaca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/40573\/","title":{"rendered":"Where I Live: Lavaca"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Where I Live\u00a0series<\/a> aims to showcase our diverse city and region by spotlighting its many vibrant neighborhoods. Each week a local resident invites us over and lets us in on what makes their neighborhood special. Have we been to your neighborhood yet?\u00a0Get in touch<\/a>\u00a0to share your story. If your story is selected and published, you will receive a $250 stipend.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no wonder our neighborhood is named Lavaca. \u201cLa Vaca\u201d in Spanish means \u201cthe cow.\u201d These were the grazing grounds and farmlands for the Mission San Antonio de Valero (globally known as the Alamo) established in 1718.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Before, bands of Coahuiltecans lived here \u2014 hunter-gatherers who learned cattle ranching in captivity by Spanish Colonial settlers. Coahuiltecans accepted land \u201cowner\u201d terms as they provided protection from Apache and Comanche. But protection and education led to systemic disintegration of traditional ways and insufficient wages for harsh working conditions in agriculture\/mining\/public works \u2014 including contributions to the design\/engineering\/digging of the acequias, irrigation systems distributing water throughout the labores of the five Spanish Colonial Missions, now a World Heritage Site. Labores were 177-acre land grants issued to individuals for agriculture and livestock cultivation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Labor Street (from labores) divides Lavaca from the area formerly occupied as the Victoria Courts. A huge portion our neighborhood with Victorian and Queen Anne architecture was plowed down to accommodate San Antonio\u2019s second oldest public housing project, around 1940. This 660-unit complex providing low-income housing became a site of danger until demolished in 2000.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a quarter century \u2014 two generations \u2014 since the Courts came down. But a double dog park opened this week in Labor Street Park accommodating Lavaca and planned-and-partially-built mixed-income-housing finally replacing fallow fields where the Courts had been.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Courts\u2019 feeder school, the original Burnet Elementary School, still sits empty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Victoria Plaza, among country\u2019s earliest high-rises for very-low-income seniors, is re-filling after a barely-noticeable face-lift. Unauthorized overnighters have brought back gunshots and other unwanted activity.<\/p>\n

Another huge Lavaca swath was leveled for Hemisfair in the mid-1960s. We lost churches\/synagogues\/entire settlements of immigrants. Now the naughts have uplifted Hemisfair into a destination for residents and tourists, with festivals and concerts in large open spaces and plazas, residences\/restaurants\/bars\/coffee-shops\/pizza-parlors\/ice cream and paleta shops intermingle cleverly-designed contemporary-park features of water\/mosaics\/plants\/paintings. This extraordinary new neighborhood asset, though, has created parking pressures and plans for a new sports complex that will make traffic-logistics more complex.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Penelope Boyer poses for a portrait on the front porch of her home in Lavaca. Credit: Clint Datchuk for the San Antonio Report<\/p>\n

Lavaca is seeing steep increases in property taxes due to high-income home improvements leading to rising property prices and rents, the presence of finer vehicles on busier streets and golf carts as micro-local transportation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Long before others, I bicycled Lavaca, night and day \u2014 helmetless. Now bike lanes help few-wheelers including scooters compete for space. Gone are paleta vendors\u2019 clown-horns on bicycled ice-boxes, Spanish heard in streets\/yards, Conjunto airs, musical ice cream trucks. Now lots of rescued dogs are walked and you hear children.<\/p>\n

Lavaca [luxury] properties have elegantly-restored facades, expansive multi-story ultra-contemporary extensions accommodate lap pools and designer landscapes. Lavaca home exteriors can be any color, a claim no other San Antonio neighborhood could make at the time. Interior \u201crenovations\/restorations\u201d compromise the character of historic homes: sheet-rocked walls, floorplans diverge from homes\u2019 original plans, attics unrecognizable under central air-conditioning duct-tunnels, detailing destroyed, original hardware and hard wood replaced. \u201cRenovated\u201d homes may flip into Airbnbs.<\/p>\n

I bought my Queen Anne home in 1993. Being from the East Coast, I wouldn\u2019t warm my wood house with flames from floorboards. I had all floor heaters removed. Within a week, I begged the operation be reversed. Floor heaters now face strict regulations. I installed mini-splits as a safe anti-invasive cooling system.<\/p>\n

Come spring 1994, I planned to plant a garden in my big backyard because that\u2019s what northerners do in spring. Little did I know how different the cultivation calendar was 1,600 miles south. Thankfully, several trees popped up on their own: palm, loquat, fig, live oak.<\/p>\n

My house was built by the chief operator of the Western Union at the turn of the 20th century, James F. Marshall. I occasionally caught Marshall\u2019s elderly granddaughter stalking slowly at Canal and Callaghan in a sedan\u2019s backseat. She\u2019d been born in that next-door corner house. A barn once housing a horse fills part of my backyard. Evidently Marshall\u2019s wife picked him up on horseback for lunch at home, returning him daily. I was told my house loved parties \u2014 a fact we\u2019ve confirmed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first big element dropped in my backyard was a palladium-shaped fiberglass-pool, echoing the shape of the attic\u2019s little stained-glass eave windows. In digging the pool, we smelled horse-manure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Later, a shipping-container was dragged on-site. It\u2019s now our Airbnb called the Alley Cat on the alley that demarcates the Lavaca National Historic District\u2019s northern blocks from Lavaca\u2019s Local Historic District encompassing the entire neighborhood. Decks and stone walkways eradicate more arable land through permeable surfaces. Xeriscaping completes the project. My backyard, with its incredible view of the Tower of the Americas, definitely likes parties.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Penelope Boyer in the backyard of her historic Lavaca home, which features a shipping container converted into an Airbnb that she calls the \u201cAlley Cat.\u201d Credit: Clint Datchuk for the San Antonio Report<\/p>\n

From backyard-to-porch, I follow birdsong. Butterflies rest in poolside pollinator gardens before migrating to Mexican roosts. Bats from the world\u2019s largest bat colony just outside the city, swoop the pool at twilight anticipating migration south. Similarly, asylum-seekers passed through our Greyhound Station from Immigration Detention Centers south following dangerous sojourns north. I worked briefly with the Bus Station Ministry assisting refugees. Everyone on their way elsewhere. Ironic, as San Antonio is patron saint of lost things.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I served as Lavaca Neighborhood Association vice-president, then president, in the 1990s. I produced my South Presa Pocket Park\/Public Art Project getting a gazebo in one pocket park, a Carlos Cortez faux-bois bus-shelter in another, a Robert Tatum Mission Trails map-mural across from the third. My terms saw the completion of the city\u2019s first formal neighborhood plan, and national and local historic district designations.<\/p>\n

I sat on the Southtown Main Street Alliance board advocating attention to Presa Street while Southtown\u2019s focus was on South Alamo Street. Now Presa is a lovely thoroughfare with wonderful restaurants\/public art\/bars\/businesses. I chided Southtown for using Lavaca\/Victoria Courts demographics to attract funds for the neighboring mansion-filled King William neighborhood. I raised money from the Texas Commission on the Arts to fund SPARTS: Southtown Supports the Arts providing artist fees for 3D murals on facades of Burnet Elementary School portable classrooms. Each artist was assigned a surface and a grade level to develop public art projects interfacing the Lavaca neighborhood to break down barriers between Lavaca and the Courts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Each year we had a SPARTS Play Day celebrating these projects. A mayor came. The Courts got its first positive press in many-a-memory. Museums and artist-spaces were given a table to engage Play Day participants \u2014 the school\u2019s entire student body. Now common practice, this was new then. SPARTS\u2019 final achievement was to kick-start and help name the Conjunto Heritage Taller<\/a> with the late-great-Lavacan, Rodolfo Lopez.<\/p>\n

Conjunto music has its earliest roots in the Lavaca neighborhood. As does the Frito Bandito. Now a Michelin-starred restaurant rotates its Mexican-region-or-era-themed menu every three-months two blocks from me.<\/p>\n

I never leave Lavaca, except to go to Paris.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The\u00a0Where I Live\u00a0series aims to showcase our diverse city and region by spotlighting its many vibrant neighborhoods. Each…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":40574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5133],"tags":[17053,5229,9449,25970,32236,32237,32238,32239,32240,7202,7203,32241,32242,358,7453,3187,7593,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,32243,7594,21042],"class_list":{"0":"post-40573","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-airbnb","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-gardening","11":"tag-hemisfair","12":"tag-la-vaca","13":"tag-labor-street","14":"tag-lavaca","15":"tag-lavaca-national-historic-district","16":"tag-penelope-boyer","17":"tag-san-antonio","18":"tag-sanantonio","19":"tag-southtown-main-street-alliance","20":"tag-sparts","21":"tag-texas","22":"tag-top-story","23":"tag-tx","24":"tag-typefeature","25":"tag-united-states","26":"tag-united-states-of-america","27":"tag-unitedstates","28":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","29":"tag-us","30":"tag-usa","31":"tag-victoria-courts","32":"tag-wc-1000-1500","33":"tag-where-i-live"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114800264747177362","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}