south street

Before Hemisfair ’68, South Street ran through a residential neighborhood southeast of downtown San Antonio. Its houses were part of a larger community that had developed over generations. St. Michael’s Catholic Church, established to serve San Antonio’s Polish community, stood on South Street alongside its school.

In the 1960s, the area was targeted for urban renewal and ultimately selected as the site of Hemisfair ’68. The language of “urban blight” helped justify the acquisition and demolition of property. While some buildings needed repair, historical accounts complicate the idea that this was simply a deteriorated neighborhood waiting to be cleared. 

Nearly every house represented in This Area Is Condemned is now gone. St. Michael’s was demolished as well. But one living piece of the neighborhood remains.

A massive oak tree once stood among three homes belonging to members of the Recio family. Angelina Recio Pardo remembered the tree as so large that its branches stretched over all three houses. Hemisfair identifies the oak as a heritage tree dating to the 1820s. Today, the tree is known to the community as Angelina’s Tree

The tree survived the designation of the neighborhood as blight, the demolition of the houses around it, the construction of a World’s Fair, and nearly sixty years of redevelopment afterward.

In a place where so much physical evidence of a community was erased, it has become an monument to the people who once called this place home.

Read Hemisfair's history of Angelina's Tree and the residents of Germantown