In the 21 years since the first phase of Hemisfair opened in downtown San Antonio, the nonprofit that runs the park has restored six historic structures where various tenants serve up everything from pizza and paletas to coffee and cocktails.
To a backdrop of children playing and splashing in Yanaguana Garden, those buildings once housing early settlers, and later world’s fair concessions, are now home to locally owned eateries.
The rent they pay, after making the structures operational for food and beverage, helps support the park which has been visited by about 8 million people since it opened in 2015.
Now Hemisfair leaders are looking to the next stage of its multi-phase plan to turn the site into an attractive urban park and using potential bond dollars to rehabilitate nine more protected structures at a cost of over $10.8 million.
Add to that another $27 million that also would allow for two more wish-list items — improving the rest of Tower Park and completing East Nueva Street — and making Hemisfair ready for what’s to come.
Public dollars
Project Marvel is expected to bring a new Spurs arena to the park by 2028 plus an expanded convention center and other mixed-use development, and all of that goes together, said Hemisfair CEO Melissa Robinson.
“The public needs to invest in finishing the public space, and Tower Park is public space unlike the arena site and their adjacent development [which is] earmarked for public-private development,” said Hemisfair CEO Melissa Robinson. “We’re asking for the public dollars to finish the public park.”
The way that’s been done in the past is through city bonds.
For Hemisfair, the 2022 bond program provided $23.5 million to complete the second phase of Civic Park, and $9.2 million for streets, sidewalks and drainage improvements on Hemisfair Boulevard.
Previous bond funding went toward restoration of the 1890s-era structures in Yanaguana Garden. Those properties are among the 22 buildings saved from the original 300 homes that formed the neighborhood known as Germantown when HemisFair ‘68 was created.
In bond kickoff meetings earlier this year, city staff told the council that the 2027 bond is projected to be only half of the $1.2 billion bond in 2022, as decreased property values impact the city’s budget and diminish bonding capacity.
That bond program was approved by voters in May 2022 and consisted of five propositions with 188 projects. About 31% of those projects have been completed so far, according to the city’s dashboard.
Restoration costs
The Hemisfair vendor lineup includes four restaurants operating in historic buildings. Dough Pizzeria Napoletana is in the former OK Bar; Commonwealth Bakery and Coffeehouse in the Koehler House; Lick Honest Ice Creams in the Sam Smith House, and Bombay Bicycle Club in the Espinosa House.
In 2023, a Sichuan-style restaurant was planned for Hemisfair’s Kusch House.
But even after a half-million dollars in remodeling work and the design process completed, the cost to fully rehab the Folk Victorian house for a full-service restaurant proved too much for the tenant, Robinson said.
“In the regular real estate market, an owner-landlord would have a tenant finish-out allowance that they would offer. We don’t have that,” Robinson said. “In order to make that work, there’s only so much investment they can put in.”
The estimated cost to rehab historic buildings at Hemisfair is between $500,000 and $5 million, depending on its condition, she said. That estimate is for a partial “white box” finish only with basic infrastructure. The final tenant-specific customizations at Hemisfair would be covered by tenants.
The Woman’s Pavilion, a 12,000-square-foot Brutalist building designed to mimic a mid-century modern home for HemisFair ‘68, needs an estimated $3 million in remodeling.
Costs like that are too high to rely fully on philanthropic support and private donations, Robinson said.
Other structures on the future repair list for the 2027 bond include the Mayer-Halff, Richter, Coyne-Tynan Dugosh, Max Schultze, Weitzel, Amaya, RCA and the Kodak Pavilion. But several protected buildings in need of restoration that are closer to Civic Park are not included in the ask.
Prioritizing needs
The timeline to prioritize and plan for the 2027 bond gets underway later this summer or early fall, with the city’s needs expected to fall into five buckets: streets, bridges and sidewalks, draining and flood control, parks and recreation, facilities, and affordable housing.
“There’s a lot of competition, there are a lot of competing priorities,” Robinson said. “We’re not trying to directly head-to-head compete with the life-safety needs of flood control … and affordable housing. We want it all.”
Robinson thinks Hemisfair’s track record should make it eligible for bond funds.
The public helped to create the master plan for Hemisfair and is enjoying the results of that today, she said. “Hemisfair already has a reputation and has already delivered that for the community. So we’re not doing anything new, we’re giving them more of what they already love.”
Some preservation work is already underway on the 1860 Tynan-Sweeney House on East Nueva Street which soon will house Mural Ride Bike Tours. During HemisFair in 1968, it was a Cajun restaurant.
Mural Ride owner and operator Brian Benavidez said he will probably put up to $100,000 into the building to get it ready for a possible August opening. But the location, “where all the action is happening,” he said, is worth the cost.
Even though the business has been successful, Benavidez said, through his hard work, a Hemisfair address gives the company its first brick-and-mortar space near the convention center, where visitors and locals gather for large festivals and events, and also in proximity to the planned Spurs arena.
And securing a downtown space without the typically high rents makes it do-able, he said. Hemisfair tenants pay a percentage of sales.
The Pereida House, which formerly housed Künstler Brewing, also is undergoing renovations for a new tenant Robinson couldn’t reveal yet.
With those projects in progress, Civic Park and The Monarch hotel completed, a sports district in the works and a bond cycle spinning up, Hemisfair’s fairly new CEO is turning attention to the park’s next big phase.
“We want to get people used to being down here … and activating that eastern edge of the park and having activity and life in those homes,” Robinson said. “Just imagine a row of homes that all have food and beverage or cultural offerings with a beautiful park space that’s completed.”
This story first appeared in the San Antonio Report.