Southern Living, Jun 1999 by Ford, Gary D

San Angelo celebrates its past and anticipates its exciting future.

It's an honor to walk with Elmer and Anna Kelton down Concho Avenue in San Angelo, Texas, the first street in a city of time and imagination. We stroll along in the blue, cooling dusk, a day before the June event, Fiesta del Concho, begins.

The city of 93,000 sits out here 220 miles northwest of San Antonio, with the farming country of Lipan Flats to the east and sheep and cattle ranching among the blue hills to the west. Its heart still beats on Concho Avenue, filled with boutiques and restaurants in old buildings of native stone and cast iron, crowned with oldfashioned finials. Below the street flows the Concho River, and beyond the river stands the city's first site, Fort Concho National Historic Landmark.

Elmer, the author of 37 novels, set some of them on this ever-changing street. In The Wolf and The Buffalo, which takes place in the 1870s, the fort was manned by Buffalo Soldiers, and Concho was lined with saloons, cafes, and brothels.

In the transitional time period of The Good Old Boys, the early 1900s, both stables and auto garages arise along Concho. Finally, characters in Kelton's The Time It Never Rained come and go along the street of the 1950s.

"Concho Avenue then was busy with farmers and ranchers and oilfield workers. You'd find it pretty busy on Saturday," Elmer says. San Angelo, he adds, went into a decline in the sixties and seventies, but "now some of the biggest businesses are the shops back on Concho where it all started."

Restoration now flourishes along the avenue and in the city that goes by two other names. Outlying ranchers and farmers just call it "Angelo." They come to attend cattle and sheep sales, to buy handmade boots, and to stop in at the avenue's Concho Saddles, a business dating to 1884. It's now owned by Jeff and Karen Kimball, who handcraft fine saddles.

"Everyone within a hundred miles still comes to Angelo," Karen says. "Even people in Midland say there's no tack and saddle shop there, so they come here."

Across the street, around the tables of Jabberwocky's Restaurant &Tavern, natives and long-time residents call the city "S-nangelo." Many love this restaurant that native Carolyn Maynard restored from a 1926 auto parts store. She serves cornbread as well as scones in what she calls her "New Texas Cuisine," defining it as "a little bit of home cooking with a gourmet twist."

A few doors down in J. Wilde's, one steps into a riot of color and texture with fabrics swooping and swaying from walls and ceilings like a morning after Mardi Gras. In this imagination laboratory, Joyce Wilde designs women's blouses and jackets, along with robes, tapestries, pillows, and throws. Although shy and unassuming, Joyce pioneered the street's restoration, moving onto then-derelict Concho when it really wasn't safe.

Sparkling accessories for Joyce's creations await across the street at Legend Jewelers, where owner Mark Priest displays pearls found in mussels in the Concho River and other local waters. Set in earrings, pendants, rings, necklaces, and bracelets, the pearls sell from $90 to $5,000.

The pearls gave the river, and later the street and fort, their names. "Concha" is what Spanish explorers called the gray mussels, as big as old men's ears, that hold the beautiful, lavender pearls inside.

One former business, now a museum, spans nearly all the years of Concho Avenue. Upstairs, above Legend Jewelers, Miss Hattie's Bordello Museum preserves a 19th-century establishment that operated until authorities padlocked it in the 1950s-furnishings, clothing, accessories, and all.

For years it sat up there like a pearl in a shell, until it was unlocked, dusted off, and re-opened as a museum. Concho Avenue looks at Miss Hattie's with neither a leer nor a sneer. It's simply a quaint curiosity of the town's rough-and-tumble past.

It's late Friday afternoon now, hot and bright as only West Texas can be, and I walk across Celebration Bridge, a winding pedestrian walkway across the river that ties Concho Avenue to the River Walk and the river to the south bank where Fort Concho stands.

Locals fish in the river. Behind them rise the native stone walls and the copper, saddle-shaped roof of the new, $6million San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts. Opening in September, it will house what's been called the nation's best collection of 20th-century ceramics.

The museum gleams like the pearl in the city's new imagination. This civic state of mind was spurred in 1992 when the American Institute of Architects sent in a Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team, chaired by civic leader and local rancher, Lee Pfluger. The team, meeting with 2,000 townspeople, devised a plan to coordinate various renewal projects on both sides of the river.

One, El Paseo de Santa Angela, reinvigorated a blighted area with open-air markets and restored historic buildings to house a depot museum, restaurant, and senior citizens center. In downtown, the 14-story 1929 Cactus Hotel now houses a children's museum, the local symphony, and the offices of San Angelo Cultural Affairs Council.

Nancy Loving, director of that council, has brought in the fabulous Cactus Jazz Series, as well as promoting other performing arts. At Fort Concho on Saturday morning, in the early dawn, Buffalo Soldiers gather like ghosts for Fiesta del Concho's Frontier Day. While hundreds arrive for a pancake breakfast, the reenactors raise a huge flag above the parade ground and restored limestone buildings and take time back a century. Throughout the day, with snap and polish, they parade and fire and charge just the way Elmer Kelton describes in The Wolf and the Buffalo. Conrad McClure, a re-enactor at the city-owned fort for 15 years, watches the soldiers and smiles. "I've always liked that time and era. I like reading about it, everything," he sighs. "Maybe I was born in the wrong century." There is no wrong century in San Angelo, it seems. Each era has its place where time and imagination blend-here at the fort, over in the city, and down along Concho Avenue. Advertisement


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