THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
Oral History Office
SUBJECT: HemisFair
INTERVIEW WITH: Boone Powell
DATE: 27 January 2003
PLACE: Mr. Powell’s office, San Antonio, Texas
INTERVIEWER: Sterlin Holmesly
TAPE I, SIDE 1
H: Interview with Boone Powell, January 27, 2003, in his office in San Antonio. This is Sterlin Holmesly. Okay, it’s all yours.
P: Yes. I’m Boone Powell of Ford, Powell and Carson, and I came to San Antonio as a small boy back in 1939. And aside from being away in school and working a little bit in Chicago and being in the Army, I’ve lived here all my life. I came back here from MIT in 1960 and rejoined O’Neil Ford and worked briefly for O’Neil and Sam in 1956 and 1958 and rejoined them and have stayed here in this firm ever since. Became a partner in late 1966, early 1967.
H: And the firm is Ford, Powell and Carson.
P: That’s right. The firm became in 1967, it became Ford, Powell and Carson. And one of my principal projects, I was project architect for the Tower of the Americas and so...and I also worked briefly for the HemisFair, for the HemisFair Corporation, working on their site planning in the early Boone Powell 2
P: days.
H: Okay. And the Tower of the Americas was and is the symbol of HemisFair ’68? And it had some problems.
P: Yeah. I think the Tower was...it was a symbol. I think there was some confusion about it – it’s a theme structure. I know even within the executive committee of the Fair there was some issue about what the theme structure should be. I know Mr. Zachry was looking for a different kind of theme structure and I’m not sure whether it was ever formally adopted, but I think it literally was the theme structure of the Fair.
H: Uh-huh. I think Mr. Zachry wanted something like Tivoli Gardens, is what I’ve been told.
P: Right. Well, he had a number of ideas. He even had one idea of having a great statue of Lyndon and...[inaudible], I think it was the president at that time, I’m not sure I’m right about that, who the president was, but in the...[inaudible] as he described it. And then half of a hemisphere was another idea; half of a sphere was another idea - to have a great Hemisphere.
H: Describe the design and construction of the Tower of the Americas.
P: The...that’s a long process. Let’s start with...let’s start with the way it was actually constructed and then we’ll talk about how we got there. It might be a little easier to understand it if we start with that. There are Boone Powell 3
P: issues about the Tower, of course, about how tall it was, and before it was built we hadn’t yet funded the mast on the top, which is, as towers go, it’s always counted as part of the height of the tower, but that had not been authorized. So that when some press releases went out, it was six hundred and twenty-two feet. And soon after the Fair, I mean after the tower started, then the City went ahead and executed the contracts to go ahead and complete the pylon on top of it,...[inaudible] mast on top of it and so it became seven fifty. At that point the publicity more or less changed. So it’s a seven hundred and fifty foot tall observation tower, built for the Fair, just like the Seattle tower had been built for the Fair. And as such - and I was looking at some notes I had - probably was the tallest observation tower in the western hemisphere at that time.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Obviously not nearly as tall as the Empire State Building or some of the other commercial buildings, but was for a short time the tallest observation tower. I think the tower that eclipsed it was Toronto and eclipsed it by quite a long ways. But in any case, it began in February, the construction began in February of 1967 and was complete basically right at the time the Fair opened. There’s a little story I only heard recently about a delay - this was not public knowledge - but what I heard, now either from Boone Powell 4
P: Marshall or maybe from Tom Frost, but...
H: Marshall Steves?
P: Yeah. Probably more like it was Tom, but the...what I was told was that it was actually ready to open and it was delayed about a day or two because of the Martin Luther King assassination. And there was a concern about some kind of event or something, you know, that might be...that might ripple from that situation. And so it was opened either the next day after the Fair began or the day after that. Frankly, I don’t...I never knew that and I thought that the reason it had been opened late, it was just because of construction and so forth. But it did open virtually at the same time as the Fair.
H: And how do you build a six hundred and...?
P: And how do you build it?
H: ...[inaudible].
P: Well, in this case that we have very good foundation material - down about fifty feet under the tower. And the first thing to do – we did drill thirty-six inch piers – fifty-five of them. They went down and belled out into the shale down around sixty feet below – below ground level. And the first thing to do was to pour those piers and pier caps. All this started about fifteen to sixteen feet below grade. And then at that point, and still below grade, a great pier cap was poured that unified all those fifty-five piers. Pier cap was about eight feet thick, solid concrete,Boone Powell 5
P: almost a hundred feet in diameter, sat on top of the piers below grade. At that point, then, the shaft was poured up to the top and it consisted of, initially, pouring the main shaft, along with buttresses that became monolithically part of the shaft, and they went from below grade up to around twenty-two feet above grade. And at that point the shaft shape that we recognize as the tower then commences in earnest and goes all the way up until it gets to the...where the top house is.
H: And what is the material in the shaft?
P: That material is all reinforced concrete, and it’s all being slipped formed and it was being slipped formed at a certain rate every...a day. I intend to come back and sort of do this in more detail.
H: Okay.
P: Just to give you a general idea for questioning and other things. It changed as it went up. It changed in terms of the concrete reinforcement in the lower levels, some of the cells that are in the actual shaft higher up are full, and then at two hundred feet and four hundred feet, the design of it internally changed – externally it looks the same but actually changed. And then when it got to five hundred and forty feet – five hundred and fifty almost – then it changed again because now we’re inside of where the top house will ultimately be. So it becomes stairs and little rooms and things that are slightly different, that weBoone Powell 6
P: could pour in the core and then when it gets above that - I think it’s about five ninety – it becomes much more solid and the embedments are placed at that point: twelve above and twelve below – to bring in the twelve major trusses and weld them back into the core at that point and everything hangs from those trusses, the top house hangs from above not ...is not supported from below. The pouring on up to that point and then on top of that is the elevator penthouse and above that is the...they erected the mast. That was all completed in about fourteen months despite the difficulties, which we can go into.
H: One question. You mentioned the other day you didn’t have a wind tunnel to test...
P: Right.
H: Then tell me how you tested the tower.
P: Well, when we were developing the tower we had developed the intricate twelve – twelve pointed shape - early on; it became kind of a...something that generated a number of the different designs. We had started with a design...we had started with a design that early on, that just was a great monolithically poured concrete shaft. It didn’t have...didn’t have a way to really build it in a procedurally sound, inexpensive and simple and lean kind of way. So, we came back to the design of the shaft and began to think about how we could slip the shaft. And then there were three designs – three different designs - of towers Boone Powell 7
P: that were designed - basically scaling it down and making it more realistic in terms of the numbers. The crowds that would be at HemisFair, the amount of space that could be afforded and so on, until the final design emerged is the one that we built. As we were working on this process, the money to develop those plans was coming from the HemisFair Corporation itself. And they had limited funding and they were spreading it around, as you can imagine, to lots of different...lots of different things. And we had been paid to develop the basic design only about twenty-two or three percent, maybe less than that, percent of the total fee that would ultimately emerge. And yet the Fair Corporation at one point, when it was switching over to the City, bid the project from those designs. Now normally you’d get seventy-five percent before you start building a building like this. But we’ll come back to that issue, because that rippled through a lot of the problems that I personally had to face, at least. The...I think the key thing, though, to say about that is that with that sixty-four thousand dollars we were strapped just to get drawings made. ...[inaudible] really was having a hard time to...he couldn’t...[inaudible] design the steel. But we knew one – we did know one thing, Ray and I, we got to talking one day about a great fear he had and that was: what was the overturning moment - what’s the coefficient of drag is the technical term for that - what’s the coefficient of drag in Boone Powell 8
P: that shape in the wind? And that was a serious question because it could vary a lot, and if it was twice as much as he assumed, let’s say, that would mean that it would have to be twice or more the amount of steel. And so that’s a huge, huge factor. So he came up with...he came up with an idea – he was our structural engineer, Ray ...[inaudible] – he came up idea to, since we had no money for a wind tunnel test, and we’d asked and we couldn’t find any money. To get the leading experts in hydraulics and fluids, mechanics, in the state, one at A&M, one at Texas, to give him their opinions of how this would...what it would be. To give you some point of reference: a square shape, extruded, with wind passing across it has a coefficient of drag, if that’s what calibrates it, of one point zero. So that’s the base everything is related to. A cylinder, the same size across, has a coefficient of drag of point three, three, just one-third as much. And a sheet of paper or a sheet-like form with wind going around it has a coefficient of drag of two point zero. So it’s all very neat and precise and...[inaudible] this is all real; this is the way these things test. And so, he wrote them both and got answers back. And the...I think it was the professor at UT, who was very well regarded, said that he thought that the tower because of the ins and outs of the shaft, this is... [inaudible] because of all the undulations of the tower, the twelve points and the spaces in between it, that it would Boone Powell 9
P: perform like a sheet of paper, and it would have a coefficient of drag of two point zero.
H: Which means it would...the wind could blow it over.
P: What it would mean is that it would have to be extraordinarily stout.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And it would have to have so much steel in it that there would be some serious economic problems and some serious design problems. The professor at A&M said that he thought it would...that the wind would read this a cylinder and would...the coefficient of drag would be near, approximately, point three, three. Now, that’s one-sixth as much. And so we struggled with that and we – as we further worried about ...[inaudible] tower and the top house and the various design aspects of it and we didn’t know what to do until we sat down one day and Ray said maybe we could make a simple test because water and air behave the same. Could we find a place where there’s any moving water? And I said, well, we could go out to the mill race, out south of Espada Dam. and there’s a little area I know there where there’s a good bit of water flow. And so he said, well, we need to do something ‘cause we don’t...we can’t go on since we have this opinion at UT. So what we did is we got Marshall Steves to makes us a square shape, it’s about two feet long, and we got a shape he milled that is like the shape of the Tower of the America’s shaft itself. And then we got a Boone Powell 10
P: cylinder that was made to the same length – all of the same size across and we screwed eye hooks into the ends of them and we got...[inaudible] got some weights to hold the shapes down and we got a bridle to hold the shape down into the water and then another bridle that we hooked up to a fish scale, just a simple old fish scale, and the water was running fast enough that we actually got readings - and whether they were the right readings in terms of pounds didn’t matter - what we wanted is the comparison. And the water as it swept across the shape of the Tower of the Americas responded to it just...approximately just like it did to the cylinder and much less than the square. So that in a sense, the square weighed three times as much as the cylinder and the shape of the Tower of the Americas. And I’ve got pictures of this wading...people wading around, you know, and holding these fish scales and stuff. And it’s really an interesting thing that...but it wasn’t just a game, it was terribly serious, although it looks funny, but it actually was very serious. At that point we felt confident that the position of the person at A&M was right, and we knew at some point we would have to do the...have to be...catch up and do the theoretical work. As this progressed, at some... Finally the City took over this project from HemisFair and signed appropriate contracts to go on with the work. This was when...this is after the construction was now begun. And we were able to afford to Boone Powell 11
P: get a...we were able to afford to get wind tunnel estimates made, and they validated the water tests we made. And validated the approach that we had already taken and assumed was right. However, at that point then Ray... [inaudible] has the actual data to complete the work. Now, what’s laced into this very complex issue is the fact that when they were finally ready to construct the building - and it was started February 10th or something like that, 1967 - there was the threat of a tax payers suit from a woman, I can’t remember her name, out in South Bexar County, or out at South San Antonio - I guess she was a city resident - and she had not filed that suit. And the City was pretty clever about this - I don’t know whether it was Crawford Reed or somebody - but the City was pretty clever about this. And they realized that she would not file a suit, formally file a suit, unless - she was threatening to do that – if construction was underway, because then she’d have to post a bond.
H: And what was the object of her objection?
P: She just didn’t think the City should do this kind of thing.
H: Oh, okay.
P: Who knows? You know.
H: Um.
P: Exactly why, but she was against it. An injunction - we didn’t have time... If she’d filed suit, I mean, I guessBoone Powell 12
P: it could have been released by the courts, but there was a fear that it would – it was serious enough that it would, if it delayed the project a couple of months, we probably couldn’t finish. That was the feeling. So we were not, you know...Neil and I weren’t in the middle of this at this time in terms of these discussions, because for one thing the mayor didn’t really like Neil, you know; that’s the old...
H: That was Walter McAllister.
P: Yeah, Walter McAllister. That was that old enmity that existed between them, neither trusted the other. And so the City went out and did something...they’d already...a bid had already been received from a combination of a firm in San Antonio and combination of... I mean, of a firm in Houston and it was Lyda and Lott and it was a...the local man was, was necessary almost to get good bids from local subs. And Lott was...A.J. Lott was a much bigger company in Houston and so they gave the underpinnings of the technical support and the size and the scale that Gerald Lyda didn’t have. And so together they made a great team because it would have been very hard for a big outside contractors to come in here and get sub-bids prior to that. So they made that team. They had already bid and...but there had not been a contract signed because, well, for what ever reason – maybe it had to do with, maybe it had to do with the threatened suit. Perhaps, in fact, if at the end the contract had been Boone Powell 13
P: signed. But without any fanfare and completely, secretly, the ground was broken in the middle of the night.
H: Um.
P: So that she couldn’t file her suit. They were afraid she was going to do it in a few days. So, I didn’t know anything about it. We didn’t know the ground was broken. I
awoke the next day, came to the office and found that the tower was under construction, which was a great shock in a number of ways. We still had never had been advanced anymore money, and the plans were twenty-two percent complete, and there was a seven hundred and fifty foot building under construction, with plans that were little more than schematic. Now, that’s a real – that a real...
[inaudible].
H: Yeah, that’s a real joke.
P: The other joke is that the mayor really didn’t want Neil to do the job, and he didn’t want our firm involved. And so we didn’t get a contract for about fifteen to twenty days after that, so we could do nothing. And as I understand it, the mayor went to the city attorney - and I think it was Crawford Reeder and Sedlow – I wanted to used somebody else, and as I understand it, the city attorney said, “It won’t work; they are the ones drawing these plans, you know – no other person can assume those plans and so that legally you can’t do that.” So...[inaudible] I guess the mayor told Public Works to go ahead and sign a contract Boone Powell 14
P: with us, which they did. But we were always playing catch-up, which is a very, very scary thing on a project of this size.
H: ...Particularly with the time limits.
P: Yeah. And so Ray hadn’t even sized the steel in the basic shaft or even some of the steel in the pier cast at that point and so he, just like we, had an enormous amount of work to do and very little time to do it, with the building already...[inaudible].
H: This is Ray...[inaudible] Spell it...[inaudible].
P: P-i-n-n-e-l-l.
H: Okay.
P: Right. And I’ll give you some written material later on, there’s some spellings and names...
H: Okay. Great.
P: And so, as a consequence, we’re doing working drawings; we’re trying to bring this building up to the point it should be. Gerald Lyda and A.J. Lott are out there building this sucker and I’m the project architect and every day there are a lot of things that come up that you feel like, to me, that if I don’t get this done today we’re in trouble, you know - and every night the same thing. I’d lie in bed at night and try to go to sleep and I would, maybe, and then I’d wake up and I’d start thinking – one thing after another, what just absolutely had to be done first thing –
had to call the superintendent, had to call this person, hadBoone Powell 15
P: to get ready to do something. And I finally found out that the only way I could function was to have a yellow pad there, and so when I’d have five or six ideas and I just knew that I had to do them, I’d turn the light on and write them down and then go back to sleep. And that was the only way it worked.
H: And you did this for months on end?
P: And I did this – yeah, for about ten months, right. And that...otherwise, it was, you know, those kinds of things would multiply and finally get to the point where we’d be severely impaired. We had other major, major problems which we’re going to talk about, but certainly that whole sequence of not having plans and not getting a contract - until after the building was under construction - with the City was one of the most difficult things, I guess, [inaudible].
H: Was slip-form relatively new form of construction then?
P: No, it’d been used for grain elevators and a variety of kinds of things before. We did it in a little more intricate way.
H: Uh-huh.
P: The slip form that we...that was developed here had stainless steel sides, it was five feet deep. We slipped ten feet, eight inches each day as we were slipping...slipping it up. It was assembled on the base of ...on the top surface of the pier cap that’s ninety-two feetBoone Powell 16
P: diameter and eight foot thick pier cap. It was leveled and then the slip form was set on top of that and assembled. And in the beginning we were going to be pouring buttresses so the ends - the twelve ends of the basic shaft - were left open. And we built permanent forms on the outside of the twenty-two feet, that would slip against the slip form, so we could pour both in situ, just a normal kind of pouring on part of the work and yet pour within a slipping form on the other part, all monolithically. And so the buttresses are sloped in because of this combination of a slip form in the inside and the regular forming on the outside. Every...it was a twenty-four hour a day process, slipping twelve, sixteen hours a day and then tying...welding steel and getting everything set and then resuming again after eight more hours. So it was a twenty-four hour a day process. And you could see – if you look at the tower today – you could see the gradations of color – there’s a little bit of different color in the white and then it turns to sort of a gray look and has...[inaudible] and it goes back to a lighter color. And it’s that little gradation that gives it a very interesting kind of vertical character - that’s the daily cycle of pouring...[inaudible] - it being cooler and then warmer.
H: I’m jumping ahead a little bit, you get the shaft finished and then you have to raise the top house.
P: Right.Boone Powell 17
H: And what happened there?
P: Well, the...we’d come up with an idea and all these ideas, you understand, that architects and structural engineers come up with we disclaim, because they...
inaudible] the contractor has to take the responsibility for structural methods, so we can suggest. And in this case, we designed it so it could be built, slipped – and so it could be built with a shaft – with the top house at the bottom and then lifted up. But we didn’t dictate any of that because we didn’t want to get into the contractor’s business. And the contractors did want to use the basic situation that we had facilitated. It was the logical thing for them to do. And so they proceeded with TexStar - I think it was TexStar ...[inaudible] – a company that did a lot of lift slab work as a consultant and with Bethlehem Steel. And they designed a situation where the used lift slab jacks, twelve major - it was the old lift slab jacks used out at Trinity – put them up on the edges around the top, twelve of them, and connected them with some kind of cradle to each jack to lifting rods, there are twenty-four rods. And they were about little bit over an inch in diameter, very high strength steel. They dropped those rods all the way down, at the base the twelve big trusses, which are about fourteen feet deep on the inside and then come to the edge above the observation level...[inaudible]. But those were assembled and bolted together, and then we hooked on to them - or the Boone Powell 18
P: contractor did - hooked on to them. And after they were all assembled, then picked it up one floor and built the floor, hung the floor under that and picked it up again. So we were in the sequence of picking the tower up and always building the tower at grade. So you’re working right there.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Right around...well, I say grades, you know, fifteen feet in the air, twenty feet in the air – it had to be, I think, just above the buttresses because they stuck out a little bit. So anyway, it was built in reverse – from the top down. At that point it was pretty well loaded up, it was a good bit of weight there – the ultimate load is - oh, I’ve got it – I think it’s two hundred and – six hundred tons I think. ...[inaudible] around twelve... about one thousand two hundred tons, or something like that. And on a cold – cool night, at least – it seemed very cold that night – the rods began to snap on one side and ultimately just one pair of rods – it was taking up the load of about three sets – [inaudible] snapped, and the top house settled about an inch – jerked up over about an inch.
H: And...[inaudible].
P: ...And was in a precarious position, and it was being held by these two rods in that sector of...
H: And when was this?
P: It was October 31st. So we’d started in February and Boone Powell 19
P: this was October 31st 1967, and that’s only about seven months to the Fair, and this is absolutely critical. And at that point – how you doing on time? Okay? - At that time the...the only thing they could think of doing – because a worker wouldn’t go under this – but it’s hanging there, not near the base but still it was crooked and it was clear that only a few rods were holding the whole sector. They were stretched right to their limit; it was clear they were stretched to their limit. So the contractor brought in a whole series of major cranes and got around that structure, reached in, grabbed hold of it, and secured it so that people would feel comfortable going under it. There is a real issue about whether had it started breaking what would have happened - whether or not they would had to pulled those cranes in or not, because it was so heavy and these cranes were leaning way over to get a hold of it. In any case, they got a hold of it, but workmen went under the shoring; they shored it up, kept it in place and then started a process of what happened sort of thing. The ultimate deal about what happened became court action later on, involving all the main parties - not us, but the contractor and his consulting lifting person at Bethlehem Steel. And what was really happening was that there was a vibration being set up by the wind in these long, long rods and it was all being resolved right above the thread at the bottom. And at that point the steel would crystallize and Boone Powell 20
P: break, fracture. It was clear that these rods couldn’t be used to lift the tower without a lot of risk. It took some...maybe a month to figure out what they wanted to do – maybe not quite that long - but they decided to go to oil field drill-set pipe, which is used to operating at long distances with very high torques. And they decided they would dampen it every fifty feet by putting it back to the shaft in some way where it rolled on the shaft where it couldn’t vibrate very much, they re-outfitted...[inaudible] twelve lifting pipes instead of the twenty-four lifting rods. And once they got it all, done then it went up to the top in, like, twenty days. And just sailed right along. When it got there, it was only about three months left and so the...still didn’t have the glass in it, didn’t have any interior finish, it was just a shape up there in the air. Contractors did an absolutely incredible job of finishing it out in three months - finishing the whole interior, getting the elevators in, getting everything done. I mean, it was just amazing.
H: Was Mr. Guido part of this?
P: Cosmo was not part of this. No.
H: Okay. So he didn’t lose his money on the tower?
P: No, he didn’t lose his money on the tower. Nobody lost money on the tower that I know of. I think the contractors came out all right. They’ve never told me. I know Al Jensen pretty well; it’s a question I should have asked him Boone Powell 21
P: at some point, but I never heard him complain about it, nor did I hear...[inaudible].
H: And Ford, Powell and Carson was finally paid?
P: We were, as soon as we were hired by the City...
END OF SIDE 1, TAPE 1.
SIDE 2.
P: ...[inaudible] had done more work than we had, received compensation at that point. But that was just because of the nature of the project; we had to keep it going. But then when the City came onboard, we didn’t have any problems with the City. The whole process of working with the City was completely smooth; we had good people to work with, we had no problems whatsoever with the City, once we got the contract.
H: It’s been almost thirty-five years, and you still keep track of the tower. You have any idea of how many people have been up in your tower?
P: I do not know. No, I assume somebody has those numbers. I know that enough people have been up that it not only paid for itself, but I think it paid off a little early. It was going to be a seventeen year payout, as I recall. When I read some notes here the other day, and I think they paid off a little earlier...[inaudible].
H: So those were revenue bonds that financed it?
P: Yeah. The bond issue was an interesting thing - an interesting story. The original intent as the Fair Boone Powell 22
P: Corporation Project...and there was a special board that was set up and the mayor was a member of that board to do this work, five of them. And they were going to sell revenue bonds on the tower and build it with that. The study by a leading firm in New York City that does this kind of work said that it was a good investment, but it didn’t... it didn’t... As I understand, there was a problem with the selling of the bonds and that’s when the City came in, and it then became general revenue.
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...Or general obligation bonds - excuse me, general obligation bonds. At that point the City had to have a vote, and I was so busy doing what I was doing I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to all the machinations of that. But then it was the general obligation bonds of the City, and, as I understand, there was a problem out there. I know the mayor and Neil talked about it; I don’t know exactly how it went, but the legislature needed to authorize the sale of those general obligation bonds, I think by Cities at that point. And there was no time to do that. Now I’m not even sure they were in session. And Crawford Martin flew to New York and met with Merril Lynch and...
H: That was Texas’ Attorney General?
P: Yeah.
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...And personally said that this is a legitimate thing Boone Powell 23
P: and you can buy these bonds, you have my word as Attorney General for the State of Texas. And that also was critical.
H: Another important legacy of the HemisFair is the Convention Center, and as I recall there was some disagreements on the design, appearance, etc. I think you have some information on that.
P: I was working...I was working at the Fair at the time the first designs were published, and the firm had been hired by the City to do that. And O’Neil and Al and I would meet and talk about – Al Perry – would meet and talk about the design and the fact that it didn’t really...it wasn’t really appropriate either for the City, we didn’t think, but our specific interest was the Fair, and we knew that that building complex was going to be a huge part of the Fair, during the World’s Fair, and it would provide an entrance to the Fair. And so, what we saw in the design was something that looked almost like the things the Texas Highway Department was building - porcelain, enamel and glass. It didn’t seem to speak to the character of San Antonio on one hand, nor did it open itself up in some way so that you could come from the...[inaudible] - main center of the City into the Fair through it. And so as a consequence of a number of meetings, Lila Cockrell got involved with us and supported us and others. There was a decision that they had to redesign, and they had to use something like arches or Boone Powell 24
P: something that brought it to San Antonio. And they should build it out of brick and there should be some kind of an entry feature of water that came into it. And all of those things were done. And I think, actually, Tommy Noonan was the architect, and I think given the little time he had and the kind of work that he typically did, he made a really good effort - redirected the design and made a lot of difference to the way HemisFair worked because of what he did.
H: And the river was extended into the Convention Center there by the...what is now the Lila Cockrell Theater?
P: Right.
H: And people could take a river barge.
P: That’s right. And so that was really a key part. At one point very early on these things...these plans on the wall here are HemisFair plans. This was of the...of the three plans - the final plan and the first initial plan that we did and that I worked on very quickly for Governor Connally to see in ’63. This was the second plan, and then there is the final plan that was used. But one of our...you can see the amount of water that’s in that plan - the second generation plan. At one point we were hoping that we could have relayed that water to the river itself, but it became pretty clear that, fairly soon, that on that we couldn’t do - that it was perched too high. In other words, the land was too high to get that done. But...and this plan was doneBoone Powell 25
P: after, by the way, we got the Convention Center design redone. The first plan was not...the first plan showed a different sign on that corner.
H: Well, it...
P: Anyway we couldn’t do that. But we did want to bring water into the Fair, into the...on the fairground site from the main river so that people could come to the Fair that way and then we wanted to have a good bit of water up in the Fair itself. So that all those themes were tied into notions about how San Antonio should look, what was appropriate, and how we would extend the ambiance of the downtown and bring it into the Fair.
H: And the Convention Center wound up with a series of arches and arcades and...
P: Yes.
H: And open access.
P: There’s no question that wouldn’t have happened had not the Fair and us intervened. It became a major distraction, though. I think it was really...I think it really was a difficulty for Al because he was, he was...he had a position with the Fair Corporation of directing planning, Neil had direction of architecture and I was really kind of... Neither of them were working at the Fair at that time but I was and so they both tried to act through me and I – since I had close friendships with both of them - it was really not a very easy position...Boone Powell 26
H: Right. You were...
P: ...to be in. And...but...and the Convention Center was absolutely... Neil was more...he felt it was most important, I think, than Al did.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And I think...and it began to take a lot of my time and I think...
H: And Al was who? Al...?
P: Al Perry was...he was the director of planning for the Fair.
H: Okay.
P: I think they had already hired...set his position at that point. Neil was the director of architecture and design.
H: Uh-huh.
P: I had been hired as the site person, to put together an office and hire staff, and began to work. And I stayed there for about five or six months and then left to go back with Neil to develop the tower.
H: Thirty-five years on what are your most clear memories of the Fair itself, and what it did for the City?
P: Well, it...and I think...and I don’t think this is an exaggeration, although it may sound like it, I don’t think that the San Antonio that we have today could be...would have occurred without the Fair. I mean...I don’t mean that in just a minor way; I mean I think there are major, major Boone Powell 27
P: things that happened in San Antonio because of the Fair. One of the things that’s most simple to identify is just the Convention Center, which wouldn’t have happened without the Fair and the business that it’s brought and the exposure we’ve gotten nationally. But even more, the river wasn’t a very popular attraction before the Fair. I mean, it was wonderful, beautiful - don’t get me wrong - but it really had no national exposure at all. A lot of people... for the first time, major cities, major journalists came to the city during the Fair, and it began a process of interest – people from elsewhere – thinking about San Antonio and thinking about the good times they had here and thinking about that quaint little river. And so, after a period, kind of a slow period in ’69, ’70, ’71, things began to pick up, and I think they can be directly attributed to the Fair and the building, starting with the hotel developments and the publicity we got. And from there on, it just kept going...[inaudible]. So all of that whole downtown sort of thing: the hotels, convention business, the development of the river and businesses on the river, come directly out of the...out of the Fair, I think.
H: Yeah. A lot of people found that we weren’t a dusty little town somewhere near the border.
P: They were found that we were a wonderful place that they could come and relax and enjoy themselves. And that was primarily probably Texans - it was people from Houston Boone Powell 28
P: who didn’t want to go to Dallas.
H: Uh-huh.
P: People in Dallas who didn’t want to go to Houston, so they could compromise on San Antonio. Austin wasn’t much of a destination at that point.
H: I remember walking the grounds in the mud in March of 1968 with Irv Wyman who said, “Never going to get it on time.”
P: Right.
H: I understand that H.B.“Pat” Zachry came to the rescue. Were you affiliated, did you see that happen - to finish the Fair?
P: I don’t know exactly how – there are stories about that that I’m not exactly sure how that happened. I don’t...the actual construction work was being done by people like Cosmo and Bartlett and Brand – there was a company that was doing paving and others, I think. I think the place where Zachry came in, there were stories about him putting up money, but I asked Tom Frost about that and he said that didn’t happen. H: Well, I heard he put us his people at cost.
P: Well, I don’t know. That may be true. The...I think what he did do, Joe Gaines sort of walked out one day...
H: Uh-huh.
P: ...Just disappeared. And didn’t even tell anybody he was going.
H: He was the chief executive of the Fair.Boone Powell 29
P: Yeah. And they...somebody had to take over and the most powerful symbol for someone who would take over was H.B. Zachry. And H.B. Zachry took over and filled those shoes, and then tried to make up for things that had happened.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Before, before...Zachry took over like June, something like that or late May, things hadn’t been going well. As I’m sure you remember, that Martin Luther King was assassinated...
H: Right.
P: ...Just about the time, the day the Fair opened. We couldn’t...we didn’t get any publicity that we expected and about a month later, the Fair... I think Jim Gaines cancelled all the publicity that had already been prearranged for it – to be held, to be put out in May and June or something like that. The Board...the Board of Trustees – the Board of the Fair - didn’t know that.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And until Zachry came aboard and began to piece together what had been going on, there was a really difficult period there.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And I think, from what I understand, his finest hour - Zachry’s finest hour - was holding everything together...
H: Uh-huh.Boone Powell 30
P: ...at a time when it was really iffy.
H: When things were starting to fly apart.
P: Right. But in terms of the on-going projects, I’m sure that he made people available to do certain things. But basically, every project that I knew of, would be built by a particular contractor.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And so I don’t know to what extent that, you know, extra people were used and how they were used.
H: We have about fifteen minutes left. Anything you’d like to amplify on the tower or the convention center or...
P: I’ve got a few little stories that I might add that you might like. Let me just catch what...I’ve told the one about the coefficient of drag, the issue of the height of the tower, taxpayer lawsuit, middle of the night work - pretty good job, wind tunnel tests, broken rods, oh, I’ve got a good one! It’s a good story. When we were working for...when we were working for the Fair Corporation, instead of before we were working for the City, the chairman of the buildings committee within the Fair structure, was a contractor here named Dan Rheiner, D.J. Rheiner.
H: Rheinert?
P: D.J. Reiner. H: R-e-i-n-e-r?
P: R-h-e-i-n-e-r, I think.
H: Okay.Boone Powell 31
P: Dan Rheiner. And Dan was the chairman of the building committee of the Fair, and he really loved the tower. And he took particularly interest in the...we were getting our compensation through his committee at that point and they had initiated the joint – the revenue bond program...Smith or whatever was in New York and they were going to sell bonds and all that was setup. and they needed...they needed a bid on this. And so, we were going to go out to bid and get bids on this sixty-four thousand dollar package – on this project that had hardly been designed but it was felt it was absolutely necessary to establish that cost. So Dan turned in a bid on this project, and I think he was the only bidder; I’m sure he was. And he resigned his position with the Fair Corporation only one day before he turned in his bid. In other words, he was on both ends of this.
H: Uh-huh.
P: And the bid...he bid like, as I remember it, about three point nine million dollars to build the tower. And Henry Gonzalez hit the roof. Conflict of interest, how can you do this? You know, this is no way to do this. You know ...and he really was on his high horse about it. And it was very ironic what really happened. Eventually he forced a re-bid. And by that time, the City had come in - same plans. And Dan didn’t bid...didn’t...wasn’t low. His low bid was four million, two hundred and some thousand dollars, and Dan was higher than that. And in fact, Henry Gonzalez Boone Powell 32
P: saved Dan Rheiner, because Dan could never have built the building – nor could he have even come close to building it for three million eight. So in a sense, it was...what Henry Gonzalez was afraid of is that Dan was taking advantage of his position.
H: Insider stuff.
P: Insider stuff. And he was going to make this big profit. But the exact opposite would have been true; he would have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
H: How much did the Tower finally cost?
P: Well...
H: ...[inaudible].
P: Somewhere up around four point eight million. The contract was for four point two something, but a whole series of things were done. As I told you, we didn’t have all the plans done.
H: Right.
P: We had to design the...[inaudible], add steel into the building; we had to design the kitchen that went in. There were just a series of things that just had to be done. Came up to around four point seven something – four point eight million by the time it was finished.
H: And today it would be what? Eighty or a hundred million?
P: No. I’ve thought about that from time to time. My best guess is it would be about thirty million. It would beBoone Powell 33
P: about five or six times as much.
H: Um.
P: But some things would be very, very hard to do. Anyway, I thought it was very interesting that he stopped... that he stopped the...
H: ...And saved the guy from himself.
P: Saved the guy from himself. It’s unintended results, which really helped everybody.
H: Uh-huh.
P: Because had Dan started the tower, we would never have built it, because he would have failed in the middle of it and then we’d have a terrible, terrible problem. One of the interesting things about how well it was built and how intricate it is, is that one of the things that the contractor was puzzling about and didn’t know what to do was how to keep the tower being poured exactly straight. And they had just begun to have availability of laser control – laser devices that could sort of be used to see if everything was being done straight. They finally decided not to do that. Elmer...[inaudible] superintendent, came up with the age-old way to do this - the way the Egyptians would have done it. That is, he got little tubes and he ran them all over the platform where the slip forms – as part of the slip forms – and there was going to be about fifty or sixty jacks out there - I think maybe fifty-four or something, little jacks. They’re going to grab a hold of Boone Powell 34
P: the steel and lift the forms up on the steel that’s just been placed, in fact. And how do you keep all this going exactly straight is the issue. So he ran these little pipes all around the platform and then stood them up in little glasses and then put rose-colored water in there and so you could by a glance, see, at any given point if the form was exactly level, because they’d calibrate. They had made it exactly level, and they’d mark where that was on all the water glasses - all these fifty-some water glasses. So if anything got out of whack, you could see it immediately, which was much better than lasers; it was much better than high tech; it was perfect. So it just lifted. They kept it all just straight, straight. And they went to the top. And when they’re up there at the place where you can inspect this, they found the center. Now the shaft is swollen a little bit because wood gets water it swells a little bit, and it got about an inch and a half wider as you get to the top of the tower. So they took a...they took and swung an arc from each of the points to the center and it made a little place in the center. None of the arcs quite hit the center - it left a little place in the middle. And so then ...and they came back and they found that the center of those arcs what was in the middle of that and they compared that to where they had started and they had missed it five-eights of an inch – five-eights of an inch. And Gerald said, “You know, Boone,” he said, “if you had put that in Boone Powell 35
P: the specs that we had to achieve that perfection, we would have had to add millions and millions of dollars to the cost of our bid. So that’s how true it is - that it is literally, absolutely a perfectly vertical shaft.
H: That’s a great way to end.
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 2.