Sex, Death, and Beer

Now that I've got your attention...

Following up yesterday's post about San Antonio Beer Week, today we'll discuss more history and beer, along with a helping of sex and death. But first, a little background.

It helps if you understand the San Antonio mindset. This place is the second largest city in Texas, and the seventh largest in the U.S. It's vibrant and fast-growing, with a large military presence. It is economically diversified - manufacturing, tourism, health care, and energy sectors all play major roles, along with a rapidly expanding hi-tech segment (in particular, a large cyber security community).

It is also a historic city - founded by the Spanish in 1691, home of the Alamo, one-time capital of the Republic of Texas. Teddy Roosevelt recruited his Rough Riders here (interestingly, in a bar).

Perhaps because of that history, San Antonio has always retained a small-town feel. It also has a huge inferiority complex. Houston and Dallas are flashier. Austin is hipper. Smaller cities have major league football and baseball teams (Buffalo?!? - GMAFB). And it positively reeks of diversity - real, nitty gritty diversity, where all sorts of people intermingle with each other on a daily basis because of their life styles, not because of some progressive mandate.

Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect who designed Central Park in New York City, traveled throughout the South and Southwest, and published accounts of his observations. In his 1859 book about Texas, Olmsted described San Antonio as having a "jumble of races, costumes, languages, and buildings," which gave it a quality that only New Orleans could rival in what he described as "odd and antiquated foreignness."

One by-product of that diversity is that things are done a little differently down here. Power structures are jealously defended. Networks and who you know are critically important. One hand washes the other so frequently that I'm surprised the politicians and special interest groups have any skin left on their paws. Which brings us (finally) to the point.

The controversy du jour revolves around a request to move an old bar. The bar in question, formerly named the Liberty Bar, has been around since the 1890s - or at least the building has. But the building has not been designated as a historical landmark. It's also the San Antonio version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. That means it leans, all right, but it's otherwise dilapidated and falling apart. The current owners want to move it a few blocks to a more suitable location, then restore it.

But...

The Historic and Design Review Commission on Wednesday afternoon denied an application by owner Silver Ventures to move the 1890s structure to the culinary complex a few blocks away.

Though the building is not designated as a local landmark (it’s never been nominated), commissioners said it should be...

(But) “There are no current plans for landmark designation,” (one official) said in an email late Wednesday.

(But) “The issue for me is that the building has become a de facto landmark whether or not its landmarked..." (another official) said.

So the poor owner, who just wants to fix the place up, reopen it, and provide jobs and beer to San Antonio citizens, is left twisting in the wind. Typical of how things are done (or not done) in these parts.

Now about the sex, death and beer.

Former building owner Dwight Hobart was interviewed to get his thoughts on the building's history and structural integrity.

“It was as though it had been designed and built by drunken children,” Hobart said.

(The history) began in the mid-19th century, when skilled European immigrants arrived in a wave. One was Fritz Boehler, a German who went to work at the new Pearl Brewery. He earned enough capital to purchase a nearby lot, where he opened the Liberty Schooner Saloon, Hobart said.

Liberty Bar - the early years

Built in 1890, the building was “poorly constructed,” he said. “I wouldn't call them carpenters. They had boards and nails.”

The “Liberty” name never stuck. During Prohibition, the business, a saloon and general store, served weak alcohol, or “near beer,” under a grove of trees, earning it the name Boehler's Beer Garden.

Boehler moved upstairs with his wife, Minnie, and their four children. He constructed a small house for a daughter, also named Minnie, behind the building in 1911. That same year, Fritz's wife slipped down a staircase in the main building, broke her neck and died. Fritz's daughter stayed upstairs to care for her father until his death in 1931.

Two years later, Boehler's was the place to party in San Antonio.

The night before Prohibition ended, in December 1933, people lined the distance between the saloon and the brewery. They cheered when Pearl made its first official beer delivery to Boehler's at one minute after midnight ... “The celebration lasted all night long...”

The Second World War struck, populating military bases around the city. Enter the unnamed Boehler cousin.

“She had the family entrepreneurial spirit,” Hobart said. “And she was a patriotic soul, and she saw it as her duty to entertain the troops.”

She and a few “lady friends ... began to do their best for the war effort,” he added, “and I don't think they did it for free.”

The second-floor brothel ended with the war. The building, somehow, was still standing when Hobart and a friend, Drew Allen, moved here from a “bohemian” life in San Francisco and started leasing it in 1984. It had survived two fires and various floods.

The structure needed attention, of course.

“Leaning is one thing,” Hobart said. “Buckling is another. It was starting to go down measurably by the month.”

Liberty Bar - today

Hobart and his friend ran a restaurant and bar in the building until they sold it four years ago to the current owners. What happens to it next is up to a variety of city boards and commissions, beginning with the aforementioned Historic and Design Review Commission.

If a 125+ year old former bar and brothel isn't a representative historical landmark for San Antonio, I can't imagine what is...

Liberty Bar - better times