san antonio

Of course, the Missions themselves were the real stars - but how could one not love the drive-in?

This is is Mission Concepcion, above, and San José, below.  I've wanted to see these for aeons - ever since I knew about them - part, I suspect, of a desire to experience American history as a complex and old history - one that engages with the Old World in all kinds of ways.  Certainly, I felt - and I know it's anachronistic - as though I was very temporarily back in Europe, or at least within a very familiar time-scale.

Here's the entrance to the church at San José: the facade was one covered in painted stucco (that, so far as one could see, looked like a bad lino design).

Here's some more recent architecture (Gothic revival, but with proleptic hints of Art Deco) in the form of the Emily Morgan Hotel - built in 1924 as the Medical Arts building (architect Ralph Cameron, from San Antonio); then an office building; then a hotel - seen from the Alamo.  It was built in 1924 - rather startlingly, to me, after my mother was born;

and here's a koi carp, in a pool in the lovely courtyard of the McNay Art Museum (below) - itself largely remarkable for an interesting, if depressing show about Coney Island.