The Eastside of San Antonio is a unique place within the context of downtown-adjacent neighborhoods. New development is sparse and few and far between, even just a mile or two from the city’s core, and pledges to bring fresh life and business sectors have gone uninvested. This can be keenly observed in the lack of progress on what was once deemed the future “Pearl of the Eastside” amid investor backouts and continued snags.
The Southside is seeing Southtown inch its way in, the Northside has been flanked with rapid development and the Westside has seen its major corridors crop up with storefront, eateries and businesses. But much of the near Eastside remains vacant or unchanged over the past couple decades, despite vows of investment as entertainment venues cropped up.
Both the stadium and arena erected on the Eastside of San Antonio in the past 30 years, the Alamodome and Frost Bank Center, came with a promise of economic boom. City officials crafted arena districts and community plans outlining all the growth that would come to the area. A lot of those promises never came to fruition (a sore point for those in opposition to a new multi-billion-dollar sports and entertainment district).
A key example is Essex Modern City – a 7-acre lot in between Carolina and Essex streets along Cherry Street, about half a mile south of the Alamodome. It came with vows of “rad tings” unavailable anywhere else in the Alamo City in a location that hasn’t otherwise untouched by development for some time.
“Essex Modern City started as an idea and is now more than a mixed-use urban infill project. It’s a social experiment that believes that good design and technology can create a more enriching way to live,” the website for the stalled project reads…