MAKING ROOM FOR HEMISFAIR '68

HemisFair ’68 was built on a 92-acre site immediately southeast of downtown San Antonio. Before it became the fairgrounds, the area was an established neighborhood containing homes, apartments, businesses, churches, streets, and other community spaces.

Creating the fair required assembling this enormous tract of land in only a few years. Properties were acquired through purchase and, in some cases, eminent domain as the city cleared the site for construction. More than 1,600 residents were displaced in the process.

The transformation was remarkably swift. By the time HemisFair opened on April 6, 1968, much of the neighborhood that had occupied the site had disappeared. Streets were altered or eliminated, buildings were demolished, and the landscape was reorganized around the structures and attractions of the six-month exposition.

Among the new structures was the 622-foot Tower of the Americas, built as the fair’s dominant landmark. Its reinforced-concrete shaft was constructed vertically using a slip-form process, while the enormous tophouse—containing the observation decks and revolving restaurant—was assembled at ground level. Weighing approximately 1.4 million pounds, the completed tophouse was then raised slowly up the shaft using 24 steel lifting rods. The process of lifting it into position took 20 days.

The Tower remains one of the most visible remnants of HemisFair ’68—and of the enormous physical transformation of this part of San Antonio.