- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I lived there almost three years and continue to commute there twice a week for work from Austin.
Stiflingly conservative, the city is composed of tons of military, families with 2.5 kids, and Catholic Mexicans. You get the sense they think GWB is STILL the best thing since sliced bread.
The neighborhoods inside the city look dingy and run down and dangerous. Further out, the suburbs with their palm trees and trellises are wealthy but dull.
Art and creativity and entrepreneurialism seem like something kept on life support only to tout in brochures of the city.
There are the hoi polloi, the immigrants and local poor, and the fabulously wealthy, who have had money since the beginning of Texas, who 'act' like they're open to multiculturality, but look down on the rest of the city from their lairs.
Granted, the Riverwalk is world famous and actually quite pleasing, but it is all but an isolated mini Disneyland in the middle of a dull moraine. The Alamo? I've never been a big fan of history or rusty old buildings.
On the plus side, SA is the oldest large city in the Southwest, so it has many unique hole in the wall eateries.
But overall, the longer I lived there the more I hated it.
San Antonio is the future of America, it is about the very rich enduring the very poor with little in between.
