Ursuline Convent

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Literary San Antonio The Ursuline Convent (Southwest School of Art and Craft )
Early photo of Ursuline Academy (DRT Library)	The old Ursuline Convent, recently re-christened The Southwest School of Art and Craft, is located on what is now the north side of downtown San Antonio, along the banks of the San Antonio River. A local architect and civic leader named Giraud built the limestone structure during the mid-nineteenth century for a group of French nuns from New Orleans. Sydney Lanier praised it in 1873, along with the San Fernando Cathedral, as one of the most impressive structures in the city:
	Strolling up the river a quarter of a mile, one comes upon a long white stone building which has evidently had much trouble to accommodate itself to the site upon which it is built, and whose line is broken into four or five abrupt angles, while its roof is varied with dormer-windows and sharp projections and spires and quaint clock-faces, and its rear is mysterious with lattice-covered balconies and half-hidden corners and corridors. This is the Ursuline Convent; and standing as it does on a rocky and steep (steep for Texas plains) bank of the river, whose course its broken line follows, and down to which its long stern-looking wall descends, it is an edifice at once piquant and sombre . . . in the early twilight, when dreams come whispering down the current among the willow-sprays. (Lanier 242)
Two modern views of Ursuline Academy (Southwest School of Art and Craft)	About a quarter of a century later, O. Henry made fictional use of the Ursuline Convent in one of his stories set in San Antonio, "The Enchanted Kiss." The tale's lovesick young hero, Sam Tansey, having drunk too much absinthe in a nearby bar, wanders outside and finds himself directly in front of "the convent of Santa Mercedes, with which ancient and bulky pile he was better familiar from different coigns of view" (Complete Works 1:480). In reality, the structure could only have been the old Ursuline Convent, it being the only building in the vicinity which would fit the details of the narrative. While the sensitive Lanier had praised the architectural appeal of the convent, for O. Henry the quaint old limestone building functioned simply as a kind of gothic setting in which to fashion the remaining details of the plot.