COVER STORY, DECEMBER 2008

SAN ANTONIO’S PAST COMES BACK TO LIFE
Two former breweries get facelifts, as the San Antonio River Walk expands.
Coleman Wood

One of San Antonio’s most famous success stories is the San Antonio River Walk. The iconic entertainment district, which is also known as Paseo del Rio, was almost lost in the 1920s, after a severe bout of flooding caused city leaders to want to pave over the river. The waterway was saved, and it was later made into a park by the Works Progress Administration, which added walkways, bridges and tree plantings. Over the years, businesses moved to riverfront locations, providing residents and visitors with a variety of dining, retail, hotel and entertainment options, and the River Walk has expanded as its reputation has grown.

The city is in the process of extending the River Walk in both directions, opening up large tracts of the city for redevelopment. While many projects are under construction or in talks along these new corridors, two stand out as especially creative and unique. Both are former breweries that once used the San Antonio River for their livelihood and are now being given a second chance.

Lone Star Brewery

On the south side of San Antonio, the city is working on a $124 million extension of the San Antonio River Walk that will expand its system of parks and trails 1.75 miles through the city’s Mission Reach neighborhood to Mission Concepcion, one of San Antonio’s five historic missions. Back when this project was still on the drawing board, Austin developer B. Knightly Homes was looking at a property that the new extension would pass right by — the Lone Star Brewery.

The brewery, which was founded in 1884, had closed its doors in 1996, when its owner moved brewing operations to Longview, Texas. The vacant 400,000-square-foot building was ripe for redevelopment, though, and the approval of the River Walk expansion sealed the deal.

“It was obviously very fortuitous timing for us, because we actually started looking at this project before those envisioned improvements were actually funded,” says Mark Tolley, CEO of B. Knightly Homes. “The funding actually came through while we were doing our due diligence and, frankly, cemented the deal for us.”

B. Knighlty acquired the 22.8-acre brewery and set forth redeveloping it into what the company hopes will be San Antonio’s next great residential development. The first phase of the project will comprise the conversion of the brewery building into 180 residential units and 10 ground-floor commercial units. The site has been approved for up to 700 residential units, which will consist of new construction on the property after the brewery building is complete.

With prices that start at $129,000, B. Knightly is hoping to attract a diverse group of residents to the Lone Star Brewery. Marketing efforts by AMP! Marketing are attempting to appeal to a hipper crowd. Last month, the brewery held a concert for prospective buyers at the brewery’s newly reopened entertainment space, which was once used by the brewery to entertain distributors. The space has a stage, a bar and a dance floor; it is currently pulling double duty as the sales office for the project during the week, and an entertainment venue for prospective buyers on the weekends. Tolley says that there are currently 750 registered buyers that have toured the property or looked at the plans online. First move-ins are expected to occur in summer 2009.

The concert venue is only the first of many amenities at Lone Star Brewery. Residents will enjoy an Olympic-size swimming pool fed by an on-site natural spring, a gym, a spa, and 6 acres of green space that feature mature oak and pecan trees. The brewery’s two beer gardens are being restored and the 2-acre pond that the spring previously fed is being converted into a sunken garden.

The 42,000 square feet of commercial space at Lone Star Brewery will be in keeping with the River Walk’s destination appeal. Units will be divisible from a 1,000-square-foot bar space, to a 21,000-square-foot parcel that has caught the interest of two microbreweries.
“I see it being kind of a vibrant, artist-oriented anchor to the southern end of San Antonio,” Tolley says.

The project also features sustainable elements, such as a photovoltaic array that is being constructed by CPS Energy, stormwater collection in the building’s existing cisterns, high efficiency building systems and low-e glass windows. Tolley says that they are shooting for LEED-Gold certification but are hoping for LEED-Platinum.

“At the end of the day, we’ll have a very efficient project with hopefully extremely low electricity and water bills and an extraordinary amount of open space, all within gate-guarded security on the River Walk, in, what is one of the greatest cities in Texas, if not the world,” Tolley says.

Pearl Brewery

Pearl Brewery

On the northern end of the San Antonio River Walk another extension is under construction, and at the terminus of this 2-mile addition sits the Pearl Brewery, a 23-acre former brewery that is being converted into a unique mixed-use project.

“We would describe it as an emerging culinary and cultural destination,” says Paul Beard, managing director of Silver Ventures, the project’s developer.

Several of the buildings at the site have been renovated, including a building occupied by the Culinary Institute of America, and a garage that contains the first Texas location of the Aveda Institute, and Farm To Table, a restaurant that focuses on organic and locally grown food. The Pearl Stable, where the brewery’s draft horses were kept, has been converted into an event center, and the 10,379-square-foot Can Recycling Building now contains three residential units, a yoga and pilates studio named Synergy, and the Run Wild shoe store. All of the buildings were restored to their former state during the conversions.

The biggest project at Pearl Brewery currently is the conversion of the Full Goods Building into restaurant, office and residential space. Restaurants Il Sogno and La Gloria are both are set to open by the first of the year.

“There’s homage to these old buildings, which are being reused in creative ways, and there’s an existing group of tenants that have been here for some period of time. So they all have history at this point,” Beard says.

The biggest project at Pearl Brewery is the conversion of the Full Goods Building, which should be complete as of press time. The approximately 65,000-square-foot warehouse will feature two more restaurants: Il Sogno, an Italian restaurant owned by famed local chef Andrew Weissman, and Johnny Hernandez’s La Gloria, a restaurant specializing in Mexican street cuisine. Both restaurants are expected to open by the first of the year.

Several offices will inhabit the building, including event management firm CE Group, Texas Provincial Culinary Store, offices for the American Institute of Architects, the Nature Conservancy and Silver Ventures’ Pearl Brewery offices. Rounding out the Full Goods Building are eight live-work residential units and Full Goods studio, a high-tech media studio with broadcasting and recording capabilities for sound, video and the Internet.

Lone Star Brewery

One of the building’s highlights, though, is Silver’s pursuit of LEED-Platinum certification for the Full Goods Building. A highlight of the building’s list of sustainable features is a $1.35 million solar panel array that Beard has been told may be the largest array of solar collectors in the state. The array, which was designed by CPS Energy (the same company that designed the Lone Star Brewery’s array), has the capacity to generate up to 25 percent of the building’s electricity needs. CPS is using the array as somewhat of a “learning laboratory” to study solar energy production in a real-world setting.

Another new construction project is a new building that will serve as additional space for the Culinary Institute of America. Located behind the current CIA building, the project will include 25,000 to 30,000 additional square feet for the school, 14 rental residences, boutique retail space and a 480-space parking garage. In addition, Silver Ventures is constructing a barge dock for when the River Walk extension opens in May 2009. Current plans include the dock doubling as a stage for an amphitheater that may be built. Another new project is a farmers market that will start up at the beginning of the year. With many of the brewery’s tenants involved in the culinary field, a market seemed like the perfect addition to the project.

“We expect this market to evolve into something that will ultimately be germane to the general public, so that the general public can come to Pearl and find fresh produce at the farmers market that we will accommodate on site,” Beard says.

All of this new construction is just the beginning. Of the 23 acres that Silver Ventures owns at Pearl Brewery, only a small amount actually has been developed, and many of the buildings have yet to be retrofitted, most notably the brewhouse. With the potential to building an additional 1 million square feet of space, the next phase of development could go in any direction.

“There is far more undeveloped land available than what we’ve developed so far in this little corner we’ve worked in,” Beard says.

The San Antonio River Walk has been growing and evolving for decades now, but some believe that these new projects are the start of a new era.

“I think [Pearl Brewery] will just expand on the current experience,” says Gary Gallaspy, executive of director of the Paseo del Rio Association, a non-profit organization charged with promoting, protecting and preserving the River Walk. “[Silver Ventures] did a phenomenal job; they had great vision; and they have done the project correctly.”

“It really is a first-class project,” he adds.

Traditionally, the River Walk has been known as a place lined with retail, restaurants and bars, and hotels. With these two brewery redevelopments, a more diverse type of tenant is joining the community.

“I think residential will play a key role [in the River Walk’s future],” Gallaspy says. “I think you will see a cross-pollination of mixed-use: retail, residential and hotels.”

As the River Walk expands past the original Horseshoe Bend area that many see as the district’s boundaries in both directions, the future is looking brighter than ever for one of the city’s most cherished destinations.

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