Mod The Sims - Wanderlust

The thing to remember about the Alamo is that it wasn't built as a building, but as a mission complex housing a handful of monks and soldiers and (ideally) a large number of native converts to Catholicism and agriculture. The building we think of as The Alamo is only the chapel of that complex. If you look at the diagrams Catherine posted you'll see that an awful lot of what is gone was open space - a giant courtyard where the work was done, surrounded by blocks of living quarters whose exterior walls formed the exterior walls of the complex. One reason it was such a death trap of a fort was, that it wasn't a fort. Its defenses were adequate for protection from raiding Plains tribes, not from thousands of men with artillery led by a merciless tyrant.

And this is one reason why, although some things are certainly regrettable about Alamo preservation through the years, Catherine wastes her tears over the "street right through it." That street isn't a street - it's Alamo Plaza. It's the courtyard. And it's fulfilling the purpose it always filled, that it was designed to fill. Yes, now we drive through it rather than driving livestock into it, but that's because the way we use space has changed in 300 years. It's a place for living and working and meeting and trading and yes, also a place for remembering, and the Alamo Shrine (like all the Missions in town) is still consecrated ground, though it's not still an active parish like Mission San Jose is.

All this contributes to the thing I love best about living in San Antonio, the sense of history as daily life and daily life as history. If you get a room in the Menger or Crockett Hotels you're sleeping in the Alamo. If you drink in the Menger's bar you're drinking where Teddy Roosevelt recruited Rough Riders. When you cross Alamo Plaza you're crossing the space where barbed wire was first demonstrated and where the calves roamed that gave us the term "maverick" for unbranded cattle; because Samuel Maverick, who lived with his family on the corner of Alamo Plaza at the time of the revolution, was not a cattleman but took cattle in payment for debts and never branded them, so any time someone found an unbranded stray they'd say it must be one of Maverick's and return it to him.

I had a temp job for awhile at an advertising firm with a haunted office directly across the street from the Alamo. I watched the Selena movie being filmed on the Plaza from my place at the reception desk, and I'd eat my lunch in the preserved remains of some living quarters first inhabited by converted Indians, at the head of the water garden marking the course of the acequia from the mission walls to the river, which you reach by going through the glassed-in basement of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, whose construction was delayed by the work done to preserve the acequia and that section of wall. And when you go through that basement you come to the place where, twenty years or so ago, a vacationing Navy Seal looked down from his seventh-story hotel room, saw a little girl fall into the river, saw that no one around her had noticed, raced down seven stories and dove in after her, saving her life; which is also where I've seen a green heron quietly fishing, nearly invisible and unnoticed by the passing touristy throngs, and where they dug cannons out of the riverbed and -

And it's all history, not dead and packed away in a museum, but right here, alive and breathing and tangible, and we who live here now are the nexus of past and future. Preservation is important but life is change and it's not a tragedy that uses have changed because we do remember and all of it is still here, with us, the ground we stand on and the air we breathe. What would be tragic would be, for the Alamo to be frozen in time, unused, dead with the 150 defenders, meaning only those 13 days, and not all the days before and after them full of the life of conversos, monks, soldiers, cattle, quail, herons, slaves, slaveholders, hidalgos, cowboys, horses, shoppers, office workers, tourists, sports stars, actors, musicians, raspa sellers, and all. Some of the buildings are beautiful; some are tacky; some are beautiful shells with crass uses; all are haunted. Because the past hasn't gone anywhere and nothing here is dead.