The Where I Live series 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? Get in touch to share your story. If your story is selected and published, you will receive a $250 stipend.
Technically, I have lived in San Antonio my entire life. However, as I have grown older, I’ve come to feel that maybe that’s not quite accurate — that, in essence, I really got here when I started college at Our Lady of the Lake University and moved closer to the city’s center, far from the northeast side where I grew up. That’s when I fell in love with San Antonio and realized that the city of my dreams had been waiting for me right inside Loop 410.
That was over 20 years ago. Now, living in Alta Vista with my partner, Felicia, and our daughter, Emerson, I feel truly a part of my city, close to its beating heart.
We moved into our hundred-year-old house in this neighborhood 11 years ago, just three months before Emerson was born. As new parents to be, we had a lot on our minds, but we were thrilled to find a spot that had a backyard and yet was within walking distance to downtown, offered easy access to useful Via bus routes and was situated in close proximity to the various focal points of our city’s art and music scenes.
We were also keen on living a few blocks away from San Pedro Springs Park, the oldest park in the city (second oldest in the nation) and a space that has been important to human activity in the area for some 12,000 years.
It’s the place where Emerson learned to swim, met friends on the playground, played her first few games of tennis and developed empathy and understanding for our houseless neighbors who sleep there. It’s the place where we take family walks to warm up for our summer hiking excursions, where we visit the little library and where we practice soccer.
Housed in the park, San Pedro Playhouse is the place where Emerson, now active in her school’s theater program, saw some of her first plays and, importantly, where she first saw the Selena movie, alongside a singing, dancing and, eventually, weeping crowd of fellow San Antonians with a passion for La Reina.
As Emerson has grown into the person who makes us so proud today, this neighborhood has helped us build her foundation.
In our daily lives, especially during the school year, we can find time to visit some of our favorite places because they are so close. Some constants are the San Antonio Museum of Art and the McNay Art Museum (Felicia is a docent at both), the St. Mary’s Strip (where we enjoy live music), the Central Library (where seemingly all of the employees know Emerson’s name), and Southtown (where we go to eat and to engage our passion for local art). We also frequent the Pearl (especially Stable Hall), the zoo and the botanical garden. Of course, none of these places are in the neighborhood, but none are more than 10 minutes away.
We love living on the same block as Scratch Kitchen — a favorite spot for sweet treats and breakfast, where we get Emerson cupcakes for school birthdays — and Midtown Meetup, which was once a convenience store but is now in its second attempt (R.I.P. Oscar de la Tienda) at becoming more of a community space. We feel blessed to walk a mere half a block and catch the legendary San Antonio band Los #3 Dinners, an act that plays at Midtown Meetup regularly.
For New Year’s Eve most years, we walk to a high point at Breeden and Ashby to watch the downtown fireworks. From that excellent vantage — they call it Alta Vista (“high view”) for a reason — we can also see the Westside fireworks, which usually move us more than the professional show. With this tradition, we celebrate new beginnings and embrace growth while each of us is silently, secretly hoping some things never change.
I work from home as a teacher, tutor and writer. And, Felicia, who is an artist as well as a docent, usually does, too. This means that when the weather finally gets bearable each fall, we get to enjoy slow daytime walks around the neighborhood, observing how the old trees take on color as the temperature cools — a natural ritual that radically predates the notion of neighborhoods (or societies for that matter).
On our walks, which are most always aimless in the best way, we cross back and forth over railroad tracks lined with vibrant graffiti galleries, imagining all of the turbulent and beautiful life that has happened in these old homes of all shapes and sizes. We adore the exceptional socioeconomic and cultural diversity of the area and sometimes worry that the homogenizing effects of gentrification, which thankfully seems to work at least a little slower here than in some neighborhoods, will one day render it nearly unrecognizable.
For now, though, it is hard to imagine a better place for our family to thrive.