The Briscoe Museum: A New Use For an Old Building (with some additions

 

 

 

PART 3 - The Briscoe Museum of Western Art

 

The history and evolution of the Library and Circus Museum into the Briscoe Museum of Western Art has been well chronicled.  The building was vacant from the closing of the Circus Museum in 2001 until 2006, when a lease was signed to renovate the structure as a museum of western art.  All the history and politics of this period pertaining to this decision, and the principal persons involved in it (notably Jack Guenther and his wife for its idea, donation of artworks and mustering financial support through involvement of the Briscoe family) have been spelled out in Emily Wilson's introduction in the recently published catalogue, The West Starts Here. A Decade at The Briscoe. The wonderful discussion of what is now the three-part Museum consisting of the now-renovated original library building, the wholly new Jack Guenther Pavilion designed by Lake Flato Architects next door and the McNutt Sculpture Garden next to that designed by the Ten Eyck Landscape Studio is fully discussed and analyzed in an article by Kevin McClellan inThe Architect's Newspaper, published in 2014, shortly after the Museum opened to the public.

As well as the Guenther Pavilion, designed to harmonize with the existing Library/Circus structure, but with contemporary integrity, Lake Flato Architects was also responsible for the renovation of the library and its conversion into a truly functional museum space.  The exterior continued to look as it had always been--edifying inscriptions and all, (though large bronze pieces now flank the main entrance instead of Hertzberg's elephants), with the addition of bridges and passages linking the old building and the new.  This included the demolition of the

Briscoe Museum Lobby

six-story stack area facing the river and redesigning it to accommodate galleries.  With the stacks gutted, the designers were left with three stories of open space.  The solution was to consolidate the mezzanine and the first story where the book stack tower had been and add the third story above it encompassing most of the building space on that floor.  The central space behind the lobby was therefore taller and more open, but by keeping the old mezzanine level with the staircase as a passage, it allowed an entrance there to the second floor of the Guenther pavilion (the Presa Street exit was closed off), and additional exhibition space was added at this level as a continuous balcony surrounding the open center space.  The third floor was divided into five galleries. 

During the restoration, a sealed closet was revealed within the stack space.  It contained several books, including a partial 16th-century King James Bible and later posters.  The reason for its existence is still a mystery.

The ground floor layout remained similar to the original library, with the former children's space converted and redesigned as a gift shop to the right of the lobby entrance, and the old reading 
room to its left divided into an activity space, renamed the Clingman Gallery at the front, a passageway leading to the Guenther Pavilion, and a second special purpose room off the other side of the passage (more on this later).

The only part of the interior that remained intact was the lobby.  "Intact" may be the wrong word here, since what was necessary to recapture its original appearance was to give it a thorough cleaning.  Restoration Associates, who restored the coffered ceiling and buffalo nickel frieze, reported that before work began, the gilt ceiling had become nearly black--tobacco stained--with stress cracks in it from decades of neglect.  The restoration, with workers often on their backs on a high scaffold, took some time, recasting the plaster coffering, and regilding the whole thing--not with metallic leaf this time, but with non-toxic mica-based paint, also used to restore the buffalo nickels.  Original lighting sconces and chandeliers were also cleaned and restored, and the electricity modernized.  What was once cork flooring was replaced by travertine, and the cowhide staircase was replaced by bison hide.  The polished stone on the entry way and its brass transom and doorway were likewise cleaned.

The restored lobby is a work of art unto itself and the warm interior is allowed to shine.  Aside from a Gutzon Borglum bronze head of Abraham Lincoln, small bronzes by Remington and Russel (and a small Russel painting of a buffalo hunt), the only other work of art in it is John Colman's Visions of Change, a colossal bronze showing a buffalo jump and presiding Native American on one side and a tired-looking cowboy overseeing a herd of longhorns on the other--it is so big that the transom had to be removed and then replaced to get it in the door.  An admissions desk is found where the old card catalogues once stood, and behind that is the new two-story gallery space with a full-sized replica of a Wells Fargo Stagecoach.  This room is light-filled with floor-to ceiling windows, facing the Riverwalk.  To the left, under the mezzanine

Mezzanine

walkway is a space for new acquisitions, while to the right rear is the Women's Gallery which contains works of women artists as well as some paintings by men illustrating female subjects.

The mezzanine level has narrow galleries surrounding the open space with paintings and sculpture, and in tribute to Dolph Briscoe, his desk and memorabilia in the area leading to the Guenther Pavilion walkway at this level.

There are five galleries on the top floor; the largest two with diverse works--painting and

3rd floor large galleries

sculpture again, but also saddles, spurs, a chuckwagon and old weapons and traps which brings home the idea that what we call "western art" encompasses far more than conventional paintings and sculpture.

A small gallery named for Kate Marmion, the late granddaughter of Governor Briscoe, has changing exhibitions of smaller paintings and photographs, many of them dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The third floor is completed by two galleries on the opposite side, one dedicated to a scale model of the siege of the Alamo--as populous and large as Hertzberg's model circus, and other Alamo-related material--some of them artifacts, others

Alamo matter

(painting and sculpture) dedicated to telling the legend as it later developed.  The second gallery houses the Guerra Family collection--paintings, clothing and saddles from Mexico, one of which dates to the 18th century.

Finally, back down on the ground floor is the Clingman Gallery, the multi-purpose remains of the original library reading room enhanced by an added vintage fireplace, its upper walls enhanced by sound baffles masked by large canvasses of WPA-era National Parks.  But something of the

Clingman Gallery (former library reading room)

original library is preserved too: glass-fronted vintage bookcases, now filled with a whimsical and changing display of small objects and artifacts.

Across the passage is a unique room: the Kampmann Library Portal.  In the Kampmann's original deed of land to the city, there was a stipulation that the site always be used as a library. It's a small space with some relevant library books and computers for access to the greater library system--which makes the Briscoe the only Museum in America that has a public library in it! 

        

All the exterior inscriptions and images pay tribute to the building's original purpose, but Shakespeare and Cervantes could use some updating--maybe to busts of Sandra Cisneros and Larry McMurtry?

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The very best history of the Briscoe Museum's conception and carrying out is Emily Crawford Wilson's introduction in the Briscoe's recent catalogue, The West Starts Here, A Decade at the Briscoe, published by the Briscoe Western Art Museum in 2024, and available through https://briscoemuseumstore.org/products/the-west-starts-here-a-decade-at-the-briscoe.

 

Kevin McClellan's article, "The Briscoe Western Art Museum," The Architect's Newspaper, January 24, 2014 can be found online at: https://www.archpaper.com/2014/01/briscoe-western-art-museum/

 

Details of the restoration and construction process was reported in the San Antonio Light, October 30, 2013, p. 107.  A conversation with one of the Restoration Associates revealed the use of mica-based metallic paint. 

 

For the mystery closet, see Scott Huddleston, "Texas museum's forgotten closet yields treasures.  San Antonio's forgotten closet yields tresures: 1615 King James Bible. Civil War War photos among 200 items discovered," San Antonio Express-News, Nov. 8 2010.

The Briscoe Museum: A New Use For an Old Building (with some additions)--continued

PART 2: The Circus (1942-2002)

The Library with upper floor additions (1943)

In 1941, plans were made to add another story to the front wings of the San Antonio Public Library, making it level with the rest of the facade and the stacks..  This would provide not book, but gallery space to house a special, very large collection of 40,000 items of circus memorabilia donated by local lawyer and politician Harry Hertzberg--willed to it after his death in 1940 (Herzberg also donated 800 books, mostly about circuses, but also rare books he had personally owned.

 On the exterior, these additions duplicated those of the ground floor, creating a higher, uniformed facade.  Inside, they expanded the old office space on the third floor to house two spacious exhibition galleries containing highlights from the collection.These galleries were opened to the public in January 1943. A catalogue summarizing their contents was published by the library around the same time.  

Numerous posters and photographs on various circus topics adorned the walls, while an antique ticket wagon, such objects as bull-hooks to control elephants, a coach belonging to the celebrated midget Tom Thumb, and a life-sized mechanical model of a famous 19th-century Viennese Clown filled the gallery spaces.

A scale model of an entire traveling tent show, complete with train cars, the big top, auxiliary tents and miniature performers occupied almost the entire floor space of the second gallery.

 

While regular folks were checking out books downstairs, they could also come up and stroll these galleries.  But for scholars and circus aficionados, this large research collection offered much more, and it attracted many people from all over the United States to consult its holdings.  It may have attracted some tourists too: the first part of San Antonio's Riverwalk, virtually adjacent to the building, had been opened in 1941, at just about the same time when construction of new addition was inaugurated.

 

During the period of the Carnegie Library and the newer addition until the late 1940's, public libraries were segregated, but African Americans (called "Race Patrons" at the time) were permitted into the Circus galleries as individuals and school groups during designated hours Thursday evenings. This would become moot when the library system was quietly integrated in the late 1940's.

 

The dual function of the library/circus galleries continued until 1967, when the library and book collections outgrew the building.  The library moved to new quarters up the block at the corner of Martin and South St. Mary's streets the following year, and 27 years later, as the Central Library to its present location, Ricardo Legorreta's architectural marvel--which in turn was renovated in 2023.

 

After the move, the former Public Library building was taken over by the circus collection, renamed the Hertzberg Circus Museum, still fulfilling the Kampmanns' donation terms for the building, as the collection was still part of the library, and Hertzberg's collection of books were still available there for consultation.

 

More space meant more room for more exhibits, and what had been library public spaces were soon filled with additional pieces from the collection. Most of the two original galleries had been occupied with displays of some of Hertzberg's favorite topics: P.T. Barnum, Tom Thumb and the opera singer Jenny Lind.  Now the available galleries created from reading rooms, children's rooms and the lobby itself, were crammed with all sorts of objects: storyboards  and miscellaneous circus memorabilia along available walls, and display cases. Except for the lobby

Tom Thumb's Carriage and Gentry Brothers Wagon in Lobby: after 1967

up to the balcony, all the walls were painted white. Tom Thumb's coach, a second ticket booth from Gentry Brothers' Circus and other objects now occupied part of the former lobby, with no regard for its art deco origins--with so much stuff along the walls and on the floor, why look up at the ceiling--or even notice wall sconces and matching pendant lights at all?

 

A sculpture of an elephant, once in Harry Hertzberg's garden, stood outside the main entrance.  It was subsequently joined by a twin, contributed by a private donor, and in later years these two flanked the entry.

 

Due to the donation specifically to the library of Hertzberg's collection, the Hertzberg Circus Museum remained under the care of the San Antonio Public library system, and the latter was responsible for its maintenance.  In the 1940's and early 1950's tent circuses, big and small, were still crisscrossing the United States, and bringing a grand spectacle to cities and rural towns alike, wherever there were rail lines.  But by the the late 1960's, things began to change drastically.  For one thing, the public library had expanded to nearly 30 branches all over the city, and allotted funds had to cover them all.  By the mid 1980's, when my daughter and I visited it, circuses as they existed in the days of Barnum, barely still--losing out to Mass Media, so nearly everyone could access a wide range of entertainment 24/7 at home (and particularly in pandemics).  Wild animal acts disappeared with the movement for animal rights and conservation.  Evil clowns in horror films were pretty much making them "family unfriendly." The

Sideshow Items: after 1967

many variously "freaks" of the side shows had become persons with disabilities; sumo wrestlers replaced fat men, and tall people could make fortunes in professional basketball, where they became admired and well-paid celebrities.  Daring acrobats could be Olympic gymnasts or find a home in the glitz and bling of Cirque de Soleil.

 

The San Antonio Public Library staff itself were conservators and disseminators of books, not museum curators, and the Hertzberg Circus Museum was suffering from neglect.  By the time we visited, the museum had become rather grimy and seemed more glum and strangely weird than anything else, with its cold dusty lighting and a circus soundtrack playing scratchily in the background.  We left after ten minutes.  

Hertzberg's will had specified that if for any reason the library no longer wanted it or could care for it, the entire collection be transferred to the Witte Museum. The circus museum was closed in 2001, and everything went to the Witte two years later.  The books and his collection of 500 World War I recruiting posters were absorbed into Special Collections at the main branch of the library.  In its new home, circus items are seldom exhibited, except those two outside elephants, which now, brightly restored, stand outside the Naylor Pavilion facing Broadway.

 

After its closure, the building would remain closed and vacant until 2013.

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The original two-gallery collection and its history was nicely profiled in Memories of San Antonio (which is where most of the photos here come from): https://memoriesofsanantonio.com/2023/01/12/the-famous-harry-hertzberg-circus-collection-opened-in-san-antonio-80-years-ago-today/

 

The circumstances of the museum's closing are briefly related in the Library Journal, New York, Vol. 128, Issue 14 (Sept. 1, 2003), p.22.

 

The libraries' integration is chronicled by Paula Allen, "Library's Integration Quietly Rolled Out in 1949, San Antonio Express-News, February 25, 2024, p.A4.

 

A nice catalogue of the Museum in its original two galleries, entitled Circusana, a Guide Book for the Harry Hertzberg Circus Collection, was published by the San Antonio Public Library c.1943.  It can be accessed online at: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015031946430

 

Jonathan Dewbre's brief video, taken during the Hertzberg's heyday can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpBL5TfNJqk.  It gives nice views of the miniature circus.

 

In 2018, PBS's American Experience featured a two-part series on the history of the Circus in America.  While no longer available at PBS, it can be purchased at Amazon.com either for streaming or in DVD form.

The Briscoe Museum: A New Use For an Old Building (with some additions)

                       PART 1: The San Antonio Public Library (1930-1967)

San Antonio Public Library c.1930

1

 

I've already mentioned the history of the buffalo nickel frieze inside the Briscoe Museum. The present-day building has a long history, and now is one element of a three-part museum with a modern exhibition space and event center, and a sculpture garden.  But the main structure that houses its permanent galleries has had two previous lives, first as San Antonio's second public library, and then as a circus museum.

Prior to this, the site had several uses, and I am providing links below for that earlier history and the politics and process about how it finally became the Briscoe. Here, I'd like to talk about the main building itself.  Its location, at the corner of Market and Presa Streets, just off the San Antonio River, had already housed a Carnegie Library opened in 1903, on land donated to the city by Caroline and John Kampmann specifically as a site for a municipal public library.  This elegant neo-Roman building, typical of Carnegie libraries around the United States, outgrew its space within two decades, and a flood downtown critically damaged it in 1921.  By 1928, architect Herbert S. Green was awarded a contract, first to remodel the old building, and subsequently to design a completely new on to replace it.  It was opened with a lot of fanfare in August 1930.

              

Library Main Entrance with Allegories

Green conceived of the building in the then-popular art deco style with clean geometric lines. The tall three- story facade was flanked by two single story wings.  Behind this the structure rose to the height of the facade; and contained the heart of the library, its book stacks. To the rear were two lower wings that matched in size those in front, also holding stacks.. The restrained decorations on its exterior echoed the refined purpose of the library with some literary mottoes thought appropriate by white masculine thinkers of the early 20th century. Over the Presa Street entrance surrounded with classical decorative motifs, a quote by the now-forgotten poet William Ellery Channing: "In The Best Books Great Men Talk To Us.  Give Us Their Most Precious Thoughts, And Pour Their Souls Into Ours." On the building's opposite side is one by James A. Garfield: "Next In Importance To Freedom And Justice Is Popular Education, Without Which Neither Freedom Nor Justice Can Be Permanently Maintained."  This one, surmounted by a frieze of a book within a rayed ring flanked by two Bison, seems ironic in the light of present-day book banning by our Texas legislature.

               

The inscription over the main entrance features the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson between two lions and two opened books: "Books Are The Homes of American People."  This doorway is recessed into a coffered niche that rises nearly the height of the facade, Higher up over the main doorway is a frieze of five venerable buildings which were considered important for for San Antonians: the Parthenon, the Alamo (the completed facade of 1849), Mission Concepción, the U.S. Capitol, the old court of King's College, Cambridge (supposedly the first public library in the world), and the Lincoln Memorial. Finally, flanking the arched portal to either side, near the top of the facade are two busts, to the left, Cervantes and to the right, Shakespeare. These figures represented two of the foremost figures of the European author's canon--Cervantes, perhaps because of the first Hispanic Europeans to settle San Antonio, the Canary Islanders, and Shakespeare for the city's subsequent Anglo-Saxon occupants?

The rest of the exterior decoration was sparing: a frieze of garlands along the upper story, and a couple of footed stands with urns on them on either side of the doorway. On the recessed wall by the Presa Street doorway was a plaque with the Gettysburg Address on it--a survivor of the library's Carnegie predecessor. The exterior was thus a cultured manifestation of the building's noble purpose--indeed the August 3, 1930 issue of the San Antonio Light called it "[An] Elaborate Monument to Literature."

Library Lobby

This dignified decor was continued in the library's impressive two-story lobby--an art-deco-neoclassic fusion. At its top, a gilded plaster ceiling of neoclassic coffering, with a frieze below it containing those buffalo nickel faces.  On three sides, the walls are divided into two decorative stories, the upper painted a dark green, the lower covered by wood paneling with a palmette frieze at its top.  Tying the two levels together are flat green pilasters, with gilded flattened

Library, Catalogues

capitals with geometric marking.  The wood paneled lower portion is divided on its fourth side (facing the entrance) by a wooden-railed balcony which forms a mezzanine; this creates a lower-ceilinged recess under it, which stretches beyond the lobby to the two side entrances.  The mezzanine was reached by a staircase with its risers covered in cowhide.  The staircase continued to a third floor that contained offices.

         

In addition, to the left and the right of the lobby was a reading room to the left and a room dedicated to children on the right (this room's function was later changed and the children's section was relocated to the basement).  The main entry to the library
was flanked by glass windows and pilasters of polished stone.

Library Reading Room

This was what you, in the citizen-borrower part of the building would see and use.  The greater, taller bulk of the building behind this contained six low-ceiling floors of stacks, which housed the
books--the heart of any library.  In 1930, the library operated on a closed stack system: except for some popular books on shelves in the reading room, and a limited access to some first-floor stacks off the same room, prospective readers and borrowers would select their choices from a card catalogue located along the lobby's back wall.  Once submitted, employees called runners would fetch the books from their designated place in the stacks. Everything was classified under a number code called the Dewey Decimal System, as it still is today in public libraries.  Back in the day every book had a corresponding typewritten catalogue card with author, title, and call number.  After the client received the book, they would go to the check-out desk located to the left front of the library.

           

At some point, the rather dimly lit lobby with its wall sconces and its art deco pendant lighting proved impractical for card catalogue scanning and book checkout space, and so drop fluorescent light fixtures were installed, partially obscuring the original coffered decorations above them. Wall air conditioners were also mounted into the windows flanking the main entrance.

Library with Air Conditioning units and fluorescent  lights

                 

The library proved successful and popular.  Soon satellite branches popped up around the city, but this original building was its hub--until the collection and demand outgrew it in 1967, when it was moved. But just over a decade after its founding, changes were afoot.

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All black and white photos courtesy of San Antonio Public Library.  The colored one was taken by the author

There are two sources for the history of the site and the initial Carnegie Library: the first is Emily Crawford Wilson's introductory essay for the Briscoe's Catalogue, The West Starts Here, San Antonio, Briscoe Art Museum, 2023, pp.13-33.  The other is "210 W. Market St - A History," a handout published by the San Antonio Public Library Portal, n.d., which can be accessed at: https://guides.mysapl.org/libraryportal/BuildingHistory

 

For the 1930 library in its original state, see:  "New S.A. Library Opens its Doors to the Public,San Antonio Light,  Aug. 3, 1930, pp.1,22.