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The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

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Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#41

Post by sokoloff »

db48x wrote: post #5
dgfitz wrote: post #3

The engineering is fascinating. The river walk itself is hardly worth the trip.

It’s a pleasant spot. Texas is dry and hot as a rule, but the river walk is a level below the city, right at the water’s edge, with trees providing ample shade for the whole length. If you are visiting San Antonio you will definitely want to eat lunch there so that you can be in the shade during the hottest part of the day. But is it special enough to make it worth a trip to San Antonio just to see the it? No, probab…

> Texas is dry and hot as a rule

Brownsville and Houston would like a word… (Texas is a huge state and coastal Texas is not dry.)

Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#42

Post by austin-cheney »

stevenwoo wrote: post #18
AlotOfReading wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty revisionist. Slavery wasn't some ancillary factor that just happened to exist in Texas. It was core to the anglo side of the Texas revolution. The War Party was strongly proslavery and the increasing (Mexican) federal push towards abolition was a key point for them. They especially hated a Mexican predecessor to the Emancipation Proclamation called the Guerrero decree that (attempted to) free most slav…

As someone who went to public school in Texas, the textbooks in Texas are vetted by revisionists who still claim the Civil War was about states rights and not slavery, my civic teacher argued this repeatedly in the 1980s. A lot of kids are indoctrinated with the BS that downplay the slavery aspect, it's like the Big Lie of the south.

It was both. The succession was only about slavery. The economic motivation was only about slavery. The political motivation, after slavery, really was about states rights and that directly influenced all other factors even contributing to a weaker, fragmented, and less well funded military.

The name for post civil war revisionism is the Lost Cause Movement, by the way.

I too attended Texas public schools during that period and did not encounter any such revisionism. It was there that I learned succession started by 14 planters in South Carolina and spread to other states. I have since completed a history minor in college and completed book reports on the subject for military education professional development. Looking back the slant you speak of wasn’t there for me.

The political slant I do remember, though, is that the American Revolution was all about freedom. Not wanting to pay taxes hardly came up.

Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#43

Post by larrydag »

db48x wrote: post #35
dylan604 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it goes against the everything is bigger in Texas narrative. It’s just hard to express how small it is until you’ve been there. Once you are there, it’s just underwhelming.

You may have misunderstood what you were looking at. All that is really left is the chapel. It’s just a church sized for a few hundred people. All of the houses, offices, barracks, work rooms, stables, storehouses, defensive works, etc, etc are all gone. They were left to rot when the place was abandoned for a decade or two, then cleaned up when there was an army present, heavily damaged in a certain famous battle th…

Also it should be equated to a wilderness fort. A fortress it was not.

Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#44

Post by perdomon »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

Last year, I spent some time in Amsterdam and stayed at an Airbnb whose patio/balcony-ish extended to a canal (my host was a super awesome person, by the way). As a tourist to the new experience, it was kinda scary for me but this seems to be a normal thing for the locals. Besides the ever-pleasing view, including the casual peeks from the window, I spent a lot of time, pretty much every day, walking on the sides of…

What was scary about the canals? That your patio hung over them?

Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#45

Post by wileydragonfly »

superq wrote: post #13
closewith wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remember all who died for your freedom there The Mexicans or the Texans?

No Mexicans died for anyone's freedom, including their own or other Mexicans. They were serving under a dictator and didn't have a choice. (And, yes, there were some slaves in Texas, but comparatively few compared to the rest of the South.) The small force there knew they would eventually be massacred by the thousands of troops surrounding them. The defenders held them off for 13 days. When they requested parley, San…

Isn’t it pretty much accepted now that Davy was one of the survivors executed the next morning? I suppose it doesn’t really matter either way, but surprised to see the “died with guns blazing” story still in circulation.

Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#46

Post by perdomon »

openrisk wrote: post #31

Interesting and refreshing choice to stick to a pure textual description without the usual torrent of photos. Needs frequent looking up of terms though :-) As for the river walk itself, living in Amsterdam predisposes you to treat the bone-dry, car infested asphalt and concrete jungles we call cities as weird places where humanity aggregates for ritualistic suffering. Discovering that San Antonio is different was a g…

Grady has a popular YouTube channel by the same name (Practical Engineering) with great photos, videos, graphs, and homemade demos. I am not a real engineer, but his videos bridge the gap between complex mechanical ideas and the layperson with well-designed experiments.

Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#47

Post by lotsoweiners »

dylan604 wrote: post #10
db48x wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a pleasant spot. Texas is dry and hot as a rule, but the river walk is a level below the city, right at the water’s edge, with trees providing ample shade for the whole length. If you are visiting San Antonio you will definitely want to eat lunch there so that you can be in the shade during the hottest part of the day. But is it special enough to make it worth a trip to San Antonio just to see the it? No, probab…

Not a bad comment until BAM! The Alamo is such a lackluster disappointing building. It's tiny. Even if you know it is small, it is still impressive in how small it really is. It is the exact opposite of knowing how big the Grand Canyon is but still being amazed at its size when you visit in person. It's also a total let down in that no bicycles were found there.

Did you check the basement?

Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#48

Post by db48x »

sokoloff wrote: post #41
db48x wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a pleasant spot. Texas is dry and hot as a rule, but the river walk is a level below the city, right at the water’s edge, with trees providing ample shade for the whole length. If you are visiting San Antonio you will definitely want to eat lunch there so that you can be in the shade during the hottest part of the day. But is it special enough to make it worth a trip to San Antonio just to see the it? No, probab…

> Texas is dry and hot as a rule Brownsville and Houston would like a word… (Texas is a huge state and coastal Texas is not dry.)

Yea, I've lived in Houston so I know all about how hot and humid it is. But the two areas are by no means equal in size: the hot and dry parts of Texas are vast and cover most of the state. There’s lots of variation too. El Paso is far dryer than San Antonio. But if you’re walking around downtown in midday in most parts of Texas the only thought on your mind will be where your next glass of ice water is going to come from.

Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#49

Post by db48x »

larrydag wrote: post #43
db48x wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have misunderstood what you were looking at. All that is really left is the chapel. It’s just a church sized for a few hundred people. All of the houses, offices, barracks, work rooms, stables, storehouses, defensive works, etc, etc are all gone. They were left to rot when the place was abandoned for a decade or two, then cleaned up when there was an army present, heavily damaged in a certain famous battle th…

Also it should be equated to a wilderness fort. A fortress it was not.

Very true. It was designed to keep out thieves, not an army.

Re: The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk

#50

Post by ifakeyou »

I have lived in San Antonio for the past 2 years as an international student studying at UTSA. Never in my life, I have heard of San Antonio, Alamo, or even riverwalk before I moved to San Antonio, later I heard lot of great things about the Riverwalk and caves of San Antonio when I was researching. Personally, I doubt it, I agree it looks great in pictures, but I don't even know why people like it, the water is super dirty, the only thing which makes it look good are the lighting decoration on the trees. Though the history of San Antonio is very fascinating, and the battle of alamo etc..Its a very quiet and boring place tbh :D
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