HemisFair '68: Confluence of Civilizations

On April sixth, nineteen sixty-eight, the gates opened on a world's fair in San Antonio. The timing was deliberate: the fair's organizers had planned it to coincide with the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the city's founding in seventeen eighteen. They gave it the name HemisFair, coined by a local businessman named Jerome Harris, and the theme The Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas. The ambition was to position San Antonio as a gateway city between the United States and Latin America.

The fairgrounds covered about ninety-six acres just southeast of downtown, a site that required the demolition of an existing neighborhood. The fair ran through October sixth and drew more than six million visitors. The Tower of the Americas, built as the fair's signature structure, rises seven hundred fifty feet and remains the tallest building in San Antonio. The city provided five million five hundred thousand dollars in public money for its construction.

The fair lost money. Estimates of the deficit reach seven and a half million dollars, against a mayor's pre-fair pledge that it would not cost taxpayers a cent. This was not unique among world's fairs, most of which operate in deficit, but it was a political embarrassment at the time.

What the fair left behind was more durable: a significant extension of the River Walk to connect the fairgrounds, HemisFair Park, and the permanent presence of the Institute of Texan Cultures, which opened in the fair's Mexican Pavilion and has remained a major public history resource.

The neighborhood that stood on the ninety-two acres before the fair was home to working-class and low-income residents, many of them Mexican American. Their displacement for the fair's site is documented. It is part of the event's history, alongside the attendance figures and the tower.