March 19, 1993: A Day in San Antonio
	Return to the South Texas Trip Index

For our trip to South Texas, we planned to leave on Thursday morning after Fred's doctors appointment, head down to Austin, spend the day there and then go on down to San Antonio to spend the night.

We left Dallas just after nine-thirty, heading down I-35E to Hillsboro, where I-35E and I-35W come together. We continued south through Waco and Temple and then on into Austin.

Austin traffic is usually pretty horrendous, since I-35 handles so much traffic, but we got off at one of the downtown exits and found a parking place a few blocks east of the Capitol. It was still a bit early for lunch, so we first walked over to the Governor's Mansion to have a look.

On the aerial view above, you can see that the Governor's mansion is just at the southwest corner of the Capitol grounds proper, on Colorado Street.

We thought about trying to get a tour of the mansion, but discovered that it was not open today, and so we had to satisfy ourselves with looking at it through its front gate along Colorado. The mansion was built in 1854, designed by prominent architect Abner Cook, and has been the home of every governor since 1856.

The mansion is the oldest continuously inhabited house in Texas and fourth oldest governor's mansion in the United States that has been continuously occupied by a chief executive. The mansion was the first-designated Texas historic landmark, in 1962. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as "Governor's Mansion" in 1970, and further was declared a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1974.

Built by Abner Cook in a Greek Revival style and completed in 1856, the building occupies the center of a block and is surrounded by trees and gardens. The original mansion was 6,000 square feet. Remodeling in 1914 increased the size of the mansion to 8,920 square feet. The original mansion had 11 rooms but no bathrooms. The remodeling brought the room count to 25 rooms and 7 bathrooms. In 1931, at the recommendation of former Texas First Lady Mildred Paxton Moody, the Forty-second Texas Legislature established the Board of Mansion Supervisors to oversee all interior and exterior upkeep and enhancements to the mansion. Mrs. Moody was the first head of the Board, which was abolished in 1965.

We walked down to the corner (after checking to see if Ann was home) and were about the cross the street, when Fred asked me to stop so he could take a picture of the Capitol. Austin is surprisingly easy to get around in for a large city that is also a state capital. It is much easier to navigate than Dallas, for example, and most things that you would want to see, like the government buildings or the university, are within easy walking distance. From the corner of Colorado and 11th Street, right at the corner by the mansion, there is an excellent view to the Capitol grounds, so I took this picture of Fred and the Texas State Capitol.

The Texas State Capitol, completed in 1888, houses the offices and chambers of the Texas Legislature and the Office of the Governor. Designed in 1881 by architect Elijah E. Myers, it was constructed from 1882 to 1888; a $75 million underground extension was completed in 1993. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 and recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1986. The Texas State Capitol is 308 feet tall, making it the sixth tallest state capitol and one of several taller than the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

The current Texas State Capitol is actually the third building to serve that purpose. The first was little more than a farmhouse in 1836, and the second Texas capitol was built in 1853, on the same site as the present capitol. It was destroyed in the great capitol fire of 1881, but plans had already been made to replace it with a third, much larger structure.

Construction of the Italian Renaissance Revival–style capitol was funded from the sale of public lands for the purpose. In one of the largest barter transactions of recorded history, the builders of the capitol were paid with more than three-million acres of public land in the Texas Panhandle; this tract later became the largest cattle ranch in the world, the XIT Ranch. Based on the land grant value and the actual recorded expenses, the total cost was nearly $4 million, which doesn't seem like much, but that's well over half a billion dollars today. The crew was largely convicts and migrant workers, as many as a thousand at a time. The building has been renovated several times, with central air conditioning installed in 1955.

The cornerstone for the building was laid on March 2, 1885, Texas Independence Day, and the completed building was opened to the public on April 21, 1888, San Jacinto Day. The designers originally planned for the building to be clad entirely with hill country limestone quarried in present-day Oak Hill, about 10 miles to the southwest. However, the high iron content of the limestone led it to rapidly discolor with rust stains when exposed to the elements. Learning of the problem, the owners of Granite Mountain near Marble Falls offered to donate to the state, free of charge, the necessary amount of sunset red granite as an alternative. While the building is mostly built of the Oak Hill limestone, most of this is hidden behind the walls and on the foundations. Red granite was subsequently used for many state government buildings in the Austin area.

"Heroes of the Alamo"

The Capitol building is surrounded by 22 acres of grounds scattered with statues and monuments. William Munro Johnson was hired in 1888 to improve the appearance of the grounds. By the time the first monument, commemorating the Heroes of the Alamo, was installed in 1891, the major components of Johnson's plan were in place. These included a "Great Walk" of black and white diamond-patterned pavement shaded by trees.

On February 6, 1983 a fire began in the lieutenant governor's apartment; it was intense and did much damage. Repairs and restoration continued until 1993, and the state took advantage of the extensive rebuilding to update the mechanical and structural systems to modern standards and also to deal with the intensifying shortage of space in the old building, deciding that a new office wing should be added. The logical place for an addition was the plaza immediately to the north; however, a large building there would have eliminated the historic north façade and covered what had traditionally been seen as an important public space. Instead, an expansion to the capitol was built beneath the north plaza, connecting to the existing capital underground.

The underground extension provided a great deal of additional space, but there is little evidence of the new 700,000-square-foot building at ground level, except for extensive skylights camouflaged as planter rows, and the four-story open-air inverted rotunda.

The capitol has 360,000 square feet of floor space (not including the Capitol Extension), more than any other state capitol building, and rests on 2.25 acres (of land. The building has nearly four hundred rooms and more than nine hundred windows. The interior of the central rotunda features portraits of every person who has served as president of the Republic of Texas or governor of the State of Texas; the rotunda is also a whispering gallery.

The south foyer features a large portrait of David Crockett, a painting depicting the surrender of General Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto, and sculptures of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin made by Elisabet Ney. The Capitol was ranked ninety-second in the "America's Favorite Architecture" poll commissioned by the American Institute of Architects- the highest ranking for a state capitol.

We discovered that the Capitol was open for self-guided tours, and so we went in to have a look around. Before we did so, though, I got Fred to pose for another picture of the south front of the Capitol building. You can see that picture here. We went in to the Capitol to have a look around, and took a few pictures inside this historic building.

We found that the Capitol building was undergoing renovations (the legislature not being in session), and so there were some areas of the Capitol that we couldn't tour. But we did sign up for a tour of the House chamber, and while waiting for that, we were standing around in the rotunda when I noticed how intricately the woodwork in the underside of the Capitol dome was done.

This picture was taken Looking up at the State Capitol Building rotunda from the floor beneath.

There wasn't much light in the rotunda, so I had to lie down on the floor and steady the camera against my face to make use of all the light there was. I think the shot turned out fairly well for all that.

Once the tour got underway, we followed the guide upstairs as she told us a bit of the history of the Capitol, and a bit about the current renovations. Then we entered the House of Representatives, which looked much like I had expected, having seen it numerous times on the local news.

At right is the picture I took here in the House of Representatives chamber in the Texas State Capitol.

The chamber retains a frontier flavor, all the furniture being made of Texas hardwoods, but it is all automated. All the voting is done electronically, and every seat is wired for sound and picture presentations. This for a legislature that only meet for part of a year every two years. Those are the electronic tally boards with every Representative's name where the votes are recorded. Most of the pictures are of past Texas House leaders.

On the back wall is a picture of each of the House members and the name of the district they represent. Dallas itself has fifteen Representatives here. I found out that when a Representative leaves office, he gets to keep the chair that he was using. There are all kinds of plaques and memorials around the room, such as a memorial to all the Representatives who served in World War II.

Along both sides of the chamber are large two-story windows that look out on both sides of the Capitol and out over the city of Austin.

We were in the House chamber for about 45 minutes, as we were all asking the guide lots of questions. That's where the tour ended, since the Senate Chamber was closed for renovations. The rest of the Capitol is mostly offices, but Fred and I wanted to see the new offices that were just being completed.

The problem has long been that the main Capitol building is too small to provide offices for all the Senators and Representatives, much less provide meeting and committee rooms. So the State chose to build a new office building for these people (except for the leadership, whose offices remain in the main Capitol building).

But no one wanted to obstruct the views of the Capitol or from it by building a three or four-story building right next to it, which it what it would have taken. The solution was to build a large, three -story complex entirely underground on the North side of the Capitol. Eventually, you will be able to access it right from the main building, but that underground promenade was not yet open, so we had to go outside, across the lawn and over to some elevators in small kiosks above the new underground structure.

Those elevators will remain even when the underground access is open. When you get underground (you are not far underground; the garden on top is just above the roof of the third story), you find yourself in a central atrium, which is open to the sky.

In the picture at left, Fred is standing in this underground atrium of the new House and Senate offices. The atrium lets in a great deal of light which then filters to many of the offices surrounding the atrium itself.

The roof over the atrium is basically at ground level, allowing a park above the office complex. The atriums look like very low greenhouses, and when all the plantings are done, the effect should be a pleasing one. There are other skylights throughout the complex, with the result that you hardly know you are underground.

At right is the State Capitol as seen through one of these skylights. You can see what we mean by getting a fair amount of light into the underground complex. These skylights open on elongated, rectangular three-story open spaces, so the light filters throughout the complex. I didn't get a chance to go into someone's office, so I don't know what they must be like with no windows. The whole complex is done in Texas marble and granite, and looks very nice.

In the picture at right, I am standing in the same spot as the previous picture, but just looking down the atrium. Offices branch out from both sides, and there are actually more hallways at the end of the picture and in the center of the picture where the columns are.

I understand there are other shafts that bring more light in, but at least the most that any of the workers who need some outside light have to do is walk to the end of their hall and reach this atrium. It is certainly not like an above-ground office building, where most of the offices would have windows looking to the outside, but it is a reasonable compromise.

I found that the decoration of this underground building was quite rich-looking; all the Texas marble and granite adds an air of class to the building. Also, the building has just been completed, and new things always look their best. But just the way the floors have been inlaid, and the richness of the doors and so on makes this a very handsome complex.

We spent some time at the University of Texas bookstore, and walked around downtown Austin, and then drove down to San Antonio. We stayed in the Rodeway Inn on Thursday night, ahead of our tour of the missions and the riverwalk tomorrow.

You can use the links below to continue to another page for our South Texas trip or to return to the trip index so you can continue though the photo album.

	March 19, 1993: A Day in San Antonio
	Return to the South Texas Trip Index