Redesigning Alamo Plaza

[Odainsaker 2,134]

"Is this it?"  "I thought it would be bigger."  "Boring..."

Those are common visitor impressions when visiting the Alamo, the Shrine of Texas Liberty, and the signature landmark of San Antonio.  They are not necessarily wrong, for the Alamo really is lacking in relevant exhibits and the experience of visiting the Alamo doesn't feel like a visit to a historic battlefield shrine or a World Heritage landmark.  Meanwhile, a major American city has grown around it, turning the courtyard of a former Spanish colonial mission, a historic battlefield fortification, and a frontier archaeological dig site into a bustling urban plaza and downtown traffic artery.  Across the street from the Alamo, Ripley's Believe It Or Not has set up shop along with a Tomb Rider 3D Arcade and a Guinness World Records Museum, all while clowns and ice cream sellers peddle the throngs of tourists in the plaza.  How far removed it all is from the days when Franciscan monks hoped to the convert the local Indian population to Christianity on a remote mission plantation or when Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and the Alamo defenders tried to hold off the besieging Mexican Army of General Santa Anna.

Aside from the preserved mission chapel and long barracks, most of the Alamo site has been erased or buried under 180 years of modern settlement, surrounded now and even built over with buildings which are themselves being historically persevered as examples of their bygone eras.

With the power of Google Earth Pro, here is an aerial of the current site:

There are plenty of elements here to play with...how do we bring all this together into a spatial experience worthy of a heritage landmark.

A wild 1912 plan by Alfred Giles proposed a 802-ft. tower, the Alamo Heroes Monument, that would have dwarfed anything in the U.S.:

It would have been taller than anything else in the world except for the Eiffel Tower, with the actual Alamo shrine itself hardly bigger that the foundation of the podium.  Civic leaders opted instead for the much smaller and more budget-friendly Alamo Cenotaph.

Some have suggested recreating the fortified Alamo of the siege of 1836, an Old West Disneyland park which would require the demolition of much of the surrounding buildings siting over the buried footings of the original enclosure's walls.  Others, such as the Alamo Plaza Restoration Project, have proposed a massive repaving into a fully ceremonial plaza:

Several important local events have occur that finally spurred momentum of redeveloping Alamo Plaza:

In 2013, the Travis Letter, a romantic "Victory or Death!" appeal for aid by Colonel William Travis that mobilized Americans to the Texas Revolutionary Cause, returned for display at the Alamo for the first time since it was written and dispatched in 1836.  The Texas government likes to hoard such documents to itself back in Austin, especially when a letter like this becomes acclaimed as the most significant document in Texas history.  This is what people expect to see and read at the Alamo.

In 2014, British rocker and Alamo history enthusiast Phil Collins donated his collection of Alamo artifacts to Texas on the condition that a proper museum be constructed for their public display.  The $100-million Phil Collin Alamo Collection includes such items as Davy Crockett's rifle, Jim Bowie's original Bowie knife, and Santa Anna's sword.  These are the sorts of things that people expect to see when they visit the Alamo, but are currently not actually displayed on site.

In 2015, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, custodians of the Alamo after they first pushed for its preservation in 1903, lost their caretakership of the shrine after 106 years of stewardship.  The modern DRT had become fractured by infighting that revealed financial mismanagement of the donations and funding meant for Alamo maintenance and preservation.  The Alamo itself was placed directly under State government control through the Texas General Land Office under Land Commissioner George P. Bush, another aspiring political leader of the Bush family.

Also in 2015, the Alamo along with its sister missions were added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites as the San Antonio Missions.  This is expected to galvanize a major increase in foreign visitors, particularly from Asia, increasing foot traffic through the plaza the shrine site.  So important was attaining this goal that the City of San Antonio and its Historic Design Review Commission controversially crushed the planned Joske's Tower skyscraper in the Alamo's vicinity atop the old Joske's Building when UNESCO warned such development might jeopardize the Alamo's bid for World Heritage listing:

No amount of diagrams showing sightlines and shadow studies would convince the city that the tower would not impact the character of Alamo Plaza or cast shadows on the Alamo's doorway.  Texas defeated Santa Anna, but they caved quickly to the UN, and the project was nixed.  Now that the World Heritage Listing has been achieved, what are they going to do with the plaza?

The upcoming Tricentennial of San Antonio will be celebrated in May 2018.  While San Antonio has been invited by the Smithsonian Institution to bring its festivities onto the Washington National Mall for the 2018 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the city must still concern itself with its downtown centerpiece stage.  The incentive is to have transformative urban projects at a point where they too can be showcased as a part of the city's 300th birthday celebration, and there will be strong pressure to have the Alamo Plaza plan formalized by then, for the Alamo is traditionally the center of almost all local celebrations and activities.

 

This past week, the first images of a formal redesign of San Antonio's Alamo Plaza were presented as the Proposed Alamo Plaza Master Plan:

The Rivard Report - "Visuals of 'Reimagined' Alamo Plaza Emerge"

Among the highlights:

Alamo Plaza is closed to automobile traffic and the large traffic islands are reintegrated and re-landscaped into the plaza.

The plaza will be resurfaced with sandy gravel to emulate the more austere conditions of the outer courtyard of the former fortification.  The current large and shady oak trees will be removed in preference for more native plantings and desert scrubs.

Glass walls define the original lost fortification enclosure walls.  A glass arch identifies the location of the former South Gate and is meant to be the primary controllable entrance to the site.  Glass walkways reveal the excavated footings of the former south wall and palisade.  A glass wall to the north closes the site from Houston Street, allowing only a controlled exit from the plaza.

The Alamo Cenotaph, a memorial dedicated to the Alamo defenders in 1940 as the "Spirit of Sacrifice," will be removed from the north end of the plaza and relocated, likely to a site further east down East Commerce Street near where Santa Anna had the bodies of the Alamo defenders burned in a pyre.  It is claimed that with the new plan the cenotaph distracts away from the Alamo shrine and would incongruently inhabit the reimagined enclosure.

The Alamo Plaza Gazebo is removed.  The entrance path leading to the Alamo enclosure begins along Alamo Street where it narrows between the Joske's Building and the Dullnig Building, and proceeds north to the glass arch of the South Gate.  The gazebo interrupts this processional sightline.

The Ripley's Believe It Or Not arcade and other incongruous commercial circus and souvenir occupants are moved out of the Crockett Block of historic buildings.  There was a fear that these buildings, built over the footings of the western enclosure wall, would be outright demolished when they were purchased en masse by the Texas General Land Office.  It is now revealed that they will be expanded westward and repurposed to become a formal Alamo museum, housing the Phil Collins Alamo Collection.  The Crockett Block will also have a rooftop restaurant and garden overlooking the plaza.

The Alamo's stone arcade is removed.  Though wonderfully picturesque, this popular arcade is actually a false addition erected in the 1920s and whose attachment to the Alamo blocks views of the chapels structure.

Acequias lined with plantings runs along the west side of the plaza fronting the future museum as well as through the garden behind the Alamo.  These water channels connect the plaza to the Riverwalk and harkens to the colonial system of acequias and aqueducts devised by the missionary settlers and dug by the Christianized Indians to irrigate the mission's fields.  The construction of the acequias to provide the region irrigation is the primary reason why the missions of San Antonio were able to survive, whereas the missions in East Texas all failed.

__________

My take is that the plan has gone too far in trying to resurrect the Alamo of 1836 into a tourism zone while trying to erase 180 years of subsequent city history.  The argument is that the life of the city conflicts with the memorialization of the Alamo as a sacred shrine, and that ice cream vendors and balloon selling clowns detract from the space.  Back in the day, it was the chili queens selling homemade chili from their chuck wagon stalls., and later there was a Grand Opera House and even wax museums.  The open, dynamic city is being walled out, and a more controlled program missing only the tickets stalls is being put in place.  I applaud finally closing the streets to vehicle traffic and clarifying the patchwork of surfacings, but the image of the glass walls, especially along Houston Street with the image of the child looking in, really highlights the bubble world divide.  The most ominous was the night image, where the glass walls suddenly look more like night-lighted chain-link fences surrounding a soccer field.  Really, would the glass be much different than chain-link fencing, and if it were actually chain-link fencing being proposed, how would we then judge this plan?  All that glass is unnecessary, a low, permeable stone wall would just as easily define the shape of the fortifications while also allowing people to sit.  The base of the glass walls are proposed to be low concrete walls anyway.  But, then, loiterers sitting around and people-watching is a messy aspect of city life and not the programming of reflective contemplation being intended here.

Lastly, I am frustrated by the removal of the cenotaph and gazebo.  The cenotaph was sacrificed for the sake of not dominating the recreated small space made by the glass enclosure walls, but in an open plaza, even one with low walls, it is just one more in a series elements.  Similarly, the gazebo competes with the proposed glass entry arch of glass wall, but without the wall it is just one more anchoring element in the long plaza.  There is nothing wrong with the chain of special moments leading through the site, starting with the bright red "Torch of Friendship" sculpture, a gift from the government of Mexico to San Antonio, that would mark the entry to the greater site with the narrows between the Joske's and Dullnig buildings.  The next pearl in the chain would be the gazebo highlighting the end of the plaza in front of the historic Menger Hotel, followed then in sequence by the South Gate, and then the Alamo Cenotaph with the colonnade of the Federal Building as a backdrop.  That is a powerful sequence, and it already exists, needing only the right reinforcing to connect all the parts into a whole.

Ah well, this is only the first public images of the proposals, and much of the public has had the same criticisms, even as City and State leaders have embraced the plan with worrying enthusiasm.  There is an Alamo landmark in SimCity 4, so maybe we can experiment while they hash this one out.

[9gruntsand1hammer 3,194]

Another great history lesson.

The Emily Morgan hotel is beautiful, I can't believe I've never seen that building before. 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I more or less agree with you. 

I'd add that outdoor glass terrifies me. On balconies on condo towers or anywhere really. All I can think of is the glass either getting scuffed until it becomes frosted glass, or a car hitting it or someone shooting it. 

 

Also, I have to say, I think we're overdue for another San Antonio BAT from you... 

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Yes, I definitely need to finish something.  Hoarders tend to talk about all those unfinished projects they have planned out for their hoards, and I have hard drives stuffed full of hoarded reference materials waiting to be finished out as something tangible.  I suddenly want to do a San Antonio Missions BAT, which would involve recreations of the five historically preserve Spanish colonial missions, in the time from now until the Tricentennial in May of 2018.  The existing Alamo landmark in SimCity 4 is so ridiculously unsatisfying...does anyone ever even use it in their cities?

______

Robert Rivard posted a succinct commentary about the plaza project on his Rivard Report:  "A Public Plaza is More Than Dirt and Glass"

Yesterday was the fourth public meeting for the Reimagine the Alamo project, and the first since visuals of a proposal were presented.  Not surprisingly, the public outcry was negative:

"Public Delivers Strong Criticism of Alamo Plaza Redesign" - The Rivard Report

Alamo Public Meeting #4 - April 18, 2017 - YouTube 3-hour public meeting video)

This sort of public meeting can be like valium to watch, especially when it runs over three hours but there are some interesting information to be gleaned.

Admission to the shrine has been freely open to the public, but, after the glass walls go up, admission will require freely issued but limited tickets for available time slots so as to reduce the crowds.  We are assured those waiting for their allotted visitation times won't have to stand in the glassy heat and desertification of the empty sand plaza, as they will be issued alert pagers similar to those given at busy restaurants.  That they don't want to make visitors suffer too much in line within their own Zen plaza should tell them something is fundamentally wrong with their plaza.  My last visit to the Alamo was during a lunch break...I just walked all around downtown, did some people-watching and took some pictures, and at the Alamo I went right in and wandered through the exhibits.  I guess I won't be able to do something as simple as that anymore.

$450 million in City, State, and publically-donated money is to be dedicated to the project, but no Federal funds.    Not that Federal monies aren't available, but project leaders specifically want to bypass any environmental impact studies that necessarily come with Federal dollars.  Whacking down mature oak trees into order to manufacture an urban desert full of hot sand might not sit well with national taxpayers, and San Antonio already had its River Improvement Project dragged through the Washington mud when presidential-candidate Sen. John McCain specifically targeted it as an example of gross pork-barrel spending for the sake of river beautification during the 2008 Presidential Election.  Ironically, McCain casts himself as an independent "Senate maverick" in likeness to San Antonio land baron Samuel Maverick, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence who refused to brand his cattle, and it was Maverick's grandson Maury Maverick who, as Mayor of San Antonio and later U.S. Representative, helped pushed New Deal era funding for the WPA project that created the River walk.

One public speaker related the plan to Hans Christian Andersen's tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes," and it is surreal how much of a disconnect apparently exists between the project's Philadelphia-based team and the San Antonio general public.  The urban plaza is City land, but the Alamo shrine and museum are State property, and the overall project is being driven by Commissioner George P. Bush's Texas General Land Office as a re-sanctifying and re-memorializing effort for the greater symbolism of the State of Texas.  Little San Antonio's downtown urbanist concern's pale before the enshrinement of the State.  I haven't seen this kind of disconnect since the debate over the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., which was hurriedly built under the later Bush Administration with all site, design, and legal reviews bypassed by act of Congress.  It was then argued that the national memorial had be built quickly before too many of the now elderly survivors of that war passed on, and so planners did not have time to pause and reflect on the spooky irony that the chosen architecture of Stripped Classicism with its starkly regular rows of triumphant art deco pillars was in the vaingloriously fascist style of infamous Nazi architect Albert Speer.  At night, it needs only the Luftwaffe searchlights to create the Cathedral of Light...egads, is that big ancestor of night lights of the glass wall proposed for the Alamo?  While it's all polite smiles at the public meetings, there is a sense in the refutations that the presenters have already pre-dismissed the public's criticisms.

More ironically, some commentators have suggested directly seeking advice from designers in Mexico and Spain, where plaza design has an older and stronger tradition than in young Texas.  Indeed, it was Spain that that decided the original colonial layout of the first settlement of San Antonio around the plazas designs established by Spain's Law of the Indies, and seeking their input now despite the history of the Siege of the Alamo would be like turning back to the mother country.  A serious debate was brought up when the Daughters of the Republic of Texas first sought to preserve the Alamo, with some wanting to preserve and emphasize the convento of the Catholic Spanish mission and the Spanish and Mexican heritage of the city, while others wanted to preserve the symbolic shrine and memorialize the American-led revolutionary history.  In 1908,  Adina de Zavala proposed the recreation of new convent structure, and then barricaded herself inside the ruins of the Alamo in order to draw national attention to the need to preserve what little of the Alamo remained:

It's a fiction, as nobody then knew archaeologically just what the Alamo complex actually looked like, but, we might guess that somebody is thinking perhaps of Mexico City's Zocalo.  My own view is that this part of the city, which boomed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then was frozen-in-place by the Great Depression, is too far removed from New Spain and Old Mexico and really does have more in common with the Old South.  Indeed, there was a time when the charms of San Antonio were romantically equated with its contemporary colonial rivals New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston, and San Antonio was grouped with those Southern historical cities by no less than Mark Twain as mandatory stops on the American Grand Tour.  Look again at those yesteryear postcard views of Alamo Plaza...the scenic squares of New Orleans and Savannah are not really that far off, and I might argue that San Antonio needs to recapture those historical charms so as to once again compete with its contemporary colonial sisters.  The Menger Hotel on the plaza is an excellent example of the image and atmosphere, and while I don't like much of the plan's tree removal, the limited-access glass walls, or the loss of the gazebo, I do like remaking this area into a pedestrian-friendly forecourt plaza.  Some commentators have mentioned that the reimagined area for The Menger indeed does remind them of historic New Orleans, and that is a good start, as San Antonio was once thought of as a Spanish New Orleans and was even first built to counterbalance the influence of that French colonial city.

 

[SimCoug 5,972]

Seems like a neat plan.  I would like to be able to see the excavated original foundations of the gate... I remember seeing this done in a number of places in Rome and Athens to great effect. z

... The music in the beginning of the video reminded me of something and I finally pegged it... the movie Glory.  

[Odainsaker 2,134]

On ‎4‎/‎16‎/‎2017 at 2:15 PM, 9gruntsand1hammer said:

Another great history lesson.

The Emily Morgan hotel is beautiful, I can't believe I've never seen that building before. 

Though it is a beautiful hotel now, it was originally built as the Medical Arts Building, an office building for medical professionals to operate their private practices.  In the early 20th Century, these innovatively centralized "medical arts buildings" would be where a person downtown could receive a check-up with their private physician, see a referred specialist, or just visit a dentist.  When it opened in 1926, the 13-story Spanish and French Gothic Revival building was San Antonio's tallest, and the triangular site made it "San Antonio's Flat-Iron."  The top floors housed a 50-bed hospital operated by the building's medical collective, giving recuperating patients a commanding view of the city.

Amusingly, much is made of the seeming need to limit skyscraper development within sight of the Alamo, lest such buildings alter the historic integrity of the skyline as seen from the Alamo grounds.  This was the argument strongly pressed by UNESCO to block the proposed Joske's Tower.  The Emily Morgan ironically stands as a pointed counter-argument to the notion that tall buildings are necessarily incongruent and incompatible with the Alamo or its surroundings:

Interestingly, the Medical Arts Building was built with a wall-to-wall façade that suggests the street façade wall could be continued by later buildings in what was then a series of under-developed blocks on the fringe of downtown and the around the rear gardens of the Alamo.  That potential development never happened, as the Great Depression that suddenly ended San Antonio's 1920s building boom was just around the corner.

A competitor built a few blocks west of the Medical Arts Building was the J. M. Nix Professional Building, which opened in 1929 as the largest, tallest, and most fully-integrated hospital skyscraper in the nation.  Unlike the Emily Morgan, the Nix Professional Building is still run as the Nix Medical Center, and is a rare surviving example of such an early downtown Gothic skyscraper hospital:

 

Amusingly, the buildings I have most cited in this thread--the Alamo, the Menger, the Emily Morgan, and the Nix--are all considered the four most haunted sites in downtown San Antonio, which is itself claimed to be the most haunted city in Texas.  There are supposedly ghosts from Mexican and Texican war dead, ancient Indian burial grounds, lost Spanish conquistadors, disappeared French explorers, Old West saloon shootouts, forgotten Civil War heroes, atmospheric hotel mystery murders, sinister mad doctors, and old patient suicides.

I'm not a believer in the paranormal, but, yeah, that's definitely Spook Central.

I might argue its part of the life and liveliness of the city that Alamo Plaza is also a rally point for the annual Zombie Walks.

 

__________

 

It's not often that urban planners and architects get to work with significant sites like this, and this has naturally rocketed to the forefront of San Antonio urban design.  For those interested, here are a couple of YouTube clips of the site for more context:

Alamo Plaza ground level

Drone footage of the Alamo at sunrise

Disturbingly, the proposed Alamo Plaza Master Plan will already go before City Council for approval on May 11, and we are being told it needs to be approved despite any misgivings and that is can "evolve" afterwards.  I suspect some deadlines involving the release of the project's $450 million in funding or the conditional donation of the Phil Collins Collection are at work, but the notion that we need to approve what we have now and maybe fix it later is worrisome given the deeply fundamental issues being criticized in the plan.

 

  Edited April 24, 2017 by Odainsaker  

[Odainsaker 2,134]

UPDATE

Last month the conceptual plan for Alamo Plaza was unanimously approved by San Antonio's City Council, beginning the process to restore the Alamo church, close the two streets currently running through the plaza, turning over management to the State of Texas's General Land Office headed by Land Commissioner George P. Bush, and dismantling and relocating the Alamo Cenotaph.  Interestingly, the controversial design proposal to enclose the plaza in glass walls has not at this time been approved, and will instead come up for review later.

I am dismayed at the removal of the landmark cenotaph, as its placement makes urban design sense within the full scope of the plaza, and I am suspicious of knocking down historic, symbolic, or civic landmarks without compelling reasons.  The argument that the cenotaph overly dominates the space and distracts attention from the Alamo church only holds true within the confines of a segregated plaza enclosed inside a tiny glass box (some are even deriding it as a "terrarium").  Indeed, the cenotaph would be too large and unwieldy for the enclosure, but, as I don't even support the glass enclosure, I then don't see a compelling reason to remove the cenotaph.  However, we learned that the desire for the glass walls was pushed upon the designers as an addition to the project's vision and guiding principles by State, which has become concerned about security and considers the Alamo a soft target for potential terrorism.  Additionally, the private Alamo Endowment, the third partner along with the State and the City and which is responsible for raising private funding to cover half of the $450 million project, may have pushed for the walls as some suspect it hopes to later oversee concessions within the newly controlled space.  What was sugarcoated as an impressionistic reconstruction of the historical wall enclosure to aid in the storytelling of the Shrine of Texas Liberty has been revealed to be a Trump-esque wall to keep out poor Mexicans and radicalized Muslims.

There was some huffing over the timing of this vote, as it was scheduled on May 11, barely a week after San Antonio's local General Elections on May 6th.  An unusual number of the city council races saw their incumbents fall or their races go into runoff, leaving the vote on the most symbolically significant urban design project in Texas left to a lame duck council, most of whose members would not be returning.  Surprisingly, the race for mayor also went into a runoff, and the Alamo project's challenges with the democracy urban public spaces versus glass walls suddenly arose as a campaign question between incumbent Mayor Ivy Taylor and challenger Councilman Ron Nirenberg.  Councilman Nirenberg has vocally called to "take down those walls," while Mayor Taylor has ducked behind the vague need respect the design process.  As the leader of the council of a city that is an equal partner in this project, she needs to be able to articulate the vital interest the city has in its own civic plaza.

I have not been a fan of Mayor Ivy Taylor, whose first major city design decision was to pull the plug on San Antonio's downtown streetcar project just months before construction was to begin.  The controversial-yet-innovative downtown mass transit project was shepherded to the fore by her predecessor Mayor Julián Castro as part of his "Decade of Downtown" initiative, but when he was later tapped by President Barack Obama to become U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the project was suddenly left without its most visible cheerleader, and the remaining City Council under Interim Mayor Taylor got cold feet in the face of the looming conservative and suburban backlash that burst forth with the 2014 U.S. Elections.  Part of that election backlash was a poison pill amendment to the City Charter specifically designed to stifle any future attempts to install rail-based mass transit.  Had this not occurred, the downtown San Antonio streetcar system modeled after Vienna's would now already be in operation, a relatively cheap mass transit keystone for broader light rail, regional commuter rail, and downtown revitalization.  Instead, our leaders have sheepishly let mass transit policy disputes get chiseled into city charter amendments, part of a wave of extreme obstructionist politics that has emboldened some to even try to insert practical barriers to rail mass transit into the state constitution.

Over the past three years, the sense is that the momentum for San Antonio's urban development has been lost.  The economic conditions of the city has not changed, but the leadership had, with Mayor Taylor drawing much more of her political base from the more conservative suburbs than her predecessor Mayor Castro, who reactionaries had painted as a communist terrorist illegal immigrant.  Taylor has generally tried to play it safe, appealing to those who complacently do not want to rock the boat socially, politically, and urbanistically, and that scaling back has brought stagnation, disappointment, and squandered opportunities.  Her hamstrung disinterest in challenging the mistake of enclosing the signature heritage landmark at the heart of the city into a segregated terrarium is just one symptom of that lackluster malaise.

The runoff elections leftover from May were held today, June 10th, and based solely on these two projects, the cancelled streetcar system and the re-imaging of Alamo Plaza, I voted against Mayor Ivy Taylor and for Councilman Ron Nirenberg.  There were other issues raised during the election and runoff campaign involving sanctuary city lawsuits, LGBT rights, philosophies of religion versus poverty, and city council corruption, but I can honestly say my own vote for mayor was specifically driven by the sorts of things some of us here might play with in our SimCities!  There was also a runoff for my district city councilmember, and while most such hopelessly local elections focus on forever mundane things like sidewalk and pothole repair or greater law enforcement, the clincher for me was that one candidate actually mentioned the phrase "linear park," an urban design concept the city has long been trying to stitch together into a comprehensive network ringing and criss-crossing the city along its many creeks.  Potholes will always form and get filled, but appreciating a linear park system takes greater vision, and I voted for that candidate.

A few hours ago, it was announced that Ron Nirenberg had defeated incumbent Ivy Taylor to become the next elected Mayor of San Antonio.  The vote was 54,010 to 44,919, with a margin of 9,091.  Turnout in a city of a million eligible voters was dismal as always, but I did my part, and I can imagine myself as that last little digit in the voting margin.  My "linear park" candidate didn't make it, but local progressives are rejoicing at the election of a new, fresh mayor and the ousting of the majority of the old city council.