INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAH
INTERVIEW WITH: David Anthony Richelieu
SUBJECT: Fairmount Hotel
DATE: 27 September 1989
INTERVIEvlER: Esther MacMillan
M: The Shiek of Araby. Tell me about the death of
Valentino. That is pretty cute. Of course, a lot of people
don't know who Valentino was.
R: I have friends that live in the valley in a house
Valentino owned once. It took 12 years of legal work to get
it untangled from the estate.
M: I can believe it. I s it a nice house?
'f. ~ .A. ~ -;::+
M: In March and April of 1985 those of us who work downtown
had a once in a lifetime opportunity to wa tch a s izeable
brick building moving maj esti cally down Market Street and it
was the Fairmount Hotel and this is an interview with David
Anthony Richelieu. The date is September 27th, 1989. The
place is the Oral History office of the Institute of Texan
Cultures and I am Esther MacMillan. David is the expert on
the moving of the Fa irmount Hotel and I wish, would you
s tart going way back on the building at the very beginning.
When it was built, I think in 19-- and what.
R: Six.
M: Six, okay.
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 2
R: It was a working class hotel as far as I always knew.
It wasn't really a very elaborate building. It was three
stories tall and it takes about, oh, maybe a quarter of a
block at the most. It' s not real, real big. But it did
happen to have some interesting arches on the side of the
building, that was on - it was o riginally located at the
corner of Bowie and Commerce, facing Commerce Street, and
the buildings to the west of it. It had a furniture store
and other things to the west of it, so that side of the
building was, in fac t, built not with decorations. The east
side, or the Bowie Street side, did have arched windows and
other decorations.
It was designed by Mr. Diehlman who was responsible for a
number of early turn of the century buildings in San
Antonio, both industrial as well as a few residential and
some business buildings; a lot of business buildings. He
was sort of one of the big designers here. He did things
like - I think he did the Pioneer Flour Mills if I'm not
mistaken.
M: I think he did something at Fort Sam Houston.
R: Just a lot of things, you know, and j ust a whole bunch
of industrial kind of buildings. So t his was not a major
project. It was a small hotel that really - I mean this was
not any kind of a snazzy place to go. It was a working
class hotel and for a while it was a residential hotel. I
think you got some more information from some of the people
that ran the hotel. But it basically never was a real
outstanding piece of architecture or a particularly
significant building in that respect. However , everything
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 3
R: else around it had been torn down by 1968 when HemisFair
came along. Jeske's of Texas which owned the block
immediately to the west had a service center for
automobiles; a garage basically. At the opposite corner of
this same block, at the west end of this block, this is on
the east end of the block on Commerce , they had a s ervice
center, a General Tire store there, that also did automobile
service. Jeske's tore down all the buildings around this
one except the Staffel Feed Store which was immediately
between the two- between Jeske's car service center and the
Fairmount was the Staffel -
M: On the same side of the street?
R: Yeah. A Staffel Feed Store. And behind it Jeske's had
cleared an entire city block for parking and they also had
expanded their store . So there was almost nothing left of
this particular neighborhood. And then the plans started
developing for this downtown mall that was going to involve
the people at Jeske ' s and whatnot .
Now one of the interesting things in all this is that the
site where the Staffel store was is where - the Staffel
store and the Jeske's car center - is where the river was
being cut through t o go into the middle of the mall. Now ,
the whole idea of this mall was it was going to be
originally , it was going t o be called , Tiendas del Rio ,
which is the shops on the river; the river shops . And then
they would extend the river underneath Commerce Street into
this area and build the mall around it. This was going to be
typical San Antonio, very exclusively San Antonio, because
not too many cities have rivers that you can do that with .
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 4
R: We did that for HemisFair in 1968, extended the river up
to the Convention Center - around it. The lagoon is still
there and this is a branch off of that same extension going
in the other direction. The Convention Center is south and
this is to the north and it goes underneath Commerce
Street.
The plans all developed for this mall and because there
was federal money involved in this mall, this building was
deemed historic because of its age. Not because it did
anything - nobody significant ever stayed there. Nobody
important. Nothing happened there, unlike the Menger where
Teddy Roosevelt recruited the Rough Riders, and all sorts of
historic things happened. Presidents stayed there, and God
knows what else.
But the Fairmount was deemed historically significant on
a survey done by the Texas Historical Commission for the
National Trust for Historic Preservation and, therefore,
under the federal law involving the use of Community
Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds you have to preserve
anyth i ng that's historic.
Well, the other interesting thing is that right where the
Jeske's Car Center was, the Jeske's parking lot also was
thought by many, according to all the historic efforts, (and
I went back and looked at some of this stuff,) thought by
many to be the place where they actually buried the ashes of
the h eroes from the battle of the Alamo. And the reason we
know this is because after the whole battle was over, and I
don't have the exact dates, but I do have the newspaper
clippings and the articles describing all this stuff, after
the battle was over, they had some ceremonies where they
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 5
R: went and dug up the remains and stuck them in a metal
box and took them to San Fernando Cathedral. That's what is
in the sarcophagus in San Fernando Cathedral. And the people
that were involved in this included, I believe, Juan Seguin,
who was then the mayor of San Antonio. So apparently they
knew where the remains were and the descriptions that were
in all the publications at that time indicated to everyone
that they had to be about where that car service thing was
and the Joske parking lot. That's where they think they all
were buried. It's actually right behind the Alamo for all
practical purposes, or around the corner from the hotel.
So it wouldn't be illogical to have them there although
other people said they were buried out in the courtyard in
front. But the fact is we do have records of them having
dug up remains and taking them down and putting them in the
floor of San Fernando Cathedral.
Well, the cathedral was renovated in 1936, and one of
the things they did was change the floor. They dug up the
floor and found this box that had been buried there by Juan
Seguin and all those people right after the Battle of the
Alamo. And so, that is what, in fact, is in the sarcophagus
that's in the front of the church by the front door. And
while a lot of times people said well that really wasn't it,
the latest research seems to indicate that, yes indeed, this
probably was the remains of the heroes of the Battle of the
Alamo because the people that were alive at that time knew
where all this stuff happened and they went there and dug it
up and had a very large ceremony; a huge ceremony. They had
·:•.r
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 6
R: a parade down the street and everything, to the cathedral
for this event where they buried it in the floor.
And then when the cathedral was remodeled, I guess about
the same time as the centennial of the battle, it was probably
a total coincidence but it so happened that they dug up the
floor because they put a new floor down and they f ound the
metal box with the military buttons and other remains, ashes
and all sorts of things, and that's what's inside the
sarcophagus.
Anyway, t hat's all part of that site and they had to do an
extensive archeological dig on this site. And one of the
requirements was not the archeological digs b u t the saving of
this building if possible. Well, the developers - it had been
suggested to the developers that one of the t hi ngs that would
be interesting would be to take the hotel and roll it down the
street, literally west, straight west on the curb line, and
put it next to the river as it comes through. In other words,
it would be right on Commerce Street still but it would be
overlooking the river as it carne underneath Commerce Street,
then connected to the mall.
The devel opers, however, and I must say t his was a very
wise decision, they said: No, they didn't really feel like
doing that. And then everyone said: Well, you can just leave
it where it is and incorporate it into the mall. And they
said: No, we can't do that either. Of course, t hey had a 40-
story hotel planned at that site and i f you go look at the
hotel, the little hotel probably wouldn't have been much use
to them there and it probably wouldn't have looked like much.
M: It wouldn't, that's for sure .
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 7
R: The reason - rolling the building is very easy. We've
done this before. We rolled the Alamo National Bank, which is
now the Commerce Building -
M: How many f eet - 30 feet?
R: Nineteen feet, basically. And the bank stayed open the
whole time. The lights were on, the gas was hooked up, and
the people were going in an out of the front door. The thing
rolled just inches a day and then when they moved it back to
the position they wanted giant ice blocks under it and stood
back and when the ice melted it settled down on the foundation
evenly. And that was the cleverest way of lowering a building
I'd ever heard of because it does it evenly and you don't have
to pull anything out from under the building, it's all gone,
it just turned to water.
M: I love that story. I've got that on tape from somebody.
R: But rolling the hotel a block or a short block basically
would not have been totally impossible 'cause rolling
buildings is fairly easy 'cause you put them on a steel
framework, and y ou put a little track and you roll them.
That's very easy. However, when you start talking about
moving buildings you are in a lot of trouble and I'll show you
some of the reasons why.
First of all, the good thing about not putting the hotel
down there was because that side of the hotel as we now know
was, in fact, the undecorated side , so the side of the hotel
overlooking the river would have been in yellow brick. See,
the front side and the other street side are in red brick and
the two back sides are in the yellow, sort of construction
brick.
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 8
M: I didn't know that .
R: Yeah. They are in yellow brick.
M: Like the HemisFair houses . Some of them are yellow
brick.
R: Yeah. If you go look at the hotel now you'll notice if
you go out in the cour tyard that the right hand wall of the
courtyard which is the original wall of the hotel is yellow
brick. Then , of course, when they built the addition to it
they used both the yellow and the red bricks but the yellow
brick was on the building side that was up against the other
building and on t he back and the red brick was on Bowie
Street and Commerce. So the outsides were in red and the
.
two back sides were in yellow. And so, if they had rolled
the hotel down there you would have had this undecorated ,
uninteresting- I don ' t think the yell ow brick is
uninteresting but that wasn't the side of the hotel that had
any design on it; it was the Bowie Street side.
And turning the hotel around, of course, you couldn't do
that and roll it. Rolling it you have to do it just in a
straight line. So, they said no to that. They said "no" to
incorporating it into the mall or incorporating it as part
of the new hotel they planned . And of course all of this
was going on - and , you know , this was a very big project and
the plans changed dozens of times and nobody really knew
what the thing was going to look like when it was done but
everybody was anxious that it work.
But finally , the Conservation Society and the Historic
Preservation Off i ce or, Bebe Inkley, I think is the fo rmer
chairman or president, or something, in the Conservation
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 9
R: Society, had worked on this project very hard because
this was a city - after all the city was involved in this
project, too, because the city was spending $40 million or
something worth of federal money to inprove utilities and
streets around this particular development. This was not
just a private company coming in. This involved city money.
We were building a bridge. The city built the bridge
and cut through to extend the river and we owned the river
down there and the walkways and all that stuff. It was a
very interesting private/public project and since it was
public money involved, and the city was involved, it was
felt incumbent upon the city to make an example about how
you can go about saving and preserving historic buildings,
because that's what San Antonio is all about. What makes us
different f rom Dallas and Houston and Cleveland and Des
Moines and Cheyenne and Reno, Nevada, is that we have
historic buildings here. All these other people keep
tearing their buildings down and the tourists come here
because there are historic buildings and I just don't
understand why we keep tearing them down.
But this particular hotel then became sort of a point of
contention. The developers said: Well, okay , we've got to
start construction on thi s mall. You've got until March 30,
1985, to get the building off the property. And they
contributed a large sum of money to help with the relocation
of the building. Well, it turned out to be not nearly large
enough -
M: Fifty thousand , wasn't it?
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL
R: Yeah, I think it was something like that.
10
It was the
money that they would have had to spend to demolish the
building. It would have been what it cost them to demolish
the building. This was a very difficult building to even
think about moving because it had no superstructure
whatsoever. This was not a concrete reinforced building.
This is nothing but solid masonry. There is no steel in it.
There is no concrete in it. It's just nothing but bricks.
Bricks and plaster. Adding to the complication is the fact
that it was U-shaped, that it actually had an atrium down
the middle. And the back end of it simply had a
one-layer-thick brick wall across it, so it really had like
a - it wasn't just a skylight. The back end really had this
open U except for this one layer of bricks there that made
this sort of wall with windows in it; open windows.
So we are not only talking about a real fragile building
in terms of the whole thing but it is also the twisting
problem because the front is solid and the two back, it 's
got like two legs in the back that aren't connected to
anything. And so, no one had ever attempted to move
anything this large before and no one even thought it could
be done because, I mean , rolling it is one thing but moving
it is s omething els e .
Now, moving it i s a real complicated project because
this hotel was like 60 feet wide and 90 feet long, or
something like that. Sixty feet wide - there are very few
s treets in San Antonio that are 60 feet wide. And so,
wherever you move it to, you've got t o be able to find a
street that you can move it down. It's not j ust a question
FAIRr10UNT HOTEL ll
R: of saying: Oh, well, we're gonna move it, you know, over
here on Broadway. You can't get to Broadway from where it
was. Because there is no 60-foot wide streets to take it
down. I mean, you're limited as to what you could do. You'd
have to find a location very close by that they could move
it to.
Now, HemisFair Plaza was a possibility, but that wasn't
really a viable place to put a building that would be a
commercial success. And, they looked at all sorts of
locations. They looked at a location over by the
Express-News as a matter of fact. If I could also - we
looked at that same location when t hey tried to move the
Sullivan Carriage House, which was at the Light. You know,
they wanted to move that in one piece and they were going to
make it into a restaurant. They were looking at the block
that was near the Express-News, about two blocks.
The problem is, you see, when you start moving things
you've got overhead t e lephone lines, you ' ve got traffic
signals, you've got lights , you've got all this stuff .
Well, in order t o move the Fairmount Hotel, any distance
would have required - oh, and if you run into a bridge, you
are really in trouble because no bridge has got 55-foot
clearance underneath it so we could not go east, which means
we could not go unde r Interstate 37 , and we couldn't go too
far west because we'd hit Interstate 35. And we could go
north except the streets aren't wide enough 'ca use we could
go over I-35 at that point . Now, of course, you 've got the
elevated parts, we can 't go under it either.
i s no t an easy thing.
You know, this
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 12
R: Just finding the location to move it was a major
difficulty. Then complicating all that was the fact that
around that particular site is the river and so almost every
direction you go from there except east, which you can't go
because of the highway, you have to go across a bridge. And
these bridges are not designed to carry, you know, these
kind of loads. In fact, we had a bridge repairing project
here not too long ago and most of the downtown bridges, you
know, a lot of them are steel. These iron bridges, truss
bridges, and stuff, they wouldn't hold any kind of weight.
Like, in fact, a lot of them are in danger. We just spent a
whole bunch of money reinforcing them.
So we had a real problem here - what do we do with this
hotel. And there was no land to put it on. I'm try ing to
think what the first site was. What had happened. They had
found - there was a site. Oh, I think - oh, it was going t o
be on the City Water Board property. Acros s the street .
And a block east. In fact, they were going to turn it around
and put it there next to the little house that ' s already
there that's the water board museum. And, somehow or other,
the Water Board got real antsy about that and decided they
didn't want it on their property.
We were all ready to go and move it there and that
wouldn't have been so difficult 'cause it would have been a
half a block and a turn around. Although once the whole
machinery of a move is such that the rea l complication is
getting the stupid thing lifted up in the first place and
once it's lifted up, moving it is a problem only in that
you've got to watch the terrain you go over. But once it's
up you can almost move it anywhere as l ong as you' ve got a
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL
R: clear trail.
13
And then, of course, setting it down again. But lifting
it up and setting it down, that's the problem. How do you
lift a building and how do you set it b ack down again.
Well, I'll explain how they did it. It is very clever.
But, they didn't use ice blocks this time.
But, at the very last minute they l ooked around for a
piece of city property and what they found out was that a
parking lot at the corner of Nueva and Alamo Street, which
had in fact been used by the Four Seasons Hotel (at the time
it was opened it was called the Plaza Sa n Antonio,) was in
fact a piece of city property that they really did not have
a lease on. They thought they had a verbal agreement on it
but actually they didn't have a written lease and it just so
happened that by some strange mechanics of nature and God
and everybody else, the property was just barely deep enough
to put the hotel there with 5-foot clearance on the rear if
it sat right on the property line at t he front. It was wide
enough . There was plenty of width, but the ques i on was how
do you - you know, it was just barely deep enough because
behind it is a c luster of little historic buildings, so they
couldn't just, you know, around it are a ll these parking
lots but here were this little cluster of historic buildings
M: German-English school on the left.
R: Yeah. And so it was on this corner that had histor i c
buildings on two sides. So you couldn't make the site any
bigger . But it so happened that the site was just about
five feet longer than the hotel was. well , it was amazing.
And Pat Osborne, who is a Historic Preservation officer ,
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 14
R: found this guy in Oregon who claimed he could move the
building. Well, it was all a lot of bravado because no one
had ever moved a building of this enormous weight before.
This being solid masonry, the thing weighed 3 million
pounds, and the fact that it was not reinforced in any way
at all, everybody thought that it could not be done. They
sent people down here.
We broke the story - the Express-News broke the story,
in January of 1985 about the fact that someone was going to
come down here and move this building. They sent people
down here starting in March or February, I forget which, and
they did all sorts of things. They got the hotel ready.
They took the - on the back where the open spaces were and
where the doors were they filled in with concrete. They
poured new concrete across to make a reinforced thing to
keep the thing together and in the front, where the windows
were,they had put in some aluminum frame windows and stuff.
By the way, after the thing ceased being a hotel in
1968, during HemisFair, it served as a hamburger stand
serving the fair crowds. And I think they were 25 cent
hamburgers or something. And I think that is when it was
painted gray. And that's one of the reasons why a lot of
people didn't think it was worth saving, and of course they
had boarded it up.
But then, it also served as a political headquarters for
people like Joyce Peters, the Democratic Party, and some
other people over the years, 'cause Bill Sinkin owned it and
he was real big into Democratic politics. So he would let
them use the ground floor because it had all these aluminum
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 15
R: store front windows and stuff. But it was a hamburger
stand. They had turned it into a restaurant, just the lower
floor, during HemisFair. Then after the World's Fair, it had
been used as a political headquarters, some other things, but
for several years it had been boarded up.
And when they tore the boards off they found these stupid
aluminum window frames and all this stuff and so they poured
concrete and made sort of a new framework at the bottom where
there was nothing to really hold the building together,
-because when they lift this kind of building up they have to
saw it off at ground level. In other words, you can't lift
the foundation. It had a full basement and you can't lift
the foundation up with it so what you do is you saw the
building off at ground level.
Well, when you saw the building off at ground level there
is nothing there but these posts that connect to the basement
pie rs and the basement piers aren't coming with it so you've
got to have these posts sitting on something so they poured
new concrete beams along the front bottom and edge so that
the iron beams that hold up the front of the hotel would all
rest on thi s new concrete and steel and it was all temporary.
It was all going t o be just for the move .
Well, let's see what else happened that was real bizarre
about all this. Well, a lot of people didn't think this
could happen but they did get a site for it.
M: How did that come about? Which site?
R: Well, they just checked all the city records. They
l ooked at every single piece of city property that was
ava ilable and they kicked the parking lot out of there .
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 16
R: And so they got the people down here to work on this
hotel and one of them was Rusty Gorman who had already moved
a building in Albany. He worked for this guy named Emmert,
up there. And Rusty was actually the job foreman. Emmert
was the owner of the company but Rusty was the job foreman
and he was the one that came down and started to prepare
along with Pete Friesenhahn who actually had retired but had
moved some other buildings.
And so they had these two experts come down and Emmert
happened to have the patent on a hydraulically suspended
dolly. Now the way you normally move a house is you lift it
up if it's not on a basement. It is usually on piers or
something. You put giant beams underneath it and then you
lift it up and you set it on other beams that are connected
to tires, you know, truck tires. And you just pull it and
it rolls.
Well, with a big building like this you can't do t ~a t.
And what they had developed was a system that had a l o t of
tires. They were like eight wheels on each of these
dollies. The dolly had a three-foot-thick hydraulic piston
in the center and there were 288 of thes e tires. When they
got this done they put as many of them underneath the hotel
as they could. They put several steel beams, I think there
were 7 stee l beams, across the hotel and then two great big
steel beams running the length of the hotel and then more
steel beams across the hotel. It was to those steel beams
that these little hydraulic dollies were attached.
These hydraulic dollies were all interconnected with
each other by computer and what it was designed to do is
li ,,: j'
~ ~
' FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 17
R: that when it went over a bump it would operate like a
car spring but it would be self leveling and so if you went
over a bump the dolly would raise up but the hotel would
stay level and so the wheels would go up and down underneath
while the hotel maintained perfect level attitude. Now they
only had a 2 and a half foot throw, in other words, you
couldn't go over anything taller than 2 and a half feet
because the pistons of the hydraulic thing were not that
long.
But this was an amazing thing because there were, I
forget how many dollies there were underneath the building ,
but there were just dollies, dollies, dollies. I think
there were like five of them across and nine of them deep,
or something. Each one had eight wheels on it . There were
these great big, not great big tires, they were low-profile
tires, you know, they were heavy duty tires, and so the
whole thing was that the hotel was lifted up on these
hydraulic dollies.
Well , before all of this happened, of course , they did a
lot of t hings . A lot of people thought they would have put
metal beams across the hotel and straps and all that outside
to hold it tog e ther and they never did that at all. They
ran two cables around the outside of the hotel and , you see,
the hotel has got like four courses of bricks thick. It's
like four bricks thick.
M: Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that.
R: Well, that's all the hotel is made out of, is bricks.
And so, what they did is they went down into the basement ;
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 18
R: it's pretty, thick. The walls are pretty thick. They
went down into the basement of this hotel and they started
stacking wood , these lumber timbers that were 8 ' x 8' x 4'
and they made cribs out of them. They would lay then side
by side and so they made a square, four feet of them, so
there were like 5 of them and then they would take and go 5
the other way and they would stack them on top of each
other. Well, they did this all under the entire hotel. I
mean there was enough lumber to build 15,000 houses. I mean
it was unbelievable. These huge 8 x 8 timbers .
And what they did is they filled up the basement of the
hotel with this wood and they just built it layer on layer
and then as they got near the bottom of the hotel they
rolled the dollies on top of this wood. Okay. Then, when
they lowered the tops of the dollies as low as they would
go, they rolled them under the hotel. Then t hey raised the
dollies up and they connected to, they hit the steel beams
that they had rammed, literally rammed across the hotel.
Okay, now here's how they lifted the hotel up.
They took the dollies and welded and clamped them to the
steel beams underneath the hotel. Okay, t hese dollies have
suspension that go in both directions . Okay, so what
happens is they got all the dollies underneath the hotel and
they were all clamped to the steel beams that were holding
the hotel as the new floor for the hotel. I mean the floor
of the hotel, this was right underneath the floor. Okay, so
then what they would do is they got them all up there and
then they would push a button and they would raise them up
one by one. Since it's clamped to the beam , they would
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 19
R: actually say lower, they would give instructions to this
dolly to lower. Well, it couldn't lower because it was
clamped to the beam.
So what happened is the wheels would raise up. So then
they get underneath there and stick another layer of the
wood, and they would do that with each one of these dollies.
It would raise the dolly up and stick the wood under there.
They went around the hotel and did all this four times and,
finally, when they got to the point where they couldn't
lower, the wheels couldn't go up any higher against the
bottom of the hotel because the piston was all the way down,
then they gave instructions for the piston to raise. And
when that happened, it lifted the hotel, it separated the
bricks from the foundation, and it lifted the hotel up in
the air.
Now the first time they did this was on Wednesday before
the move actually took place, which was on a Saturday. The
day they did this, they just did it enough to make a crack,
and as we were standing there watching, (see a lot of people
didn't know, I spent a lot of time over there, but a lot of
people didn't know what day this would happen.) This was on
Wednesday before the day of the move. The day of the move
was the 30th of March 1985. The Wednesday before that is
the day they actually lifted the hotel for the first time;
when they lifted all the dollies simultaneously and you
could see the crack run around the edge of the hotel right
at ground level and it lifted the hotel for the first time
and they did a test and the hotel was actually suspended on
the dollies from that time on. It was actually just a
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 20
R: crack, just a quarter of an inch, but their own
measurements and their computers told them they had the full
weight of the hotel on those dollies, and so that's how they
did it.
And when they lowered the hotel down, they did the same
thing but they did it in reverse. They filled the new
basement output. The wood - drove onto the wood, lowered
the hotel down as far as they could, and then lifted one of
them at a time enough to get the wood out and then they
would lower the dollies and when they got them all lowered
then they would lower the hydraulic pistons all together and
that would lower the hotel, then they'd start the whole
process again.
And it was just a real tedious problem because there was
so much wood involved in this and each one of these dollies
covered about the space of one of those cribs of wood. You
know, they were about 4 x 4 and so it was just real tedious,
because of a lot of dollies under this building. Well, all
that, it was a really amazing way to do it.
M: Who figured it out?
R: Oh, the movers, you know. But the only way it works is
if you attach the dollies to the metal because otherwise
they wouldn't be able to lift them up and put more stuff
underneath it until you got to the point where you could
raise the hotel up. So, the day of the move,
M: Simply amazing.
R: the - was any of that information too complicated?
M: No, no, it's just exactly what I want. But I don't want
this tape to run out. I just want to be sure we're not
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL
M: gonna run out.
Okay, I'm with you.
21
You see I'm gonna have t o turn it over.
That's exactly the kind of stuff that's
not anywhere in one place.
R: See. I think there were probably four across the front
and there were more in the middle. Oh, the other thing they
had to worry about was, of course, the bridges and all this
stuff.
Well, anyway, there were several things that happened
when this move took place. One was that they would have to
go down a street that had a median in it that they could not
remove, which was Alamo Street. The median that went in
front, you know, to divide the street. Well it turns out we
have since removed parts of it for the Grand Prix and then
put it back but they told them not to remove i t . But what
they did do was take the trees out but there were these tree
boxes in the middle of the street and they had to figure out
how to do that. So what they did is they didn't put any
dollies in the center of the hotel and it was sort of like a
groove of no dollies down the middle of the hotel so that
once they turned the corner and went up that street the tree
grates, I mean the tree boxes and stuff , would all sort of
fit down this slot of empty space in the middle of the hotel
underneath t he hotel.
And the other thing is, of course the hotel was wider
than the actual pavement of Market Street which is the main
east-west street it traveled down. They had to take the
heads off of all the parking meters because it extended
beyond there. They had to take down the pedestrian crossing
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 22
R: signals, the light poles, the traffic signals. I mean
this was a major project. It really was. The other thing
they had to worry about was the weight of this hotel,
whether or not it would crush the utilities underneath the
streets. Because you know when they run over these things
as pipes, there is e l ectric lines. (Phone rings
like Pete Friesenhahn and the guy from
Oregon, Mr. Emmert, who held the patent on it . These
particular hydraulic dollies and the only reason this hotel
was able to be moved. And , the - because normally when they
move a house they don't have any suspension on, there is
just a metal assembly with some tires that usually sometimes
they have a steering mechanism with them. All of these
steer and there - normally they all steer but they were all
interconnected with computers and controls so that when they
did turn a corner you could pull the backend of the hotel
around so that we could turn on a dime literally. The front
would no t even move and the back could swing around 'cause
the wheels - all of them could - with that many dollies
underneath they have to be turned in unison and so they had
controls on how they could make the things turn without
having to get under there and turn each one individually
which would have taken forever . I mean, they had them all
interconnected with cables and so they would actually turn.
And actually what they were looking for the last time I
heard about this , the next phase of development for these
movers was to have motorized dollies so they wouldn't even
have to have trucks. They would s tick the things unde r the
building and the little motors would help propel . Well, in
order t o get -
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 23
R: Let's see what else was going on at that point. Oh,
the day that they were actually getting ready to lift the
hotel up high enough. See, Wednesday was the day they
lifted it off the foundation for the first time and then
they set it back down briefly and then they lifted it back
up again on Thursday. They wanted to set it back down so
they could weigh the hotel. They wanted to get the
instruments right. So they set it back down briefly,
weighed the hotel, and lifted it back up the next day.
On Thursday, they lifted the hotel up about a foot and a
half or something. Well, Channel 12 was over there with
the ir cameras and one of the guys from Channel 12 looked at
the back of the hotel and said: Look at that big crack on
the back of the hotel. And so he got on television that _
night and said: And cracks are appearing all over the hotel
and it's just a real nightma r e.
Well, the next day, none of the workers would go under
the hotel and of course they had to be under there to put
the wood so they could get the hotel high enough up so that
the wheels were at ground level 'cause, see, just raising it
off the foundation the wheels were still way below ground
level. And so t he idea was they would keep raising it up
until the wheels were at ground level then they would just
drive it out onto the street or the sidewalk.
Well, they wouldn't go underneath it beca use they were
afraid the building was gonna collapse because of what they
s aw on television. The cracks had been there for 50 years.
We all saw the crack before they ever started lifting the
hotel. There were c r acks in the back of the corner of the
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 24
R: hotel. And actually it was amazing how few bricks fell
off that hotel once they lifted it off the ground. The
right rear corner some bricks fell off and then part of the
parapet got hit by a crane later and a bunch of bricks fell
off but they put them back on. But very few bricks fell off
that hotel.
And so that was a real problem. They had to get the
workers convinced to go back underneath the hotel. They
assured them it wasn't going to fall down. Of course,
nobody really knew, honestly. So, they lifted the hotel up
and got it off the ground. Now I think it was like three
and a half feet off the ground in order to get the dollies
underneath and up to street level, so it was - maybe it was
even more than that, I'm not sure. That's three and a half
feet for the dollies, plus the steel beams, so I think the
whole thing was like 7 or 8 feet above ground. The bottom
of the hotel was 7 or 8 feet above where it began.
The day of the big move came and see, how they work
this, is t hey get a bunch of trucks with large motors and
they put up a winch system and they brace the trucks against
things like blocks and they all pull on this winch and what
it does, the cables run through wheels that are attached to
the steel girders that are on the front of the hotel and so
when they pull in the cables, technically, the weight of the
trucks should offset the weight of the hotel and the hotel
should roll forward. In other words, it is just a pulley
system basically. Instead of actually pulling on cables and
making it move, the trucks are stationary and they pull
against their own weight and then the cables go through
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 25
R: these wheels that are attached to the hotel and as they
pull the cable in, it pulls the wheels and that should pull
the metal.
The deal was, it had to be off the site by 30 March
[1985].
around.
morning.
trucks.
At 5 in the afternoon they were still messing
It was supposed to have been moved at 10 in the
At 5 in the afternoon - and they got more and more
They got 7 of these huge dump trucks and they had
to fill the dump trucks with dirt to give them enough
balance, weight against the hotel. Otherwise they would
have just ~lipped up in the air , you know , and they got
cranes and everything, and they could not get the thing to
move. You kept hearing the engines all rev up together and
you heard the cables tensioning up, and nothing would
h appen. And finally they said: Okay , we're gonna do this
one more time, and they did it a nd the thing finally moved
forward . Only after it moved, they finally figured out what
the problem was. They had left blocks under the wheels of
three of the dollies underneath the middle of the hotel and
actually had to pull the hotel over those big four 8 x 8
timbers that they had used as blocks to keep the hotel from
rolling . And see the hydraulics actually worked . They
actually raised up over that. I mean , they had to get the
thing rolling first. Once that happened and they got it out
on the street it was no problem at all. But it took them
all day to get enough power to pull it over those three or
four -
M: Well, now, it was pulled on to Commerce?
R: On to Commerce. And then they ang led it and pulled it
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 26
R: onto Bowie. First it was pulled straight off the site
and then it was angled and pulled over to Bowie and the
first day it stayed on Bowie right at Market Street. The
next day -
M: Did they get it down as far as Market the first day?
R: Well, it was right there between - right at the end of
the Marina Garage, between the Marina Garage and the water
Board Building. And the big deal the next day was going to
be making making the real right-angle turn from Bowie onto
Market. Well, they thought that was going to take about 7
hours. It actually didn't take very long at all, because
everything was rolling fine because they weren't trying to
pull it over the blocks. They got it around the corner.
That was when we first got to see how sharp it could turn,
because - just literally, you can turn the thing around just
without moving it. It will figure around in a circle
without actually moving in any direction. The whole thing
would just turn.
M: Now, we're on the second day now?
R: The second day it made the turn from Bowie to head west
on Market, next to the Marina Garage. And then they stopped
it there and then they had the big party that night. That
would have been Sunday night, I think.
M: Where was the party?
R: The party was in front of the Convention Center, down on
Market Street, just in front. It was all basically sort of
in front of the Fairmount Hotel. The Fairmount was sitting
back there by the Marriott Hotel, but you could see half a
block up the street and the party was out at the corner of
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL
R: Market and Alamo Street.
M: What was the party all about?
R: Just celebrating the move.
M: Oh, just anybody could come, the public?
27
R: I think it was an invitation only. It included the city
officials and the movers, and the owners of the hotel and
all this stuff.
Well, the other complication they had was the bridge
that was right next to the Marriott on Market that had been
constructed in 1968. At HemisFair they could find no plans
for it, because like a lot of things at HemisFair it was
sort of built on the spur of the momemt and nobody had any
idea what the load-bearing weight of that bridge was. They
didn't have any idea what the piers, the support piers were
made out of. There were no plans for this bridge . And they
had no notion at all whether it was concrete piers or steel
piers or what. I mean, or if it was just a piece of metal -
concrete-covered metal just laid across there. They had no
idea what the load weight of that - the load factors of that
bridge were. And it was the only way to get the hotel there
to the new location.
So, they had to figure out what to do and they had to
wait another day while Guido Construction Company feverishly
took high-tension scaffolding and , of course they blocked
off the river so there was no water down there, but they had
literally built an entirely new bridge underneath the
existing bridge. It was a maze of steel supports down
underneath there that held up the bridge that even if the -
I mean - the bridge was supported fully all the way across,
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 28
R: every eight inches. I mean there were things holding up
that bridge every eight inches of its surface so that no
matter what happened the bridge would be supported.
M: How long did it take to do that?
R: Well, longer than they thought and that's why there was
this delay because they went down there and did it and did
it and did it and did it until they got it - I mean it was
almost a big block of steel underneath that bridge in order
to get it, you know, well they sort of overdid it. You
know, they wanted - rather than try to say well you couldn•t
do this without the other thing, well, they did it so you
could probably move the whole world across that bridge and
it wouldn't have collapsed. I mean, Mr. Guido just wanted
to make sure that nothing horrible happened, because they
got the hotel up in the air, it was moving, and one of the
worst things in the world would have been if they had gotten
it up on that bridge and the bridge had collapsed and the
hotel would have been a big pile of bricks.
It was real funny because they had been moving the hotel
sort of in spurts, you know, they would move it about· 25
feet or something and then they would move the trucks down
and then they would get the pulleys and the cables and then
they'd run the truck engines and they would pull. Well,
this time, at the bridge there, they moved the hotel right
up to the edge of the bridge and they ran the trucks way
beyond the other side of the bridge so that when they were
done with this pull,the hotel would have made it all the way
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 29
R: across the bridge and beyond the walls of the bridge.
So that the thing across the bridge was going to be like
this mad dash so that maybe if we go fast enough nothing
will happen. And, I mean there were some incidents that
happened during this. One of the cables snapped the
previous day when they were trying to pull it up to the
Marriott and those are very dangerous. Of course it was
under extreme - but you know, they had a lot of people - I
mean people were all cleared from the thing but it was a big
party and there were thousands of people down there watching
the whole thing.
But the funniest part was the day they were going to go
across the bridge. And they got the thing positioned right
there by the front door of the Marriott Hotel and they put
the trucks down way across down by the Convention Center and
got them all revved up and everything. Of course they knew
it was going to roll easily because they had already learned
how to do that. It was not as difficult to roll as they
thought. But you also have to kinda steer it and stuff and
so that morning there were a lot of people in the Marriott
watching all this and so you heard the trucks all rev up and
all of a sudden the thing started moving and they just kept
revving and revving and they just pulled the thing right
across the bridge and everybody just held their breath and
when it got on the other side everybody that was there just
all burst into applause and yelled and beeped their horns.
I mean it was just a blast.
Once they got beyond the bridge, the next big problem
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 30
R: was turning the corner down there and that's an obtuse
angle. It's a backwards angle, it's sharper than a right
angle. It doesn't look like it to stand there but if you
look at it from the air it's a sharper than a right angle.
Not noticeably sharper but it is sharper. And so that's
where the dollies came in real handy 'cause they could swing
the back of the hotel around and then line it up with Alamo
Street but they had to get it lined up perfectly 'cause
that's where they had to straddle the median , you know, and
so they had to swing the back of the hotel. Because, see,
actually that's where you lined up with Losoya Street, not
Alamo. See Alamo makes the perfect right angle but that
part of the street that's lined up with Losoya comes at an
angle through there. So they had to get around and sling it
so it was lined up with Losoya in order to go up over the
median.
And that was like on the fourth day, I think, and they
got it rolling along and it started raining and they
couldn't move it during the rain but they got it just beyond
the doors of the Hilton.
Now, let me tell you some other things that happened.
The very day they were going to move it, the Hilton people
had threatened to file a law suit. They had all the
paperwork worked up and they were going to file an
injunction to have the move stopped because -
M: I thought that was the Four Seasons.
R: No, the Four Seasons tried to do it - they tried to get
the parking l ot back. But the Hilton was afraid they
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 31
R: were going to lose so much business. And a bunch of
people went over and talked to the Zachrys and to the people
at the Hilton and told them: You know, this is not a good
idea. And the day went by and finally nothing happened.
M: But, in other words, you had to stop everything right
there?
R: Well, they would have had to if they had - they had all
the paperwork ready - all they needed was a judge to sign
it. And they decided not to. Actually, it turned out that
they got a lot of business because a lot of people rented
rooms at the hotel to watch the Fairmount go by and they had
parties
END OF TAPE I, SIDE 1.
SIDE 2.
M: Day what?
R: This would be day three or four - I'm not sure which.
M: Let's see, one, two, and then they had to wait f or the
bridge - three, four .
R: This is four. They got it beyond t he Hilton so the
people could get in and out of the Hilton from one end
anyway.
M: They got over the median all right?
R: Yeah, well they are still parked on the median . Well,
in the meantime, they had been trying to get all the wood
transferred from the basement of the old hotel into the
newly poured basement of the new site, and they had trucks
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 32
R: running back and forth like mad and they couldn't get it
over there fast enough and so wha t they did is on the fourth
day they just pulled it about a half a block down in front
of the USO Building and meanwhile there were just night and
day truckloads of that wood going by. See, they had to
the other basement was full and they had to take all that
out and fill up the new basement.
M: In other words, repeat.
R: Yeah, and they just couldn't get it done fast enough.
It was just labor-intensive work. They were working 24
hours a day and they could not g e t it done. And it took
them three weeks to get it done the first time and they had
to do it all in two days. And, so, because the basement is
pretty deep - the basement is like 15 or 20 feet deep. And
of course, it's a whole new basement. It is all concrete,
and steel-reinforced concrete and all that stuff. And then,
of course, they had to make space for the steel girders.
There two real long steel girders that ran the length of the
hotel and they had to make indentations in the foundation
for those so that when they set the hotel down those girders
would go down below the foundation level and the hotel would
actually end up sitting on the foundation itself and not the
girders . ' Cause thos e girders all came out, see.
M: Oh, they did?
R: Oh, yeah, all thos e steel girders were removed . The
hotel was back on a foundation by itself. They just
cemented it to the new foundation. It ha s no steel girders
in it at all.
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 33
M: Didn't need it, apparently.
R: No. But, the big steel girders were much, much longer
than the hotel and these were very expensive I-beams that
were like two and a half feet tall and 75 feet long, or
something, and what they had to do in order to - well, we'll
get to that in a minute. Anyway, they finally got the hotel
down in front of the USO Building and what happened is they
had to turn it around so it could be backed onto the site
because they pulled it forward. When they moved it, they
moved with the front of the hotel going in the direction of
the move. So, it came down South Alamo Street facing south.
The hotel in its new location had to face east. So they had
to pull it in front of the uso Building and turn it around
and then back it onto the site. What was amazing about this
site is that the way it worked onto the property is that the
corners of the building that were originally exposed to
streets are still exposed to the streets. The way the
street where Bowie is and Alamo Street where Commerce used
to be so it's situated on a corner that is, you know,
perfect for the building because the inside walls that are
plain are not seen. They are on the back of the building.
Then, of course, they built the addition where the other
buildings had used to be but this was a perfect location for
this building because it fit the design of the building,
because the ornamentation on the building is on that thing.
So, this was such a nightmare. It was just unbelievable.
But they got the hotel turned around and then they were
trying to pull it back into the site. Onto the new
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 34
R: foundation. And one of the cables snapped and the hotel
rolled back across Alamo Street and we all thought: Oh, my
God, it's gonna go right into the uso. Not that there would
have been any loss because it was one of the temporary
buildings left over from HemisFair but, I mean, you know, it
rolled about 15 feet after the cables, one of the pulleys
snapped. The pulley broke or something.
We heard this noise, and then the hotel started going
back across the street 'cause they had backed it up part of
the way but they had to put big metal plates and stuff to
get it over the sidewalk that had been torn up and stuff. I
mean, it wasn't, you know, it's not like driving up your
driveway. And then as they backed the thing onto the site,
they did it again with reverse pulleys so the trucks were
out in front but it was actually being backwards. Because
there was no way, there was a wall and those historic
buildings behind it so there was no way to get behind it to
pull it that way so it had to be a reverse pulley where they
put the pulleys up against the back.
They drove some stakes in the ground, some giant beams
and put the pulleys in back of the building t his time and
the trucks in the front so it was a reverse pulley
operation. And so they were pulling the thing back and then
they discovered that the giant I-beams that the hotel sat on
were up against the wall in the back and the hotel was like
25 feet away from the wall so they had to get blow torches
and cut these expensive I-beams off piece by piece in
sections as the hotel was backed up because there was no
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 35
R: way, and you know, the steel was worth a fortune. And
these expensive beams had to be cut off in little sections
about two and a half feet long as the hotel was backed up in
stages and they would sit there and cut these two giant
I-beams off and one of the problems was they had planned to
re-sell the I-beams because they were very expensive and
they had to cut them up in order to get the hotel backed
onto the site. But it was a real amazing feat.
But all the complicated business about going over gas
lines, water lines, all this stuff, and moving fire hydrants
out of the way at the corner of Market and Alamo, removing
traffic signals, this, that and the other thing, and that
bridge. The stupid bridge that nobody knew whether it would
hold so it was a real complicated project that required a
lot nf energy and work on the part of the city; the people
moving the hotel; the owners of the hotel. This was a
concerted effort.
The city of San Antonio wanted this hotel moved and
saved. The city found the property for it. The city told
all the city departments: You're going to make this work and
you go do whatever i s necessary to get this hotel moved down
that stree t. And they went out and I'll . be darned if they
didn't get everything right. I mean, nothing happened
during that entire move of that hotel, you know, and I mean
it's not like we do this every day or something, but-
M: Who was mayor then?
R: Cisneros.
M: Was Cisneros mayor then?
FAiffi10UNT HOTEL
R: Uh huh.
M: I didn't think he was there that long.
R: Yeah, that was '85. That was only four years ago.
Yeah, he was there. In fact, he carne up and did a press
conference overlooking the hotel.
M: That's right. I remember that.
36
R: It was sort of funny, but it was just amazing how the
people that ran the different departments of the city - I
mean, you've got to get so many different people involved. I
mean, Public Works, Fire Department and everybody. And it
all worked. I mean, you know, it was amazing.
M: It's a story and you have told, of course, nobody else
now for the future. Anybody wants to know the details of
this they are gonna know it because you have done it so
logically. How do you feel about it now?
R: Oh, I think it's a wonderful little hotel.
M: Isn't it marvelous?
R: I mean, it has a fine restaurant and the people that did
the renovation of the hotel, they were very sensitive to the
original building and they made everything in the original,
but I mean, it's 500 times as elegant as it ever was
before.
And, of course, the other thing, t hey had to go to the
city and get permission to put the porch back on. Of
course, the porch had been r emoved many , many years ago
over at the other location when they had widened Commerce
Street. And so they put the porch back on so it looks more
original now than it did.
M: There are two porches.
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 37
R: Well, I mean, the whole thing. It's a porch that extends
out from the building. And it's very, very fine. They also
had another problem, too. And that was they were concerned
whether they could keep the name of the hotel for the hotel
because there is a national chain called the Fairmont Hotel
chain which is headquartered in San Francisco, and I don't
know if you ever watched Hotel, the TV show.
M: I've been in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.
R: Well, okay, that hotel burned in the fire after the
earthquake in 1906 but it sits on top of Nob Hill across
from the Mark Hopkins. It is one of the premier hotels in
this country. It is just absolutely very, very elegant.
They have one in Denver, they have one in Dallas, they have
one in New Orleans, and they have one in, I think Reno or
Las Vegas, or somewhere. But anyway, the one in San
Francisco is the one that started the whole thing and it is
now a national chain and it is the Fairmont, m-o-n-t, and
this hotel is the Fairmount, but since there was one in
Dallas there was some concern about the fact about whether
or not they would be able to use the actual name of this
hotel because people would get it confused with the
Fairmont. And a lot of people do, in fact, call it the
Fairmont Hotel, but it is really the Fairmount Hotel. But
they used the name and there doesn't seem to be any problem
with it, but basically one is the English spelling and the
other one, I guess the "mont" must be the French version of
the same word, or something, but there was some concern at
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 38
R: the beginning that they would not even be able to call
it the Fairmount.
M: That would be a shame 'cause there's the name right
there.
R: Right there in stone on the top of the building.
M: In some of the things I read it kept talking about- it
described that as "ice" or what did they call that?
Something stone. Something like cold, or ice, or fog. But
that's an odd combination, isn't it? Of the red- have you
in any of your work around tpwn discovered where the clay
was that the yellow brick came from?
R: No, that was - a lot of buildings in this town are built
of the yellow brick.
M: At HemisFair. The ones we have now are yellow brick.
Getting back to this wonderful thing that happened in
San Antonio in 1985 . The early use of that building, one of
the things that interested me, was that they got people from
the train. It was only two blocks from the Southern Pacifi c
Depot and they got passengers from the train. And then,
another thing that I didn't know, not being a native, was
that the family lived there. A Mrs. Thomas, I think wrote a
letter to the newspaper and she said , what was her name?
R: Mrs . Roy Thomas from Abilene.
M: And she spoke about the family living there for a long
time, and they had birthday parties and things there. It
was - see when I'm coming down to the Institute I used to
come down Bowie a lot and I'd see that nondescript building
and I thought: Well, why do they want to save that. And
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 39
R: then the Conservation Society, of course, was all this
time saying: We've gotta save this building. And so they
were in there. I wonder if the building would have been
saved had they -
R: Oh, no, they were the ones that found the movers.
Nobody else would even touch it. I mean, they tried all
over the country and they found this crazy man in Oregon who
said he could move it. Well he did move it, as a matter of
fact. Now it cost them about three times what they thought
it was going to, but when you think about how many man hours
and stuff were put into this move it is incredible. And you
know, we have to say: Well, I mean, people are crazy, but
the fact is that right now that hotel is in a historic
district, it's in the La Villita Historic District, the
building itself is a historic building, and it's a viable
business.
Now why on earth is this stuff not feasible? In other
words, if we can do this and make this work, then why
couldn't we do this with other buildings? I mean it's a
typical example. Yes, it does take money. But is also just
takes a little imagination and it takes a bit of
determination on the part of the city.
Unfortunately, they tore down the Bluebonnet Hotel which
was a much more historic building; a much more impressive
building. It was 12 or 13 stories tall, it had recording
studios and all sorts of things in it, and these people, you
know, banks tore this down. And, the thing is that the city
had some control of this situation because city money was
involved o f the Fairmount and the city was determined to get
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 40
R: this done and they did it.
M: Well, there was some enlightenment there that we don't
sometimes get.
R: Well, that's true.
M: There was enlightenment of the city fathers and whatnot.
There also was a lot of ingenuity and innovation.
R: There were also threats by the Conservation Society to
file lawsuits against the mall if the mall tore the building
down.
M: Stupid, but you have to play that way.
R: Well, I mean, that's what the law says. The law says
you've got to preserve these buildings if you're gonna use
the Federal money. Now, the mall had a choice of either
spending $40 million of their own money for all these
improvements. Maybe if wasn't $40 million, it was more like
$4 million.
M: Well, it was something.
R: Yeah, it was a pretty good chunk of money for all the
utility relocations, and the street redesigns, a new bridge,
the river channel, all that stuff. It wasn't cheap. The
mall itself was a quarter billion dollars and so, I mean, it
would just have been more expense to them. But the fact is
that the Conservation Society always was driving this whole
thing on the basis that if they don't try to save it they
will file a lawsuit and stop the mall. I mean, because it
doesn't matter whether you are right or wrong when you go
into these kind of lawsuits it takes three or four years
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 41
R: just to get them to say there is no lawsuit. But there
was a lawsuit here, because the law does say that you have
to preserve this building if you're gonna use the Federal
funds.
Well, all in the back of this, it wasn't just that. But
I mean there was this other option. I mean, the
Conservation Society went out and they beat the bushes
looking for people that would even dare to - they had three
or four different guys come down here and most of them just
raised up their hands and walked away. They said: It's
impossible, it can't be done. This, that and the other
thing. And they finally found this one person who could do
it and they were convinced he could do it and, apparently,
you know, they were right.
M: You must feel awful good. Now we got in the Guinness
Book of Records.
R: The heaviest building ever moved on wheels. Now, much
bigger, and taller, and heavier buildings have been moved on
rollers which again is not nearly as complicated a procedure
as moving it down an undulating street with corners and all
that stuff . If you move it on rollers and rails you can
move anything on rails. We move the Saturn rockets that we
launch the shuttles with. But that all moves on rails and
tracks, it's on a flat surface. But when you start going
over streets, I mean you're talking real serious.
M: I hope people remember this. I was over there recently
and talking to one of the girls over there. Now that the
USO Building is down and we're starting to rehab the
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 42
R: HemisFair (and it's going to take a good sensitive job
this time), look at the view they've got. Right across the
street. The entrance is up, they're doing good planting.
The Acosta House will be restored one of these days. And
Eagar house, and further down the street. That little
nucleus right there is going to be just one more thing to
make San Antonio really something unique.
R: I know the people in Dallas think we're nuts that we
would save this hotel. But, I mean, it's-
M: Would we like to be like Dallas?
R: Well, that's what the whole point is. This is not
Dallas, and this is - only in San Antonio would you have -
oh, I don't know. And this thing got world wide publicity.
I saw this thing on BBC. I saw it on -
M: Did you really?
R: Yeah. BBC is carried on parts of those network things -
Arts & Entertainment, and stuff, over the weekends. And it
was on BBC, it was on ITN which is the competitive private
television thing, you know, in England and Europe. It got
all sorts of publicity. Of course, it was on all the
networks and it was on CNN Headline News and it was just
amazing, you know.
And then, all the things that have happened at the hotel
since then. But it's a very small hotel. It's a very
lovely little hotel. Of course, the concept these people
had of what they were going to do with it after they got it
moved was very critical to what was actually going to
happen. They realized they were moving it into a historic
district and therefore it had to have a certain amount of
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 43
R: class and style to it. It couldn•t just be a hotel,
because you can't be just a hotel and have 38 rooms. I mean
what's the difference between that and a Holiday Inn?
You've got to have a hotel that's got some special panache
and style and so they went at it full bore. It's not overly
elegant but it is very nice and sophisticated and it's a
very luxury hotel.
M: How can you possibly not mention the restaurant?
R: Well, the restaurant, of course, has been picked as one
of the ten outstanding new restaurants in the country and
has won so many awards it is just amazing. The restaurant
is very critical to the operation.
M: I was gonna say, you can't mention the hotel without
that restaurant because it is so important. The thing that
interests me is the whole thing coming all together here.
Because HemisFair is going to be good again. I feel very
confident. I'm working very closely with them now. I'm
doing the markers and I feel that we are going to do it
right this time. I really think we are.
R: Well, there are still a few problems but what I think we
need to do is put the front back on Beethoven Hall.
M: I don't know how you're gonna do that.
R: Oh, it's real simple.
M: Well, how can you do it without getting out into the
street?
R: Well, you just glue it on the building. Take the bricks
down and put the stone back up.
M: Yeah, but how much- see I wasn't here when that was
there.
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 44
R: That doesn't make any difference. You just put the
facade back on the building. It's just like if you do- you
know you just take a section out of the building you just
move the facade back.
M: How much -
R: They took about 8 feet off the building.
M: You can do it without coming into the street?
R: Sure. You just take the brick off and put the stone
there in place of the brick.
M: Have you talked to David Bomersbach about that?
R: Well, I don't need to. What do we need to talk t o him
for?
M: He's the-
R: But they don't have any directive to do that. It would
cost them about $150,000 to put it back.
M: Everybody tells me how attractive that building was.
R: It was gorgeous. You don't have any pictures of it?
M: I've seen pictures.
R: It was Imperial German Reichstag architecture. I mean
what else can you say about it. It was the home for the
Beethoven Choir, you know.
M: They've got to do something now that the USO Building is
down. You've got t hat whole blank wall there. They've got
to do something about that.
R: Well -
M: They're doing a good job of planting. Here's this
wonderful little Fairmount Hotel. How do you feel about the
- I was worried when they first did that sharp change of
color on the new addition. How do you feel about that?
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL
R: That's fine.
M: It's great now. But did it bother you?
45
R: I was a little concerned. I called it a racing stripe.
The fact that they were going to have the bottom in red and
the top in yellow, but it all works out just fine.
M: It does, doesn't it.
R: It looks just fine. They did a very good job, the
people that did it.
M: I think they did.
R: It looks great.
M: Is there anything you want to put on this that isn't on
here? I'm terribly grateful because this thing, and· you've
done it in chronological order. I'll tell you right now, if
I had people as articulate as you were every day I wouldn't
have any troubles.
R: Well, there are a lot of interesting stories about the
hotel. One of them was that the owner, Virginia Van Steen­berg,
had put a medal, a religious medal on one of the beams
of the hotel as it was being moved. I believe it was a
medal of Our Lady of Guadalupe or Immaculate Conception, I'm
not sure , or was it St. Christopher, I forget who it was,
but it was a gold religious medal that she had stuck on one
of the beams for the move, and of course, Mr. Guido, Cosmo
Guido, who is the owner of Guido Brothers, the ones who had
done the bridge work, and they were the ones who eventually
did the hotel, the renovation of the hotel, but they did the
bridge work to hold the bridge up, as soon as the hotel got
over the bridge he ran over to St. Joseph's Church.
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 46
M: He did. And said: Thank you. Bless his heart. I read
in one place that when they started this whole process that
the archbishop, Papp I think, blesed it, and Stahl -
R: Yeah, they had an interfaith -
M: And they had a Protestant of some kind.
R: Interfaith blessing of the corner.
M: That's so typical of San Antonio. It's lovely.
R: Let's see. What else did they do? It was a real
nightmare, over there, getting police passes and stuff. You
know, actually it all worked out pretty well . But I mean a
potential disaster could have happened and, you know, they
didn't want to disrupt the downtown that much. It was just
one street, but I mean, it became a rolling festival, you
know.
M: The place was just jammed every lunch hour.
R: People wouldn't go away. And they all wanted to come
downtown and see it before it got moved back to where it was
supposed to go. I mean, just the fact that they even found
a place within 6 blocks of - you know, we call it 3 or 4
blocks but if you count the number of streets you cross it
is probably 4 or 5 blocks of actual crossings.
M: Not easy, not easy.
R: No, and it was just sort of a miracle they found a place
to put it. I think the other option would have been to move
it into HemisFair instead of down there.
M: Water Board wouldn't have been bad except it couldn't
have been as good as it is now.
R: No, because it wouldn't function very well as a hotel
the r e and then at Hemis Fa ir, of course, we d idn't h ave all
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 47
R: those old stupid buildings torn down like we do now so
there was really no open space on which to put it but it
wasn't the kind of thing where you could just sort of pick
it up and roll it somewhere and sort of park it for a while
while you figured out what you were gonna do with it.
Because those dollies underneath, I think they were like
$50,000 apiece, were all sitting there and they had to be,
I mean he had millions of dollars worth of equipment tied up
into this thing and they couldn't just leave the building
somewhere while they figured out where they were going to
put it. They had to have all that stuff worked out in
advance.
M: Tommie Wright ought to be mentioned too, because he has
done some awful good stuff around town.
R: Oh, yeah. He and Virginia were partners. Now the one
who actually provided most of the money was B. K. Johnson,
who, of course , is connected with the King Ranch and he is
also the owner of the Hyatt Regency Hotel here.
M: I noticed that. I didn't know that until I read­R:
Yeah. But it's two separate things. He is just the
owner of the building. He doesn't run either of the
hotels.
M: No, I know he doesn't. But I go back to Tommie Wright
because I was in his first place there on Alamo. Oh , what's
that building? You know the way he'd restored his own
quarters up there. And then the Charles Court.
R: Oh, the Reuter Building.
M: Yeah. He's got such good taste and I just think he
needs a whole lot of credit for putting his money whe r e he
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 48
M: believes. And I like what he's doing.
R: And he, of course, was going to be one of the original
partners in the Majestic project. See we had tried to get
them to restore the Majestic Theater, built in 1929, many
times and this outfit out of Houston had bought the building
because nobody else wanted it and it was just such a
disaster and we were afraid it was going to be torn down. So
Virginia and Tommie, the same people involved in the
Fairmount, went over and put together a package that would
involve the renovation of the upper floors of the Majestic
Building, which is a 14-story tall building, into apartments
instead of offices. And to renovate the two theaters, the
adjacent building is also the Brady Building which has the
Empire Theater in it. The two theaters are back to back and
the two buildings are separated by a small building in the
front but they are joined in the back because one of the
buildings is L-shaped and wraps around the corner.
M: The basements are connected.
R: Well, now they are, yes. And anyway thi s was another
project by these very same people. They set up all the
mechanisms for it, they got all the money for it, they got
the city involved in it, they created the foundation that is
now called Las Casas that is headed by Jocie Strauss. They
have just completed renovation of the Majestic Theater to
the tune of about $4.5 million, and it's gorgeous.
They're now going on to Phase II and Virginia is now
proceeding, Tommie has dropped out for business reasons, but
Virginia is going to go ahead with the apartments up on the
upper floors and this may in fact be one of the major
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 49
R: turning points in the development of downtown San Antonio
to have middle i ncome and upper middle income people living
in the middle of the city. And these are going to be
fabulous apartments. There is one on the lOth floor, for
example, where you've got four windows along the north side
and lets you see when you look out the north side. That's
over Houston Street, you look over the Frost Brothers
Building and you see the new National Bank of Commerce Tower
' all lit up at night. You see the Interfirst Building which
of course is 29 stories tall. The other one is 30 stories
tall. They are both beautifully lighted up at night.
You see Travis Park. You see all the streets around you.
Then you've got one, two, three windows , one, two, three,
four windows on the east of the building. You can see the
Emily Morgan Hotel. You can see the Post Office Building on
Alamo Plaza, and I'm not sure, I think the Nix Hospital
blocks the view of the Tower of the Americas and the
Marriott, the new Marriott. But, this same apartment, by the
way , now has four windows on the south side of the building.
And on the south side of the building you see the Tower Life
Building lighted up at night, the entire River Walk, and the
Alamo National Bank Building, which of course is another
30-story tall building, and all of La Villita and the
Fairmount Hotel. You get to see all of that out your other
window.
M: You gonna move in there?
R: Yeah.
M: I have talked to more people who said they're gonna move
in.
FAIRMOUNT HOTEL 50
R: Well, I'm moving in 'cause I'm tired of all this stuff.
This apartment is about as elegant as the one I had in San
Francisco where I would open the drapes and you would have a
view of Nob Hill lit up at ~ight, with the Mark Hopkins, the
Fairmont, the Grace Cathedral, the Shrine Auditorium, and
the Flood Mansion and all that stuff up there at the top of
the hill. It was like a picture postcard. You'd open the
drapes and there it was, all lighted up at night.
M: And you're going to have that same sort of thing here.
R: Well, I think so. This is going to be even more
spectacular because you're gonna have architecture out every
window. I mean the Tower Life Building and the Alamo
National Bank Building out one set of windows and the
InterFirst and the NBC Building out the other. I mean, you
know, that's a skyline and a half there.
M: What are you- one thing - if I were younger, I'd live
downtown.
END OF SIDE 2, ABOUT 25 MINUTES.