San Antonio Meeting Planner 2007 - (Page 8) Top left: The River Walk is ablaze with lights during the holidays. Top right: Pedestrian walkways cross the river on a number of bridges. Below: The San Antonio Museum of Art. The southern terminus of the present-day River Walk is right across Guenther Street from Pioneer Flour Mills and the Guenther House; it’s hard to miss the tower proclaiming White Wings flour. The house, built by the founder of the mill in 1860, is now a charming museum of the period, but for our purposes it’s the restaurant, housed in a light-filled halfbasement, that’s the destination. Biscuits with gravy, hotcakes with syrup and sausage, waffles with strawberries… any of the above and more will fortify you for your urban adventure. Once well-stoked, cross the street and descend to the River Walk alongside the San Antonio River Authority building. Look upstream – what you’ll see is a kind of beacon that will be visible for much of your not-all-thattiring trek: the Tower Life Building. This multi-faceted 33-story tower, built in 1928, is visible from many points in the city – especially during the Christmas holidays when its upper tiers are illuminated in red and green. You can peek into the backyards of fashionable King William, with its Victorian and Italianate mansions, as you wend your way north, but the first structure presenting a serious face to the river is the old Arsenal complex. Built in 1859 to supply efforts “taming frontiers and borders,” the facility was also briefly occupied by the Confederacy during “the War of Northern Aggression.” Today, however, munitions have been exchanged for offices, as the muchrenovated structures now house the headquarters of H.E.B., the city’s powerhouse grocery chain, itself celebrating 100 years of operation. Speaking of sustenance, you shouldn’t yet need any, though a Hear Music Starbucks isn’t far away. Keep hanging to your right, past the International Center created from the shell of the former main library and you’ll soon come to the 1930s classic-revival library that replaced 8 http://visitsanantonio.com
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