Tivoli in Texas

Brussels, Seattle, New York, Montreal--and now San Antonio. Of fairs, there seems no end. Why another now?

For one thing, because HemisFair '68, which last week opened its six-month run, gives a big lift to the civic pride of San Antonio, long a sleepy city (pop.: 755,550) at the edge of the Texas hill country, previously noted mainly as the site of the Alamo. For another, it stimulates tourism: officials estimate conservatively that, during HemisFair, 7,500,000 people will visit San Antonio and will spend $35 million there.

But beyond this, the city has good reason to pick a fair as its 250th birthday present to itself. For what the city has really accomplished is urban renewal under the guise of a carnival, with the Federal Government paying a portion of the bill. Already the $158 million fair has turned 147 acres of downtown San Antonio "from slum to jewel box," as Texas' Governor John Connally puts it, provided the city with a permanent new $13.5 million Civic Center and contributed an impressive symbol of progress in the 622-ft.-high Tower of the Americas, tallest observation tower in the U.S.

Seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to inject new life into the city core, San Antonio has dredged out a short waterway linking the fair to the San Antonio River and threaded the 92.6-acre HemisFair site itself with a network of canals. It has refurbished its heritage by restoring 24 fine 19th century Victorian houses on the fairgrounds, and the area adjacent bristles with new construction, including the 445-room Hilton Palacio Del Rio, which overlooks HemisFair from the bank of the San Antonio River.

Bumplcins in Buckskin. As international expositions go, HemisFair is a minifair, only slightly larger than Seattle's Century 21 but only one-tenth the size of Montreal's Expo '67, the alltime giant. As a result, the exposition is "manageable in human terms," says HemisFair's chief designer, Allison Peery, meaning that all the exhibits are within easy walking distance. On the elevated "people expressway," no point is more than a ten-minute walk from any other, and for variety there are flower-bedecked barges plying the canals, a minimonorail, and that familiar world's fair fixture, the Swiss Skyride, lofting fairgoers 80 ft. in the air from one edge of the grounds to the other. Pure Texas: the massive outdoor air conditioners that cool off the busiest walkways, rest areas and queues.

HemisFair's modest size does not mean that there is not plenty of room for fun. The 43-second ride up the side of the Tower of the Americas in a glass-fronted elevator is a guaranteed belly-grabber. And from the tower's open-air observation platform, or its two levels of restaurants, one revolving at the rate of one complete turn every hour, Texas stretches out to the horizon 90 miles away.

As at Montreal, the multi-media mix of film and colored projections is everywhere, including the reinstallation of two of Expo's best received shows, Czechoslovakia's Kino Automat and Laterna Magika. One of the chief displays at the $10 million Texas Pavilion uses 38 projectors and 24 screens to convey a sweeping impression of the state from cattle to oil to space. Purpose, says Historian R. Hendersson Shuffler, who organized the exhibit, is to dispel the myth that Texas is built up entirely by "a bunch of hell-roaring bumpkins in buckskin who came brawling across the frontier and settled down to shooting each other at high noon in front of the village saloon."

There are some 100 restaurants to choose from, serving everything from Texas hush puppies and Belgian waffles to Breton cider and Polynesian pu pu. There is a delightful display of some 10,000 pieces from Designer Alexander Girard's collection of Latin American folk art and toys, and a $10 million art exhibition including 13 masterpieces by Goya, El Greco and Velasquez lent by the Spanish government, and a fresco of Geographer Amerigo Vespucci lent by Italy.

Second Bonanza. But the most dazzling display of all is at the U.S. Pavilion, where Francis Thompson, who won an Oscar for his 1964 New York World's Fair documentary To Be Alive, has triumphed again. With a script by Poet W. H. Auden and a score by Composer David Amram, he has produced a 23-minute documentary that captures both the pathos and the promise of American life.

The first five minutes of the film, titled U S (standing both for U.S. and us), are shown simultaneously in three separate but adjacent 400-seat theaters. Then, with a roar that sounds like a Boeing 707 taking off, the walls and screens fly up into the loft, leaving the entire audience of 1,200 engulfed for the duration of the movie by a vast, curved screen 38 ft. high and 135 ft. long. This is bombarded by images from three 17-mm. projectors, playing off magnificent shots of the nation's still existing wilderness against moving scenes of poverty, congestion and blight.

Come October, when HemisFair closes, San Antonio will reap its second bonanza: the entire site and its structures, 60% of which are permanent, will become the property of the city. Just as Seattle came out of its 1962 fair with a cultural complex that has immeasurably enhanced the city's vitality, so San Antonio intends to use HemisFair as a permanent civic and cultural center. There to be used and en joyed will be a 200,000-sq.-ft. convention hall and a 3,800-seat auditorium. The Texas Pavilion will be converted into a history-oriented Institute of Texas Cultures, and plans are afoot to maintain the spruced-up grounds as a Texas version of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens. As for the sculpted concrete Tower of the Americas, San Antonians expect it to remain as much a symbol of the city as Paris' Eiffel Tower. And all that, for citizens of San Antonio, is fair enough reason for the fair.

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