The land cleared for HemisFair ’68 was not an empty tract waiting to be developed. It was an established neighborhood of homes, apartments, businesses, churches, and streets immediately southeast of downtown San Antonio. To assemble the 92-acre fairgrounds, properties were acquired and buildings were demolished, displacing more than 1,600 residents.
For those who left, displacement meant more than the loss of property. A home exists within a larger network: neighbors who know one another, relatives living nearby, familiar businesses, churches, streets, routines, and relationships built over years or generations. Clearing an entire neighborhood disrupted the geography that helped sustain those connections.
Alex and Sallie Grant had lived at 521 Peach Street since 1924. Their three-bedroom cottage was among the homes lost as the neighborhood was cleared for HemisFair. Decades later, their granddaughter Lee Grant remembered the upheaval and the effect it had on her family. Of her grandmother, she recalled simply, “She wasn’t the same after that.”
The experience of displacement was not identical for everyone. Property owners faced the acquisition or condemnation of their homes, while renters had no property to sell. Families then had to find housing elsewhere in a city shaped by longstanding racial and economic divisions. Relocation could provide another address, but it could not necessarily reproduce the community that had existed around the old one.
By the time HemisFair opened in April 1968, much of the physical evidence of the neighborhood was gone. Buildings had been demolished, streets removed or rerouted, and former residential blocks absorbed into a landscape created for the fair.
What disappeared was therefore larger than a collection of houses. It was a network of places and relationships built over decades—and once that network was scattered, there was no single place where it could simply be put back together.
