San Antonio's Historic Hotels


Literary San Antonio San Antono's Historic Downtown Hotels: The Menger, The St. Anthony and the Plaza
The Menger Hotel as it looks today The Menger Hotel in the 1880's (Menger Hotel Archives)	THE MENGER HOTEL: In 1859, San Antonio’s most historic hotel was built next to the Alamo on Alamo Plaza. German immigrants William and Mary Menger were responsible for the construction of the fifty-room structure. Through the years the Menger has played host to so many famous personalities, literary and otherwise, that the hotel supplies visitors and guests with a self-guided tour brochure listing some of the more prominent names. The literary figures include Sidney Lanier (1873), Oscar Wilde (1882), and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) (1895). Not included in the list is the popular Western writer, Joaquin Miller, who stayed at the hotel during an 1897 lecture tour (Jennings 231).
Sydney Lanier Plaque in Menger Lobby	The tour brochure proudly quotes some lines from a letter Sydney Lanier wrote to his wife in which he remarked, “The hotel at which I am stopping is of stone with a fine paved court in the rear, after the manner of the Cuban hotels, and fair broad pavements in front where we sit in arm chairs and look upon the Alamo Plaza.” But Oscar Wilde’s visit in June 1882 attracted even greater attention.
Menger Hotel Courtyard	Wilde’s arrival by train was greeted by another, possibly fake, Englishman named H. Ryder-Taylor, who claimed an acquaintance with the literary celebrity. When Ryder-Taylor, working as a reporter for the now defunct Evening Light, went up to Wilde’s room in the Menger, he found the author complaining about “a feeling of lassitude which he attributed to taking a bath at Galveston” (Lewis and Smith 364). This melancholy was perhaps alleviated by what the tour brochure describes as a stroll “through the Menger patio sipping spiked lemonade and smoking long, foreign cigarettes.” Not that Wilde was entirely listless while staying at the Menger, for he was preparing to lecture on his new theme, “the basic agreement between art and industry” (Lewis and Smith 365), about which he spoke that night at Turner Hall, another historic landmark which has been subsequently demolished.
St Anthony Hotel Façade	THE ST. ANTHONY HOTEL: Though more recently constructed and historically less significant than the Menger, the St. Anthony Hotel, located a few blocks west of the Menger across from Travis Park, is more elegant and enjoys its share of literary anecdotes.
St Anthony Hotel Lobby	ROBERT FROST: The first few days of the Frost family’s stay in San Antonio during 1936-1937 were spent at the St. Anthony hotel, where Frost initially enjoyed the conviction that the manager recognized who he was. Discovering later that the man was merely flattering him like any other guest, Frost got even by warning him over the house phone, “Don’t be too glad to have us until you have looked us up in Dunn and Bradstreet’s and find out who you have on your hands. By some I am rated Public Something No. I” (Selected Letters 434). It was in this same hotel that the poet, his wife, and several members of their family enjoyed Christmas dinner of 1936 together.
Elegant staircase in lobby of St. Anthony Hotel	ERNEST HEMINGWAY: According to Hemingway’s biographer, Carlos Baker, Ernest and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, were crossing the Texas border from New Mexico when news of the Pearl Harbor disaster reached them by radio. The next couple of nights he was brooding over this and other events in a suite of the St. Anthony Hotel (Baker, Ernest Hemingway 370). Specifically, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins dated 11 December 1941, Hemingway remarked that "Knox should have been relieved within 24 hrs of the Pearl Harbor Debacle and those responsible at Oahu for that disaster shot" (Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 531). On the following day, December 12, he wrote to Charles Scribner, commenting on the his re-reading of Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and calling it "still the best and finest thing he ever wrote" (Selected Letters 532-33).
Plaza Hotel building viewed from across San Antonio River	THE PLAZA HOTEL: The Plaza Hotel building is located on the southern fringe of downtown San Antonio along the eastern bank of the San Antonio River, just before it enters the King William neighborhood. This aging structure at the corner of St. Mary’s and Villita Streets, next to the better known Tower Life Building, has been recently converted into a senior citizens’ residence and nostalgically renamed The Granada. Yet it made such an impression on the British writer Graham Greene in 1938 that he used it as a symbol in Another Mexico (The Lawless Roads) to contrast the affluent side of San Antonio with its extreme poverty, which also made a powerful impression on him. Specifically, he described the Plaza as a kind of ivory tower (in conjunction with the San Antonio River) “soaring yellowly up to scrape against the sky” (19).