SAN ANTONIO (AP) – Centuries of rainfall and punishing Texas sunshine are slowly doing what cannon fire and barrages of Mexican bullets couldn’t back in 1836 – disintegrating the Alamo.
That’s why the shrine is undergoing $5 million in emergency repairs, part of a sweeping, state Legislature-approved $31.5 million makeover that may be one of the site’s most ambitious since Davy Crockett’s day.
San Antonio, the state’s General Land Office and corporate interests are creating a master plan they hope will be ready next year. It will provide a road map for restoration of the Alamo and a face-lift for the surrounding grounds crammed into America’s seventh-largest city’s downtown.
An additional $17 million in future promised municipal funds will eventually push the total cost to nearly $50 million. Already, the state is buying three historical buildings across the street from the Alamo that now house such attractions as Ripley’s Haunted Adventure but could one day contain a museum and expanded plaza.
While future plans are being readied, two experts have spent more than six hours a day for the past month perched atop a crane, studying crumbling areas of the Alamo church’s mold-dotted facade. In places where deterioration is especially bad, they carefully created stone replicas and jigsawed those into place using crushed limestone mortar consistent with construction materials available when the Alamo was first built in the 18th century.