John Tedesco

Photo courtesy of Ernest Ruiz

After a tall retaining wall buckled in a San Antonio neighborhood, threatening dozens of homes, rancher Ernest Ruiz called us with a tip about another faulty retaining wall.

Ruiz’s story had an interesting twist: The collapsed wall near his rural property hadn’t been constructed by Centex Homes or other homebuilders. This wall was owned by the city:

From a mostly quiet tract of land surrounded by the hubbub of urban life, Ernest Ruiz has waged a nearly three-year fight against the city of San Antonio over the failure of a retaining wall.

In the summer of the epically wet 2007, a city-owned retaining wall that sits between Pearsall Park and Ruiz’s South Side ranch collapsed during a rainstorm, sending dirt and debris onto his property and into Leon Creek.

“There were rocks all over the place,” said Ruiz, a 72-year-old rancher who has been buying property in the area since the 1980s and now has about 265 acres that he calls Leon Creek Ranch. “When that rain came, it tore everything right down the middle.”

While San Antonio rebuilt the damaged portions of the retaining wall and cleaned up its property, Ruiz said the city has done nothing to clean up his property, and he’s still trying to recover.

Ruiz found it ironic that the city criticized Centex Homes for not pulling a permit for the wall at the Hills of Rivermist, while the city suffered its own wall failure.

Jen’s story about the legal dispute featured some colorful details about the ranch — how Ruiz’s family likes to play cards on poker nights and fish for perch, and how the rumble of jets at Lackland AFB drowns out the country tunes from the AM radio in Ruiz’s Toyota pickup.

I like articles that paint a scene for the reader. One way to do that is to write descriptions that engage all the senses — not just how something looks, but how it sounds and smells and feels. Jen’s story makes you feel like you’re sitting in the truck cab with the old rancher, going along for the ride.

Cute video and story by Vianna Davila, who is covering the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo:

Mutton Bustin’ has become one of the most popular events at the rodeo, organizers say, garnering 479 applications this year from children who want the honor of riding an adult sheep until it throws them onto the arena ground. Of those, 220 were chosen.

I like the crowd’s reaction to the kids clinging for dear life to the running sheep. “They get more applause and cheers than even the bull riders,” said Tinker Kelso, a hospitality volunteer who helps take care of the children once their sheep ride is complete.

Jen and I wrote a story that ran in Sunday’s paper and was posted online today about the lack of oversight of retaining walls in San Antonio. We looked at this issue after a retaining wall in The Hills of Rivermist, a neighborhood built by Centex Homes, split apart and jeopardized dozens of houses:

Despite the growing popularity of towering retaining walls like the one that buckled last week, San Antonio officials have paid scant attention to the structures in residential subdivisions and can’t vouch for their safety.

No one at City Hall tracked how many walls were built over the years as thousands of residents flocked to the Texas Hill Country and developers reshaped steep terrain for new homes.

City inspectors never checked the walls.

And, according to members of the real estate industry, it wasn’t widely known that a permitting process existed for tall retaining walls.

“No one can find where the city has ever asked for or insisted on a permit,” subdivision developer Norman Dugas said. “I can’t find anyone who has ever gotten one.”

When you work a weekend shift at a newspaper, you never know what kind of story you’re going to cover. Some are kind of lame, but I liked this annual cattle drive on Houston Street in downtown San Antonio. I covered this event a few years ago and Abe Levy wrote the most recent story about the cattle drive, which kicks off the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo. I took this video of it last year when Jen and I were downtown on my day off. Good times.

I’m helping out with the coverage of the “slope failure” at the Hills of Rivermist, the neighborhood in San Antonio where shifting soil and a buckled retaining wall jeopardized homes. Here are some useful resources to learn more about what happened:

Feel free to get in touch with me with any tips or story ideas about #slopefail — here’s my contact page.

Updated 1-29-10: Two more useful Web pages that are new:

A powerful story by Gilbert Garcia and video by Vianna Davila explore the rich history and slow decline of San Antonio’s East Side.

The video is different from your typical TV news broadcast. You don’t see Vianna talking into a microphone and interjecting herself into the scene. Instead, the video has a documentary-style feel to it. Vianna patiently let images and sound tell the story. Awesome.

One of the cool features of Bexar County’s digital archive is that you can do crazy keyword searches for people like “David Crockett” and other historic figures in San Antonio to discover deeds and other public records filed in their name. Some of these records document important events in the city’s history.

Out of curiosity, I ran a search for “Daughters of the Republic of Texas” and sorted the results by date to look for deeds filed in 1905, when the nonprofit group became the custodians of the Alamo.

I found this deed describing how the Daughters, with the financial help of Texas lawmakers and wealthy benefactor Clara Driscoll, had paid $75,000 to the merchants who owned the Long Barrack on the Alamo grounds. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $1.8 million in today’s dollars.

The deed says the Daughters were incorporated for “the patriotic purpose of acquiring historic ground and perpetuating the memory and spirit of the men and women who achieved and maintained the independence of Texas and cherishing and preserving the unity of Texas.” The deed describes how the Daughters released the property to the state of Texas. The state owns the Alamo; the Daughters take care of it.

If you’re a history buff, you could enjoy hours of nerdy fun finding these kinds of primary documents.

Notice how this record is just a piece of the story. Clara Driscoll helped save the Alamo’s Long Barrack by opening her pocketbook, so her name is in the deed. But there’s no mention of Adina De Zavala, who persuaded Driscoll to join the cause of preserving the Alamo, and later famously clashed with Driscoll about what to do with it.

For tips about looking up historical records on the county’s Web site, there’s a FAQ page that offers search tips, and I blogged here about some pointers.

This weekend my cousin and I used Bexar County’s amazing Web site of historical documents to research the history of my stucco house near Woodlawn Lake, which was built in 1924. I blogged yesterday about the racial restrictions that were written in the first deed for my home. The deed prohibited the homeowner from selling or leasing the property to black people.

But the revelations about my house didn’t end there. We also found a notation in another record that shows what it was like to be a woman in the old days.

My house at 1714 W. Summit was originally sold to G.A. Wiegand in December 1925. A year later, for reasons that aren’t explained, Wiegand sold the property to his wife, Hortanz, according to this 1926 deed.

Here’s the interesting part: Check out the disclaimer by the notary at the top of the page:

… Hortanz Wiegand, having been examined by me privily and apart from her said husband … acknowledged such instrument to be her act and deed … and she did not wish to retract it.

In other words: Are you sure you know what you’re doing, little lady?

It’s interesting how the dry, legalistic wording of the public documents for my house are a window to a different time. They offer a glimpse at how some people ranked higher than others in society.

The Handbook of Texas offers a broad look at the evolving legal rights of women in Texas. In 1926, women had only recently been allowed to vote in the United States.

Update: Just found this old law dictionary on Google’s book search and it explains how married women in Texas who wanted to buy or sell property had to be “privily examined” apart from their husbands, in order to make sure the women really wanted to do the transaction, and to make sure they understood it.

The old but well-constructed houses in my neighborhood near Woodlawn Lake have always interested me. The homes are all different — my house is stucco, while my neighbor’s house is brick. But they share stylistic touches, like the tiny octangular bathroom tiles, the smooth fireplaces, and the phone nooks built in the walls. There must have been a skilled builder who constructed a wide variety of homes in my neighborhood that all bore his subtle signature.

My cousin and his girlfriend were in town this weekend. (This is my cousin — John Gronbeck-Tedesco. The Tedesco clan calls him “Primo.”) While I schooled them in a game of Texas hold ‘em, we talked about the neighborhood, which was developed in the 1920s. I mentioned we can look up the historic deeds to the properties on the county’s Web site. Bexar County Clerk Gerry Rickhoff set up a free, searchable archive of digitized public records that go back to the 1800s.

This morning Primo and I hopped online and we found a pdf of the original deed to my house, written in 1925. The home was sold by Busby Building Corp. to G.A. Wiegand:

Someone named L.S. Busby owned Busby Building Corp., so he’s the guy who built my cool house. Or at least he bossed around the people who built it. We found other deeds with his name on other properties around here. Busby was most likely the person who put his personal touch on this unique neighborhood.

The deed states that Wiegand paid Busby’s company $2,857.95 in cash up front. It looks like Wiegand also got a loan of $5,142.05 for the house. $142.05 went to the Uvalde Rock Asphalt Co. to pay for the construction of the street — West Summit. The remaining $5,000 of the loan was to be repaid at 8 percent interest.

So the price tag of the house and property came out to $8,142.05. That doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you adjust that amount for inflation, it’s nearly $100,000 in today’s dollars. This was a nice neighborhood — one of the first suburbs of San Antonio.

If you know San Antonio, then you know that historically, the city grew along racial lines. Most black residents lived on the East Side. Most Hispanic residents lived on the South and West side. And most White residents lived on the North side.

This pattern didn’t occur by accident, as the 1925 deed to my house shows:

There’s a deed restriction that says the homeowner is prohibited from selling or leasing the house to black people. The deed goes on to say that if this prohibition is violated, the owner can lose the house.

I was aware racial deed restrictions were the norm back then. It’s mind-blowing to read it in black-and-white in a deed tied to a property I own today.

Primo got his doctorate in American Studies and he told me about a 1948 Supreme Court case that ended deed restrictions based on race: Shelley v. Kraemer. The lawyer who won the case? Thurgood Marshall.

I worked a weekend shift today and covered this conference of the National League of Cities. It was a gorgeous blue day and on the way back to the office I took these pics:

View from above at the Convention Center

The Torch of Friendship

Hilton Palacio del Rio

St. Joseph’s Church

I’m not the best photographer by any means but lately I’ve been paying attention to lighting a lot more. The sun was at my back so I saw some shots that I thought were pretty cool.