San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Will the city get moving, or should we?




By Mike Greenberg

from the San Antonio Express News 1/24/98



One day late last year I received an e-mail message from an obviously embittered reader. He wrote, in part:

"Despite any efforts to implement light rail, save the symphony, promote rational planning and growth, etc., etc., etc., San Antonio is unlikely to become a substantially better place to live ..." .

"If living in a really good city is important to us, the most rational act we can take is to MOVE."

Although I have had similar thoughts on occasion, especially during the San Antonio Symphony's near-death experience last year, I didn't pay the message much heed. Not right away.

But I've been hearing the same sentiment more and more lately - a concern that our city's political and business leadership does not possess the will, the energy or the gumption to make San Antonio a "really good city."

Just the other evening, a highly successful, well-connected professional told me he thought San Antonio was "falling farther and farther behind" the other Texas cities. He likened the present to the 1930s, when our civic indifference lost the State Fair to Dallas.

In a sense, this perception of malaise comes at an odd time.

In 1997 the city adopted a master plan that represents a stunning reversal of past policy and could be sweeping in its benefits - if it is ever implemented.

San Antonio is finally talking seriously about rail transit and the urban neighborhoods that go with it - though, so far, it is just talk.

The business community rallied to save the symphony - though it is not certain that the symphony will survive the rescue, and the rest of the arts community remains as malnourished as ever.

We have splendidly renovated the Empire Theater - which now and then actually has a performance.

I think there has been an improvement in the level of discourse in recent years. More people understand what needs to happen in San Antonio and what makes a good city. But we have precious little to show for it.

As you may have noted from other stories in today's paper, I have been looking at what other cities have been doing.

I am envious of Salt Lake City's decision to adopt a small sales tax that provides $15 million a year to support the arts and the park system. I am envious of Portland's decision to create a great downtown and thriving, walkable neighborhoods - and then doing it.

Civic leadership, in those cities, was doing its job, applying imagination, energy and intelligence to the fundamentals. What has San Antonio's civic leadership been doing?

Well, our leadership wasted most of last year in a foolish quest for a national political convention - foolish in the belief that San Antonio ever had a chance of success, and even more foolish in the belief that success would have brought any lasting benefit.

Probably our leadership will waste most of this year in preoccupation with building an arena. When it is completed, maybe the Memphis Spurs will play an exhibition game there.

An arena can be a useful part of the mix of what makes a great city.

But arenas have little bearing on the daily lives of people or the stature of a city. When people talk about the wonders of Portland, the presence of an arena is never listed among its finest attributes.

The role of leadership is to work with the rest of us to craft a vision of the city we want to be, to lay out an agenda for change that is deep, that matters and that enlists the imagination and will of the community.

This will never be a good city until our leadership, and especially our business leadership, frees itself from enthrallment to trivialities.



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