Garden Street Renamed to S St Mary’s

The Hermann Sons Home Association main entrance did not alway open to S. St. Mary’s Street. The earliest visitors to the building entered from Garden Street. Of course it was not the building or door that moved, but rather the street name that changed. The Home Association was originally built at 225 Garden Street.

Even Garden Street was not the original street name, although that name likely dates back to the 1860s, possibly earlier, when the King William and Lavaca neighborhoods were being established. South Presa and the original South St. Mary’s Streets were laid out at that time. The first name given to this early artery was Calle del Paso according to an 1836 map of San Antonio de Bexar.

San Antonio has had plenty of street name changes over the years, and they are often contentious. More than 100 years ago Garden Street was no exception. Several variations were proposed over the years, including absorbing Garden Street into Roosevelt or Navarro. You can look at a present-day map and understand why the naming was troubling — it was (and still kinda remains) a single street with multiple names. It was once even compared to Halsted Street in Chicago which “was 27 miles long and crooked as any street in San Antonio, yet…known as Halsted Street from one end to the other.” It was suggested that Garden Street should progress similarly.

The conversation about renaming Garden Street started in 1906 when city aldermen were hotly debating whether San Antonio would be “progressive enough” to follow the lead of other cities in the United States, such as New York, that were “systematizing the numbering of houses”. They were also deciding whether to continue using the river as the east-west dividing line, and whether to honor heroes by naming streets after them. At that time an ordinance was introduced to rename Garden Street to Navarro, then a few years later it was proposed that both should be renamed to Ursuline, but the matter of renaming Garden Street would not be settled for another 22 years.

Protesters through the years were generally opposed to changing the name of any street, as this was viewed as failing to preserve history. “Old names keep alive the stories of the past,” pleaded one protestor. Others were opposed to the financial burden it would place on affected residences and businesses. Garden Street was particularly contested because of the name’s historical reference.

Garden Street was once explained by a president of the Texas Landmark Association as so named “for along this street in former days gardens actually of rare beauty and splendor, a pride of the city once grew,” possibly referring the lush gardens that once surrounded the home of former Texas Republic Postmaster John Bowen on the bygone peninsula known as Bowen’s Island. She later described Garden Street as “that portion of the city bordering on the Pajalache Ditch (acequia) …really used as gardens in a more particular sense than other portions of the city.”

Throughout the 1920s the issue would surface several more times.

Finally on March 5, 1928 Garden Street was officially renamed to S. St. Mary’s Street following a vote by city council. Overnight the Hermann Sons address was changed from 225 Garden Street to 525 S. St. Mary’s Street. Naturally the change led to some confusion and was not immediately adopted. In fact, the October 1928 Hermann Sons Carnival event was advertised in the newspaper with two ads having two different addresses. It took Hermann Sons about half a year to settle into the new address, and we’ve had almost 95 years to get used to it.