SAN ANTONIO – Long-awaited upgrades to a section of Brackenridge Park appear to be moving forward.
The City of San Antonio is seeking approval from the Historic and Design Review Commission (HDRC) for a series of upgrades to the Lambert Beach area of the urban core park. Project work includes stabilization and restoration of stone walls, the Grand Staircase and the 1877 Pump House. The city also wants to remove a number of trees in the area, which sparked legal challenges. The renovations were first approved in the 2017 bond election.
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This is the second time the project has appeared before HDRC. The city received a certificate of appropriateness from the commission in April 2023, but a suit brought by the Lipan-Apache Native American Church, which alleged that changes to the site would infringe on its civil rights, put the project on hold. Certificates of appropriateness are valid for 18 months. If a developer does not begin construction within that timeframe, they have to resubmit for approval.
The Texas Supreme Court ruled in the city’s favor in June 2025, and an appeals court reached the same conclusion in December.
In a 2023 interview with the Business Journal, the city’s project manager, Jamaal Moreno, said the city aims to protect the area’s cultural heritage.
“It’s essentially trying to stabilize all of the cultural resources that are within that Lambert Beach area,” he said at the time. “Some of that includes the river walls, some of that includes the Lambert Beach retaining walls. We’re also looking to do some underpinning of the foundation of the Pump House. There’s also the Grand Staircase, which we’re going to be looking at renovating with a new foundation and then putting the stones back in their original place.”
Nearby, the Brackenridge Park Conservancy is pursuing a $10 million project that would see the rise of a new playground facility bordered by the San Antonio River, the Witte Museum and the Lambert Beach area.
HDRC is expected to take up the measure at its Jan. 21 meeting.
Read more of this story at the San Antonio Business Journal website.
Editor’s note: This story was published through a partnership between KSAT and the San Antonio Business Journal.