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What Knoxville can learn from San Antonio

by Jack Neely

It’s the landscape of an appealingly weird dream. Large cypress trees bend over a shady stream, smaller than a Venetian canal. It’s crossed by arched bridges. Stairways, no two of them alike, lead up to a city of some sort just out of sight somewhere above our heads. Everything’s made of stone.

There are no cars at all, and no room for them. The bridges look like bridges hand-built by elves; even the sidewalks are narrow, designed for little people. You can’t always tell where you are, walking among trees and flowers, and around the next corner, among lights and music and crowds. Thousands and thousands of people laughing, moving in and out of bistros and discos and jazz clubs. Boatloads of people floating up and down the stream. It goes on like this for a couple of miles.

The first time I saw San Antonio’s Riverwalk, 26 years ago, I saw it sideways, dewy mulch clinging to my face. My two comrades and I had gotten off at the train station in the middle of the night, on our way to Mexico for no good purpose. The token Tennessean in the trio insisted that we see the place where Davy Crockett died. We found it without a map, at 3 in the morning, and rejoiced in it.

But then we needed somewhere to sleep. Down the street from the Alamo we spotted a wooded area, which we assumed was a park until we got to it and realized it was some kind of ravine with stone retaining walls. Just below the street level was a planter of some sort, a little shelf with bushes that seemed tailor made for three guys with low standards. We slipped down the wall to find serendipitous accommodations. I woke in broad daylight, with the noise of traffic above, and peered over our ledge to see a small stream I did not realize was the San Antonio River, with sidewalks on both sides, people walking around.

At 19, I had never heard of the San Antonio Riverwalk before, but I thought it was a remarkable place. The bus to Laredo left at noon; there was no time to explore.

In the years since, I had not been back, and I’ve wondered about it. I’ve heard rumors about the Riverwalk, also known as Paseo del Rio, mixed opinions about how wonderful or expensive or touristy it was. I heard a live weekly public-radio jazz show. This summer, I went back and had a better look.

In this state that’s home to Sea World, the Houston Space Center, the Alamo, and George W. Bush’s ranch, the biggest tourist attraction in Texas is the San Antonio Riverwalk. Every year, they claim, millions visit the Riverwalk, more than visit the Alamo, nearby. A good many of those visitors are apparently taking notes. Greg Gallaspy, executive director of the Paseo del Rio Association, spends a lot of his time in other cities, explaining to others how they did it; he says there are currently 36 projects in the works, especially in Western cities, that are inspired by the San Antonio Riverwalk.

Naturally, you wonder whether it could work in Knoxville.

Comparisons won’t work for every city. San Antonio now claims to be the eighth largest city in the United States: bigger even than Dallas, and in Texas second only to Houston. Downtown it doesn’t seem like that big a city. Parking rates aren’t sky high, five or six bucks, and neither are the buildings. Some credit San Antonio’s mega-size to some land-rush annexations; the city limits takes up an enormous territory of south-central Texas, corralling about 1.2 million people. In spite of the fact that most of them don’t see each other every day, the sheer volume of people who live close enough to drive to the Alamodome occasionally is plenty big enough to support a pro basketball team.

It’s a lot of people. However, many, perhaps most, of the people you might see downtown aren’t even San Antonians. Tourism, which has the Alamo at its nucleus, is huge business in San Antonio; the Hospitality Industry, broadly defined, is said to have an estimated annual impact of $7.2 billion, and accounts for over 86,000 jobs. One in eight employed San Antonians work in the business. A recent study claims that 15.6 million tourists visited San Antonio in 2002; an additional $4.3 million visited for conventions or other business.

They say more people visit the Riverwalk than the Alamo these days, but it’s clear the Alamo is what San Antonians have depended on for a century and a half; the doomed men who fought for the ancient mission, democracy, and their own necks in 1836, have inspired a dozen movies.

Now surrounded by downtown buildings, the Alamo’s the kernel of San Antonio’s booming tourism, their guarantee that there will always be a national interest in their downtown.

But there’s only one Alamo; it’s the American Stonehenge, our Dome of the Rock. Its appeal can never be approximated elsewhere. Barring a last stand against al-Qaeda in the Sunsphere, Knoxville will never have anything like it.

San Antonio isn’t very close to Knoxville physically, either. There are no direct flights between the two, and an airline connection might involve a stop in Chicago or even (in one bizarre circumstance) Seattle. By car San Antonio’s more than a thousand miles away; from Knoxville, Montreal is a shorter trip.

But the politics are comparable—Texas is still resisting the state income tax. And somehow the accents are similar: on the phone, some Anglo San Antonians could pass for Knoxvillians—and the cities have a good many historic links: both cities were founded in the 18th century, reputedly “on seven hills,” a classical allusion to ancient Rome that probably meant more to former Knoxvillians and San Antonians than it does today.

Everywhere you look in San Antonio, especially on the ubiquitous postcard and brochure racks, you see familiar faces, two in particular: Davy Crockett and Sam Houston, who both spent good chunks of their youth in our metro area. Davy Crockett, especially: display cases in both downtown Knoxville and downtown San Antonio display rifles once owned by Crockett.

You could make the point the San Antonio wouldn’t be what it is today if several dozen Tennesseans hadn’t gone there to die in an old Spanish church.

A more subtle presence is Sidney Lanier, maybe the best-loved Southern poet of the mid-19th century. His parents ran the Lamar House, Knoxville’s swankiest hotel, for several years around the time of the Civil War. Lanier set his only novel in the Knoxville area. But he moved to San Antonio, and wrote about it in more detail than he ever wrote about Knoxville.

It may seem a little hard to believe that Knoxville and San Antonio were once close to the same size. By the time of the Spanish American War, in which Fort Sam Houston played a major role in recruiting and training troops, San Antonio was growing fast. In 1900, San Antonio was just about 60 percent more populous than Knoxville. By 1970, S.A. was more than seven times as big.

Just before World War II, columnist Ernie Pyle described both Knoxville and San Antonio: he called the Texas city an “American Venice.” He called Knoxville the dirtiest city in the world.

A few decades ago, when doctors sometimes counseled relocation, some Southern Appalachian types followed in the footsteps of Crockett and Houston and migrated to San Antonio “for their health.” The trip probably did cure a few cases of asthma. Sometimes the immigration goes the other way. A man who works at San Antonio’s Henry Gonzales Convention Center seems melancholic about one in particular. “Is Lori Tucker still your anchorwoman?” he asked. “She used to be our anchorwoman.”

Knoxville and San Antonio both have a 19th-century all-pedestrian Market Square—even one which once hosted a turn-of-the-century Market House which was long ago torn down—which they’re trying to make relevant to the 21st century. They both have riverfront development featuring restaurants and boat rides. They’re both especially proud of their zoos. They both host a monthly arts event called “First Friday.” They each have a restored pre-war motion-picture palace with an interior designed in faux Moorish styles (the Tennessee is about three years older than San Antonio’s Majestic Theater).They’re both surrounded by suburban sprawl, with a comparably low population density. In both cases, these low-density neighborhoods host thousands of suburbanites who say they avoid downtown because of the lack of free parking. Both cities have a big downtown convention center that happens to be located in the shadow of a strange-looking vertical building, on the site of a world’s fair.

Only a handful of American cities have hosted world’s fairs. Only three Southern cities have done so in the last century. San Antonio’s was an officially sanctioned theme-based world’s fair, like Knoxville’s was, but it was better known by a name that probably sounded more clever in 1968 than it does today: the HemisFair.

The 1982 World’s Fair and HemisFair ‘68 had several things in common: they were both theme-oriented fairs held adjacent to downtown areas on sites kept economically small by world’s fair standards; about the same number of nations participated. Bob Hope made an appearance at each of them.

Knoxville’s fair was much bigger in attendance, both projected and real, than San Antonio’s; more than four million more people visited Knoxville’s fair.

But today, somehow, San Antonio’s fair somehow seems the enduringly bigger deal. The 1968 HemisFair seems more of a presence in 2004, both locally and nationally, than Knoxville’s fair does. HemisFair ‘68 appears to have charted more than four times as many references on the Internet as has the 1982 World’s Fair.

Maybe it was its era; the 1960s, the era of the monorail, was a decade of the great American world’s fair, maybe the last one ever. By the ‘80s, the whole idea of the world’s fair seemed, to some, a little retro. We didn’t even bother with a monorail.

Maybe its theme—cooperation between the races of the Western Hemisphere—has made real progress, much of it visible in San Antonio, where more than half of the population is Mexican. The fair’s signature artwork, a 2,860-square-foot tile mural called “The Confluence of Cultures,” depicting Mexicans and Anglos cooperating happily, is visible for many blocks around, especially clearly from the many balconies of the Hilton (which was built for the fair). Some Knoxvillians who visited HemisFair remember it as a little livelier than more exciting than ours, largely due to its greater cultural diversity.

Knoxville’s fair, with its well-meaning theme of energy conservation and alternatives to fossil fuel, has been all but forgotten. By the time of the development of the SUV, many Americans were embarrassed they’d ever conserved gasoline; Americans now consume more fossil fuels, per capita, than we did before 1982. The fair and its message now seems a fossil, itself. San Antonio, which is now more than half Hispanic, contends with HemisFair’s theme daily, and for the most part successfully.

Maybe it’s because they spent more on it. San Antonio’s theme structure, the Tower of the Americas, isn’t any better-looking than the Sunsphere, but it’s more than twice as tall. That’s just the observation-deck part of it, not counting the mast that made it, briefly, one of the world’s tallest buildings. Call it phallic, but it does generate interest.

In Knoxville, we think of trips up to the Sunsphere as a long-ago thing. It was open during the fair, and for a poorly reviewed restaurant for a short time after. Since then, it’s been mostly vacant, or office space. We brag to our kids, “I once went up there.”

But thousands still ride up to the much-older Tower of the Americas every day. It’s been open to the public as a bar, restaurant (revolving, of course), and observation deck for most of the 36 years since it was built. People pay the four-dollar charge to ride its three elevators, hundreds of thousands of them every year; they glide up and down until 10 at night. (The thing is closing, Aug. 1—for the first time since 1968, one employee told me—for a top-to-bottom renovation.)

Knoxville, preoccupied with cost, saved money by concentrating most of the action in temporary buildings; in the decade after the fair, we tore down a couple of ostensibly “permanent” ones.

San Antonio built to last. More than half a dozen buildings were built to be permanent, and are still in use. The U.S. Pavilion, for example, a circular structure that looks like it belongs at a world’s fair, is now San Antonio’s federal courthouse. The former Texas Pavilion is now the Institute of Texan Cultures. The Mexican Pavilion is now an educational center. The Lila Cockrell Theatre of the Performing Arts, still used today, was also built for the fair. (The monorail ran for years after the fair closed, but was dismantled in the ‘80s.)

The front part of San Antonio’s convention center, still prominently used today, was built for the ‘68 fair. Recently expanded, it drew almost half a million conventioneers last year, for a total of 709,000 room nights. Six of the top ten conventions on the schedule, drawing 25-40,000 each, have been religious meetings, mostly of the evangelical sort. Their biggest convention in history is slated for 2010, a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is expected to draw 55,000. City spokesmen tout it as a success, but as in Knoxville, many San Antonians are skeptical of whether the convention center, especially the recent addition, was worth it. The local alternative weekly was preparing a critical story about it.

Of course, the planners of HemisFair ‘68 couldn’t brag that the fair broke even, as Knoxville did; the San Antonio fair lost $7.4 million. But frugality rarely makes a city famous; and you get the impression that San Antonio has earned the balance back in the years since.

What does a world’s fair site look like, 36 years after they close the gates? San Antonio’s HemisFair Park bears some similarities to Knoxville’s World’s Fair Park. Both feature well-mown grass, marble retaining walls, some statuary, several varieties of spewing water, some preservation projects in various states of decay. Both fairs were somewhat unusual in that they incorporated historic buildings into the plan; some, like Victorian Beethoven Hall, are still well used, but several of HemisFair’s old houses are vacant and forlorn; a couple of antebellum houses used in the World’s Fair are now in ruins.

HemisFair Park is adorned with statuary, some of it from the fair (why didn’t the city of Berlin donate a bronze bear to Knoxville?) but most of it of more recent origin.

Both attract fewer people than the designers probably had in mind. On a relatively pleasant summer Saturday afternoon, I counted only about 50 people in HemisFair Park. The kid in the playground looked pretty lonely. HemisFair Park is now subject of a major Master Plan-style redesign.

The most vigorous evidence of the lasting impact of the 1968 World’s Fair in San Antonio isn’t in an overlarge tower, or a big convention center, or anywhere in HemisFair Park. It’s a few hundred feet off site, beneath the streets of San Antonio, in what is technically a big culvert.

A lot of cities have “riverwalks” or one sort or another. Chattanooga, Nashville, even Knoxville has one. They’re all pleasant and worthwhile, but there’s a sameness to the brick-and-steel urban riverwalks built in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The word riverwalk doesn’t quite describe what’s in San Antonio; what they have there is more like a Middle Earth with margaritas. The fact that it’s below the grade of the city, somehow immune to its heat and noise, is part of its appeal. Fourteen feet below the pavement are two and a half miles of sidewalks, a pedestrians-only section that hosts a total of 85 restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and hotels, not to mention the bottom part of a major shopping mall. Restaurants range from Casa Rio, dating from the sketchy days of 1946 the oldest establishment on the Riverwalk proper and maybe least pretentious, to San Antonio’s own Hard Rock Cafe. There’s also Boudro’s, which has something of a culinary reputation; the County Line, a well-known Texas barbecue joint; and Jim Cullum’s famous jazz club known as The Landing, the set for a recent public-radio series. There are a couple of chains, like Landry’s, but most of it seems local.

The very narrowness of the river is another part of the weird appeal of this place. The people on the other side are almost close enough to talk to. It makes for a sharp contrast with the XL values of this state. On the Riverwalk, shops and restaurants are small, and squeezed together. It’s almost as if Texans decided they needed a relief from the existential anxiety of wide-open spaces, the overwhelming size of things, the outsize scales for which Texas is famous. The Riverwalk seems like a deliberate affront to Texas’ size; it’s one of the smallest-scale commercial neighborhoods in the United States.

The Riverwalk disorients; as it ambles around, it changes direction almost imperceptibly, ignoring the strict street grid above. There’s better than even odds that the emerging pedestrian on the street above will set out in the wrong direction. In a city like San Antonio, it’s easy to enjoy getting lost.

The San Antonio River wasn’t always much of an asset to San Antonio. The city’s famous for its floods, and in fact suffered a small flood after a summer squall during my short stay there. After a particularly ruinous flood in 1921 which drowned at least 50 people, the city endeavored to build a flood-control system.

In the 19th century, Sidney Lanier noted that the San Antonio River was “crooked as a pothook.” And so it is. Early canals connected the river’s crooks, effectively forming an island in the center of town.

As the city built over it, there was strong sentiment in favor of enclosing the river in a culvert and just building over it. It’s the cheapest, most practical solution, put into effect in most American cities, especially Knoxville, which over the last 40 years enclosed the downtown sections of both First Creek and Second Creek.

The legend goes that Maury Maverick, a San Antonio congressman and later mayor, fell into the river one evening “after a night of adult beverages,” and began thinking something could be done with the river. Maverick became a major advocate of a young San Antonio architect named Robert H.H. Hugman, who proposed a very strange idea. A romantic, Hugman was smitten by a visit to the medieval cities of Spain, Aragon and Romula.

Rather than fearing and loathing that miserable, stinky, dangerous river, Hugman thought, San Antonians should embrace it. Build a mini-city down there, “barred to vehicular traffic yet holding the best shops, clubs, banks, and cafes; prosperous, yet alluring with its shadowed doorways and quaint atmosphere.”

Through Maverick’s work in Washington, San Antonio was lucky to get early assistance from Franklin Roosevelt, both through a government grant and eventually the help of the W.P.A. Today, much of the Riverwalk’s distinctive stonework conjures the rustic idealism of that prewar New Deal era, in the same way that Rock City or some parts of the Smokies do.

But it didn’t work as Hugman envisioned it, not then. Hugman was eventually fired from his job. Three restaurants opened on the Riverwalk, but the place retained a reputation as a dirty and dangerous place, a literal underworld. Even servicemen avoided it. Some people who visited San Antonio in the ‘40s and ‘50s don’t even remember there was such a thing. If Hugman had died in 1960 or before, he might have felt his grand vision was an utter failure.

The World’s Fair changed all that. The fair was sited just a block away from the old part of the Riverwalk, and canals were extended to the fair to allow river access to the fairgrounds themselves. The fair coordinated events with off-site Riverwalk events.

Even an international corporate giant like the Hilton was persuaded to build a large new hotel with access to the Riverwalk. Gallaspy says the one-two punch of the HemisFair and the development of the Riverwalk confirmed San Antonio, for the first time, as a vacation destination. Today, he says, the Riverwalk alone pulls in 29 million visitors annually. (Since that’s more than the total estimated tourist draw of the city, he’s apparently including San Antonians visiting their own Riverwalk, including those who come to the Rivercenter Mall.) The state tourism board affirms that the Riverwalk is Texas’ single biggest draw.

Once, the problem was convincing investors to build restaurants in a culvert. Now, there’s concern that it’s getting overdeveloped.

Some San Antonians claim to be contemptuous of the Riverwalk. Many make an exception for this favorite restaurant or that old jazz club, and some enjoy it for a jog or stroll in the mornings, avoiding it in the noisy evenings, when they say it becomes a tourist trap. It has a reputation as being overpriced, though a Mexican combination plate at the Riverwalk’s oldest restaurant, Casa Rio, is as good a deal as any place in Knoxville offers. A pint of microbrew at Mad Dog’s is five bucks, but at a place like the Esquire allegedly the longest bar in Texas, accessible from the Riverwalk by a fire escape, beer’s cheap. Many locals complain that it’s too crowded, that development has ruined it.

You might be tempted to compare the tourist crowds to Disney World, but it’s not, exactly. Nobody paid to come down here, and if you look around, you see a goodly variety. You see lots of families with kids and strollers, sure enough, but there are also a good many drunks, foreigners, retirees, adulterers. It’s not hard to imagine Peter Lorre scurrying amongst them, dodging the gendarmes.

Gallaspy rejects concerns of overdevelopment. “I don’t think you can do too much,” he says. He cites the Riverfront’s geographical limitations, and adds that controls on what can open on the Riverwalk are so stringent “it takes almost an act of God to get anything done down there.” His business-owners’ organization, the Paseo del Rio Association, has a strong voice in decisions, and is in favor of carefully controlled growth, but everything is eventually determined by the city, which funds and controls the Riverwalk, much of it through a Historic Design and Review Board.

The thing’s two and a half miles long, in all, and long parts of it aren’t developed, or crowded, at all, and includes a good deal of diversity, from modern hotels and discos, to the 200-year-old adobe village now a pedestrian shopping area known as La Villita, to long stretches with little but plantings and the bottoms of urban buildings. It’s so big, forming a squarish loop around the central business district, that if you’re downtown, it’s handy, and even a practical way to get around. The ten-block walk from La Villita to the library by the riverwalk is a stroll through a garden. Every once in a while you encounter someone jogging, or sitting at a bench reading a novel. Up on the street, the city blocks blow by like birds, and you’re there, disappointed it didn’t take longer.

Everything’s bigger in Texas, they say, but there’s one exception to that rule, and that’s the rivers. The San Antonio River, for which the city was named, would not strike an East Tennessean as a river at all. The San Antonio River is a smallish tributary of the Guadalupe, which flows to the Gulf, but is not a very big river itself. The San Antonio once struck visitors as little more than a drainage ditch; it’s hardly bigger than the numbered creeks that run in culverts on either side of downtown Knoxville.

Considering the number of things in San Antonio that are named for it, you’d think it was the Mississippi. The multi-level, 125-store downtown shopping mall is called the Rivercenter; it has access to the Riverwalk. The downtown Hilton, built for the World’s Fair, is called the Hilton Palacio del Rio. The name of the local weekly also refers to the river: the San Antonio Current. There’s even a monthly magazine, Rio, “The Official Magazine of the River Walk.” Tourist information refers to San Antonio as “the River City.”

Everything they’ve done with the San Antonio River are things we could have done with First or Second Creeks; the water’s only four feet deep, and that deep only because it’s controlled with dams and bladders that store water for when it’s needed. About five years ago, a team of urban experts strongly advised Knoxville to unearth Second Creek on the World’s Fair site; it’s been enclosed by a culvert since before the fair; it emerges just south of Cumberland Avenue. The consensus in Knoxville was that it was too deep (who’d want to go way down there?) and too dirty.

The San Antonio River has its charms, but cleanliness is not necessarily one of them. There’s a lot of flooding in the area, and the water tends to be an opaque brown. Candy wrappers, styrofoam cups float in the water. It doesn’t seem to bother people at all. People are drawn to water no matter what it looks like. In the Riverwalk, a dead fish is a conversation piece.

Making the best of what you’ve got is a theme here. In the busiest, most expensive part of the Riverwalk, there’s a giant industrial metal tank run by the local utility. It’s as big as the tanks at Holston Gases, which many complain ruin the potential of Knoxville’s riverfront. This one’s painted a deep forest green. It’s the loveliest giant metal tank I’ve ever seen.

The paths are narrow and immediately adjacent to the dark water. Not all of it’s handicap-accessible. In the most popular part of the Riverwalk, there is no railing. At night it gets crowded, and some of these people are drunk. The Knoxville engineering department, which was skeptical about paving stones on Market Square, would say hell no.

“People fall in the river every year,” says Gallaspy. “If you’re over four feet, you just stand up.”

In this and other respects, San Antonio does much with little. They do clean up the river occasionally, drain it and pick up the silverware, lawn furniture, and wedding rings that have accumulated on the bottom. The lengthy process was once a matter of some anxiety to event planners. Tractor-trailer trucks drive down the river bed, scooping up muck. But as they did with the river itself, San Antonio made an asset of a liability. They called the annual cleaning the Mud Festival. It’s a popular thing. People volunteer to wade in and help.

The whole thing inevitably gives the Knoxvillian dangerous ideas. “We could do this,” he observes, “but we won’t.”

Gallaspy seems proud of the fact that so many cities are trying to imitate it. But he seems confident that no city ever will.

Downtown San Antonio isn’t clicking on all cylinders. There seem to be more hotels than apartment buildings; there’s well over 10,000 hotel rooms in downtown San Antonio alone. There may even be more hotels downtown than office buildings. As in every city, though, residents are moving back toward the center of town, though in San Antonio many are choosing to stop in the King William District, a gentrified Victorian neighborhood that’s part of South Town, a 20-minute walk from downtown. It has its own quieter, cooler ethic, with a good brewpub and a couple of nice restaurants.

San Antonio’s generally a conservative town; most bars close at 1:00. Except for Mi Tierra, an endearingly gaudy Market Square restaurant that stays open all night, downtown seems to close up pretty early. Schilo’s, the legendary German deli, closes up at 8:30 sharp. (If my experience is any guide, they may refuse to seat you at 8:28.) There are several colleges in San Antonio, Trinity College, UTSA, and the city actually hosts more college students than Knoxville does; but they’re mostly out in the suburbs, and the bohemian student culture you expect to find in a college town is scarce downtown.

It’s still just enough of a city to not seem like a tourist trap, but go back and forth a few times, and it’s easy to get the impression that the Riverwalk has drained some of the life from the streets above, which can seem bleak by comparison.

One of the few downtown attractions not obviously related to HemisFair is San Antonio’s Market Square. Established in the 1890s, its old market house was eventually replaced a little ungracefully by a large modern building that now houses El Mercado, which claims to be the largest Mexican market outside of Mexico—but don’t go expecting to find merchants fanning flies away from suspended goat carcasses. Its family-run shops carry a good deal of hand-made Mexican pottery, clothing, but also a lot of T-shirts and postcards; most shoppers look like Anglo tourists. San Antonians say they avoid it. A big new building in front of the Mercado is promised to be a museum associated with the Smithsonian.

Another large new building was established to be a farmer’s market, but that apparently didn’t work out; it’s now a sort of second-rate mall with tourist-oriented shops. San Antonio’s real farmer’s market is outside of downtown, in a truck-accessible area to the west. The nicest part of Market Square is a long, narrow corridor, hardly more than half as wide as Knoxville’s, which hosts cafe seating and open-air kiosks that sell everything from sofa art to overpriced sombreros. Again, it’s touristy, but unpredictable enough to make an expensive drink on a sunny patio seem worthwhile.

Before I left San Antonio, I walked from the Alamo to the nearest part of the Riverwalk and found the shrubbery ledge where three guys slept one night in 1978. I’m sure we weren’t the last ones. I was surprised to find it still down there, and hadn’t been fenced off to discourage the homeless. Maybe it’s maintained as an allowance they make for impoverished travelers who they suspect will return when they have a couple of twenties to spend.

July 15, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 29 © 2004 Metro Pulse