Walkin' the East Side #4

I have a huge supply of these things!  And this is a good 'un.  Defenders of the Alamo, Vampire/Zombie awareness, and much, much more.

The main pix start after the break, but for the folks who don't want to click through, here's a picture of Marie trying to eat the camera:

Without further ado:

 This is on Hackberry Street, a ways up from the girls' school.  Used to be an icehouse, I believe.  They've been working on it off and on for a few weeks now, so with luck it will be reopened soon, and be successful.

Another abandoned building on Hackberry.  There are no few of them. I think this is connected to that yellow building you can see behind it, but I'm not sure.  Apparently once upon a time the East Side was a thriving area.  Integration changed that.  Businesses ran west to try to broaden their customer bases.  At least, that's the way the story goes.

OK, we actually almost got hit crossing Hackberry at Commerce!  Dude waited until we were about halfway out and then decided he couldn't wait to turn left.  There wasn't any traffic coming either, so it's not like waiting would have changed anything for him.  I had to snatch Bobbie back; she was walking just an inch or two in front of the stroller, and he passed not even six inches from her!  I called him every name in the book but of course his windows were up.

Anyway, that's not what this photo is.  This photo is one of the brand-new hotels that are situated, rather strangely I think, along Commerce.  I believe this is the easternmost one.  San Antonio is absolutely filled with hotels.  I guess maybe these get patrons from folks who come to town for stuff at the Alamodome and don't have the money to stay in downtown proper.  I dunno.

So, remember this picture from Walkin' the East Side #1?  You don't?  It's here.  Anyway, I noticed that day that the couch had been turned around to face the wall.  I presume the Blair Witch is off killing its companion or something.

There are certain names that just scream "unwed teenage mother".  Any misspelling of Chastity is one of them.  This is a tile on a bench.  All of the tiles on the bench seat are hand tracings & names like this, but this is the funniest name.

Part of the Friedrich building, seen through a plot at City Cemetery #1.  Randomly, the family plot under this tree had dead sod squares & its own sprinkler system.  I have no clue why...

This is Clara Driscoll's grave.  She funded the purchase of the Alamo on behalf of Adina de Zavala and the rest of the DRT.

And, virtually right next door to Ms. Driscoll lies John Lang Sinclair, who wrote "The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You", the UT fight song that for some reason back in elementary school I was taught was actually the state song.

Do you ever take a picture and later say to yourself "Why the hell did I take that?"  This is one of  those photos.  I think it was to show the difference between the old, sunken-in stones and the slightly younger ones in much better condition.

Front (top) and back of the same headstone.  I really wish more folks thought to have these mini-bios put on their gravestones.  It's pretty neat.  And I love that they had their nicknames (probably bestowed by grandkids) put on the front and the "important" stuff on the back.  By the way, although I have no idea who these people were, they were obviously high up in SA society--the wife is of the Mavericks.  (I was recently reminded that the Mavericks supplied most of the cannon currently displayed at the Alamo.  Also, they had a Spanish cannon found on their property melted down and cast into a bell for my church.  I don't think the Maavericks are still Episcopalians, though, or if they are they've switched churches.)

Dunno who the Newtons were, but they had a nice family stone in the middle of their plot.  Apparently the motto means "Fortune Favor Us".  It's also backward, apparently.

Two nice monuments from the next cemetery over (which I do not recall the name of).  I teased Bobbie that the Scheiners are the beer family.  Yes, it's spelled different, but one is the Anglicized version of the other.  I've actually seen a few family plots where German names were Anglicized somewhere along the lines & the spelling simplifies.

 You can see me in the background of this photo.  This cemetery (the same one as where the previous two photos were taken) only has one open gate--and it's a huge cemetery--so we went in long enough to snap the two pix before this one, and then went outside to go to Pine & walk up it because there's a playground the girls wanted to visit just on the far side of this cemetery.  Anyhow, I saw the historic marker and sent Bobbie under the fence to take photos.  And wound up being really glad I did.  Why?

Cool, no?

After the park we walked up to what I lovingly call the Ghetto-B (mostly 'cause of where it is, but also 'cause it's the one where my husband keeps getting panhandled).  On the way out I noticed another pay phone, and grabbed the receiver to let all the girls listen to the dial tone, which is supposedly on its way out.

The rest of these are inside City Cemetery #4...This is the girls standing guard around Marie's stroller, ready for vampires/zombies.  (It was starting to get near twilight.)

The main street of the cemetery, with the flagpole & the Tower of the Americas in the background.  I have lightened most of the rest of the photos so they can be seen, but this a good indicator of how dim it was getting.  Thus the stakes in the previous photo.

 

This  is the Confederate cemetery I've been searching for.  I figured it was somewhere in this cemetery, but this cemetery is huge, comprising several city blocks.  True story: Once, when I was a teenager and we lived over near here, my mother and I were walking home from HEB after dark, and we took a shortcut through this cemetery.  So we're walking down the main street you saw in the previous photo and we hear a very genial "Hello."  We both about jumped out of our skins thinking it was a ghost, but no.  Just a drunk dude sitting on a headstone with his 40oz.

This is the historical marker telling you all about the Confederate cemetery.

 This monument is very close to the Confederate cemetery.  I must assume it serves as a tombstone as well, as there are no marked graves near it.  The text from the side: BORN MATTIE M BLACKSHERE/AT FORT DODGE, IOWA/MARCH 18, 1868/DIED MRS. T. H. WINN/NOVEMBER 19, 1905. Who was she? Not a clue. It's always interesting to me when completely run-of-the-mill folks wind up with huge monuments (hers is much more ornate than Ms. de Zavala's, or even Ms. Driscoll's).  A Google search only turns up genealogy info.

This is located not too far from Mattie Winn's tombstone, but it's no one apparently related to her.  James H. and Norma Bindley are the names on the gravestones at the foot of this, people also lost to history.

Two more...

I noticed this a week or so before I took this picture.  That's City Cemetery #2 on the other side of the fence, which I've already visited a bit in a previous post.  We crossed over there just so I could get this picture.  The rest of the evidence of this wreck is just about gone--there were tire marks on the street (it was a right turn gone really, really wrong, from the looks of it) and a broken beer bottle that, given San Antonio, probably was connected to things.

I'll never get tired of photos of the Tower at sunset.  (Don't mind the smudge on the lens.  Pretend it's a ghost or something.)

Next time: we walk down Hoefgen and over to my alma mater and through the King William area.  Probably the longest walk we've taken yet.