SHAWN: with fountains and light fixtures for the most part we've reincorporated pieces that we salvaged from the brewery to make as art.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: We’re in San Antonio, Texas, where back in the 1880s the Pearl Brewing Company fired up its kettles.

SHAWN: Right there you can see the three tank ins that were installed to make that fountain. And I'll tell you, getting those exact levels so the water overflows over those was small no feat.

BRIAN: [laughter]

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Part industrial relic, part water feature, this fountain -one of 14- is built from salvaged steel. That’s the Pearl ethos: let history do the talking.

SHAWN: You'll see again here, this bench here with the rebar pattern, reincorporate pieces of the brewery, but, you know, not hit you over the head with it, but let you discover it on your own or be as surprised and delighted.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: This is Pearl: a 23-acre historical district and culture hub stitched to the river.

In 1914, after the brewery’s president was killed, his widow, Emma Koehler, kept the doors open through prohibition by reinventing what a brewery could be. Decades later, developer Kit Goldsbury bought the abandoned site with  little more than a vision and a question:  what if you don’t erase history, but you build on it?

BILL: There's power in story, and when you have a place that has a story and you can really tell that story and bring it to life, people feel it and they're attracted to it.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: I’m Brian Maughan, Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer at Fidelity National Financial, and this is Built, where you’ll meet creative leaders in commercial real estate. This season, we’re going BOLD. Big ideas. Defining places. And the people who make them real.

Brian Maughan: The Pearl isn’t just a successful redevelopment, It’s a multi-generational story of bold moves. From Emma Koehler’s era to today’s public–private partnerships and design that uses history as raw material.

In this episode, we’ll meet the people behind Pearl’s evolution and see how choices made a century apart shape San Antonio's future.

Part 1 - The history

SHAWN: In the library here, you can see the original columns from the original building here.

BRIAN MAUGHAN:  We start our visit at the heart of Pearl: Hotel Emma.

SHAWN: So Hotel Emma, is the redevelopment of the old brew house, and the entirety of this area, just outside the library was the old engine room for the brew house. And so, that is now the hotel lobby and when you look out there, you see some of the old equipment, you know, the ammonia condensers, some of the old fans and generators, piping from the original brewing days.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And, a lot of what is new here is made to feel like it’s always been here.

SHAWN: the bar of Stern Worth, that room was full, wall to wall with beer tanks. It's one of those original cellars. And so when you go in the bar, you'll see two tanks that have been repurposed into little seating areas. And so that's pretty much how this whole place was. It was filled with brewing equipment and odds and ends in the brew making process. And so a big part of it was figuring out what are we gonna keep.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Our guide today is Sean Hater, senior director of development at Oxbow Development Group, the real estate company leading the ongoing development of Pearl.

SHAWN: A lot of what happens in the lobby as well is really just trying to work off the beauty of what was here from the original craftsmanship of this place.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Brick arches, exposed steel, original machinery and catwalks stay visible, but the space feels welcoming—thanks to warm wood, light, and rediscovered tile.

SHAWN: As we were going through the construction process of renovating this building into the hotel, we uncovered, under concrete, this tile pattern. And the underlayment for this tile pattern was old German newspapers.

And so when we saw this, we're like, okay, we need to bring this back. And so it’s new tile, but made it look like the old tile, what the room really looked like.

BILL: Hotel lobbies have become transactional. It's where you go to check in and check out. It's where you go to catch your Uber.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Bill Shown is the CEO of Oxbow Development Group.

BILL: We want this hotel to be a throwback to the times when hotel lobbies were where people met for business, where they went to get their hair cut or their shoes shined, it was a gathering place. And we made the statement that Hotel Emma would be San Antonio's living room. We didn't say it's gonna be our visitors' living room. It's gonna be San Antonio's living room. And it has become that. Now it's, that's a little bit of an operating challenge for the hotel because it's always full of people, but that's also I think, what makes it special.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: If you look at a map, the project runs from Grayson Street down to Newell Avenue, between Avenue A and the San Antonio River and its famous River Walk.

BILL: Pearl is I would call it downtown adjacent. We're still part of the central city. And immediately north of the CBD Central Business District. And about a mile south of some of the wealthiest communities. Alamo Heights, Alamos Park, Terrell Hills.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Over a million square feet today houses apartments, offices, a hotel, restaurants, shops, and  a twice-a-week farmer’s market.

 But what today is a living, vibrant place, a few years ago was completely different.

BILL: When I grew up Broadway which is right here, Pearl adjacent, was the heartbeat of our city. It was where, funny then, where all the auto dealerships were, which was big deal then, especially the Cadillac dealership and all the fancy restaurants. And over the course of decades, this area of town just fell in horrible disrepair. And people just stopped believing in it.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Shawn, who also grew up in San Antonio, has his own early memories of this place.

SHAWN: Growing up it was a place where a ton of San Antonians worked in the industry here of making beer. And then as it kind of fell into disrepair, it became a bad part of San Antonio.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Anita Santano grew up nearby and she remembers coming to the area when she played with her high school band in the early 2000s.

VP Anita Centeno: We would line up for the parades right here on Grayson Street, but there was nothing here. I mean, it was pretty dilapidated. Some of the buildings were just kind of abandoned looking.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Before it was Pearl, this place was a brewery founded in 1883 by German brewer J. B. Behloradsky.

Soon after, a group of local investors — including people tied to Lone Star Brewing — bought it, formed the San Antonio Brewing Association, and the operation became known as the City Brewery. They chose this site largely for its excellent water.

DAVID: We forget that water was not always pure. And so cider and beer and all these things, that's what we used to drink in the 1870s, 1880s.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: David Lake is the co-founder of Lake|Flato Architects, the San Antonio–based firm behind much of Pearl’s urban design, adaptive reuse, and architecture.

DAVID: Beer making, I think at the time had 20% of the workforce in San Antonio. So it was an enormous enterprise that involved lots of people. It created this culture.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: In 1887, the brewery found the product that would become their signature brew, and define the brand for generations.

BETH: Pearl Formula was from Kaiser Beck Brewery. That was out of Germany.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Beth Smith is the VP of Marketing, Public Relations, and Media for Silver Ventures, the company that bought the old Pearl Brewery.

BETH: And it was named Pearl Beer because the bubbles that were bubbling up from the beer were like pearls.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Jump a few years to 1894, and that's when the iconic brewhouse was built. A tall cream colored building with arched windows, a tower, and a steep slate roof dotted with small dormers. It looked part factory, part European city hall, and it instantly became a San Antonio landmark.

It was designed in the Second Empire style by Chicago architect August Maritzen, who specialized in breweries and went on to design dozens more across the U.S., Canada, and South Africa.

By the early 1900s, the brewery wasn’t just good-looking, it was scaling. It was the “cathedral to beer.”

BILL: When you look at that incredible architecture, it's like, how in the world did someone in the 18 hundreds decide that a, basically a manufacturing facility ought to look like this? Yeah. And so, yeah, when you would drive by as a kid, it was like, oh my, it felt like a castle, seriously, it was just amazing looking, and of course there was always steam coming out of the smokestack, as they were brewing.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And as the operation kept growing, the story inside those walls got even wilder.

BETH: So 1902 Otto Kaler, who had been involved with City Brewery and San Antonio Brewery Association. He was from Berlin. He was an immigrant and he was asked to take over as president of Pearl.

And he met his wife Emma, who was from St. Louis, who was also of German descent. And they moved to San Antonio to run the brewery.

And in 1910 Emma was injured in an accident. So Otto hired a nurse from Berlin. Her name was Emma Donkey. They called her Emmy, and unfortunately, Otto was a naughty boy and he began intimate relations with Emmy.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And Emmy had a nurse friend also from Berlin.

BETH: Her name was Emma Bergameister, and she went by Hedy.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Otto bought a house across the river for the nurses, but a few years later Emma No2, Emmy, married.

BETH: And so Otto turned his attention to Emma, number three. So this was over a couple of years that this relationship with the two Emmas evolved. On November 12th, 1914. Emma number three sent news to Otto, that he owed her a $10,000 promissory note for taking care of Emma Kaler, the wife, so little after 4:00 PM Otto, who's now 59 years old and married for 22 years to Emma Kaler, left the brewery in his buggy, Emma number two was visiting and was there in the house with Emma, number three. So he gets to the house And Otto and Emma, Bergam Meister argued a gun went off and Otto was dead. And she reported that she shot him in self-defense and that he had a temper and that she was scared of him.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: A grand jury indicted “Emma No. 3” for Otto’s murder, and the story became a headline scandal. But behind all that drama, Emma Koehler — Otto’s wife — stepped in and kept the brewery alive.

BETH: Emma takes control as CEO. At that time, keep in mind, women could not vote. Women barely ran any businesses and breweries were definitely a man's world. But she was actually an amazing business woman. She increased production from 6,000 barrels a year in 1902 to 110,000 barrels by 1920. So she grew it into the largest brewery in Texas.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And when Prohibition began in 1920, Emma shifted tactics, and paid for it with her own money.

BETH: She expanded the business to auto repair, soft drinks, ice cream, dry cleaning, things that were legal that would keep it going.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And she continued operations even during the Great Depression.

BETH: September 15th, 1933, the day that bolstered act was repealed and prohibition ended in Texas. And she was ready. She had the trucks loaded with barrels of beer. And at midnight the trucks were rolling.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: That same year Emma retired after 26 years at the head of the largest brewery in Texas.

BETH: And she remained active behind the scenes in the brewery Pearl operations until her death in 1943, at the age of 85.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: In 1977, the brewery changed hands and eventually became part of Pabst. As they wound down their own brewing operations, Pearl brewed its last beer in 2001, ending 118 years on the San Antonio River.

Around that time, Bill Shown was working at a commercial real estate company called Hixon, acquiring and developing properties in San Antonio.

BILL: We were approached by a broker and, and the broker said, Hey, Pearl Brewery, they're getting ready to shut down. The brewery is outdated and they're doing most of their brewing and modern facilities. It's an amazing piece of property come look at it. And I did.

And it was so easy to walk away from, I looked at this place, buildings crumbling under their own weight that were historic and that have all the complications of renovating something that is historic. The place flooded, it had a massive hydrocarbon plume underground. It was full of asbestos and lead paint. The area was abandoned and forgotten, so nobody came here anymore. There was a hotel across the street that got on the average of 200 police calls a year. That's like four a week. It was dangerous. It had all the earmarks of a horrible business investment. And, after I looked at that and said okay, this is an easy no, Kit called me.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Christopher “Kit” Goldsbury helped build Pace Foods — the San Antonio company behind Pace Picante Sauce — and sold it to Campbell Soup in 1995 for more than $1 billion.

BILL: And he said, Hey I'm looking at the Pearl Brewery and I'd like your advice.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: So Bill met Kit at the site.

BILL: Imagine being in the middle of this asphalt parking lot. And I ticked off to Kit, everything I just mentioned, thinking I was really protecting him from himself.

And about two weeks later, he called me up and he said, man, bill, thank you so much for meeting us there. We've put the property under contract and I literally held the phone away from my ear thinking, what did he not understand about what I. told him. Truth, I mean, you can see it now. It wasn't what he didn't understand. It's what I didn't understand.

BRIAN: Right.

BILL: I was looking at it like a real estate math problem. He was looking at it from the eyes of a true visionary.

Part 2 — Site survey / The plan / Masterplan / How they made it

SHAWN: The plaza we have over here to the south is the big central gathering space for Pearl. this is where farmer's market happens. This is where events that Pearl puts on happens on a weekly basis, this place will be filled with kids, as you can see now running around kicking soccer ball.

We have the Gustav geysers, where kids will come and run through the splash pad. And this place, on the weekends thousands people hanging around here.

BILL: My favorite part is the plaza in the middle there with the water jets where you see kids playing and screaming and the joy that is exhibited there is just, it fills you up.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: All this joy didn’t happen by accident. All the public spaces were designed and built with intention.

Architect David Lake was there alongside Bill, Kit and others in the early days of the Pearl redevelopment, when the team would walk around the vacant brewery and decaying lot.

DAVID: We actually talked about in order to make Pearl a place, it has to have first a purpose. It needs to be welcoming. It needs to be open and accessible to everyone.

A district has to have at least 10 things to do while you're there. A district only works if you want to stay, a district also has to engage all five senses. You wanna smell, you wanna see, you want to hear, and texas is very hot. You have to be thinking about the climate.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: So the goal wasn’t just to save buildings. It was to build a district where people would actually live, work, and play.

DAVID: We saw Pearl as a place for all, because the river ran along one side of it, it needs to be the Riverwalk that all citizens of San Antonio go to.

BILL: There was a real smart, talented team of people put together and we just started to dream. And it was unshackled dreaming. It was like, okay, if in our wildest dreams, what could this be?

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And so they began touring other sites across North America to see what was possible.

BILL: We went to Pike Place market in Seattle. We went to Granville Island in Vancouver. We went to the distillery district in Toronto.

A typical real estate developer, is they're looking at, okay, what does the market say is possible? What do the numbers say is possible? In this case, we were not limited by what the world said was possible. We were limited by our own imaginations.

What do we want this to be? And one of the things that landed was from Kit's perspective. He said, you know, food is a common thing that brings people together. I want this to be all about food. I want to transform the culinary landscape in San Antonio.

I came to him with some analysis. I said, kit, we can support four restaurants. And he said, no, we need at least eight to have a critical mass. I said, I don't see how between cannibalization and parking, we can support eight restaurants. I think we have 30 or 32 today.

BRIAN: Unbelievable. [laughter]

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And if you’re going to build a destination around food, you want the best. For that, you look to the Culinary Institute of America,  based in Hyde Park, New York. They are widely considered the top culinary school in the country.

BILL: We said, okay, well let's go get them to come down here. And we went up to Hyde Park and met in their boardroom with their president and provost. They were looking at us like we were insane, like where is San Antonio?

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Bill says they were persistent.

BILL: We said, I tell you what, we'll build you a pilot program. We'll use your curriculum and we'll use your professors and we'll pay you for the privilege just to test the concept, and it was crazy successful. Long story short, their third campus is here. And it is transforming the culinary landscape in San Antonio.

DAVID: They were very reluctant. They had done the building in California, in Napa Valley. It was very expensive for them. And Kit came up with this idea and he also funded the construction of the school.

But more importantly, he went a step further and said, we are only going to have restaurants which feature Culinary Institute of America chefs. And that's what really got the CIA's attention and got them to come to San Antonio.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: So food wasn’t just an amenity. It was an economic development strategy: train talent here, keep talent here, feed the city here.

And it wasn’t fine dining only. You can grab food and carry it out onto the lawn.

SHAWN: Food hall is also known as the bottling house. So the beer was brewed in the brew house, stored in the cellars, and then it was bottled in the bottling house, and so the original structure. Burned down during the early days of a kind of demo redevelopment brewery.

And so what we decided to do is we wanted to build that back, not verbatim, but very, close to what it originally looked like. We had salvage, you pieces of limestone and remnants that we used in the recreation of the bottling house. And now it is turned food hall with six different food vendors. And a more casual, lower price point options for folks come get a drink, slice pizza, burger and just kind of hang out on here. Another cool thing about it's, there's a basement in that building that has a jazz club. It's one of the coolest bars in all San Antonio.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: But back to those early days “make it welcoming” and “make it about food” were just the start. The team still had to answer two important questions: Will anyone actually come here? And will anyone actually live here?

That second question led them to try something that, honestly, sounded unrealistic at the time:

luxury apartments… in an abandoned industrial site… next to an unimproved stretch of the river…

That turned into a building that today is called the Cellars, because, well, this was the building where beer was stored before.

SHAWN: This is the cellar's apartment. So you'll see that structure that have there that is part of the original structural frame of what was. You know, the, the cellars. It was a brick monolith. There were no windows, there were tanks that went from beam to beam, stretched that entire opening. And just fill with beer.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: The team tried to see if they could just convert that brick block into housing, but the building fought them.

SHAWN: We looked at could retrofit that building, but the floor to floor Heights were, not conducive for that. So we tore most left this portion of the structure, and then built new building around it, this is cellar's residence.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Below, there’s parking tucked under it. At ground level, the new building spills directly into the public plaza to the south — on purpose. The idea was: this isn’t a tower you disappear into. It’s housing that plugs straight into Pearl’s shared life.

SHAWN: We toured high rise projects all across the state. Austin, Dallas, went to San Francisco, Chicago. one thing that, we came away with was a project we saw in Dallas, have been in Austin, we in Austin, have been to Chicago, were none of them that had a real true place. And so we decided we wanted to do here was build a building that true to Pearl, San Antonio South Texas.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Don McDonald is the founder of Don B. McDonald Architects and the artistic brains behind the Cellars, and many other buildings in the district.

DON: Because of our residential background, they asked us to take a look at it. And so we. We designed using that same kind of rationale that we did on rural farm and ranch projects where we're looking to the local culture, we're looking to build something that speaks distinctly to San Antonio.

So Cellars was the first, I would say it was a bit of a roll of the dice because of the relatively high-end and the location.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Don’s team wasn’t interested in dropping in a generic high-end apartment building.

DON: We knew we wanted a building that was of San Antonio and spoke to San Antonio. So our goal was to tap into a unique architectural vocabulary, both with the architecture and the design of the first floor.

And it allowed us to work with local crafts. Almost all the furniture was custom made. The art was local. Everything there was fabricated by local people, so we felt like it was a moment in time that spoke to the last 300 years of evolution of architecture and design in San Antonio.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: That vocabulary shows up right when you walk into Cellars: mesquite wood, tooled leather, old tank ends from the brewery on the walls, South Texas art — and downstairs, instead of an open lobby, are shared rooms that feel like somebody’s river house.

DON: Historically in San Antonio, there were houses perched along the banks of the river. So the idea of having a kitchen and a small contemplative garden on the banks of the river as opposed to a pool that was initially planned there felt more right for this location.

We didn't know if people were really going to use these public spaces, right? We like these are really beautiful spaces. But early on, it was really fun to see.

People start moving in, they bring a bottle of wine down into the little garden and groups of people that never met each other from all over that had moved into the cellars, were enjoying that space. So it took on a role that, that we had hoped it would almost immediately.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: That was a turning point. Because if people were willing to not just rent here but hang out here — bring wine, talk to strangers, treat the river like theirs — Pearl wasn’t just rescuing buildings. It was creating community.

DON: The main thing that I'm intrigued with is how integrated with the rest of the community it's, That's been, for me, the big surprise, pleasant surprise.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: The irony is, at that point the river itself wasn’t even ready for that kind of life. Pearl had a flooding problem and the San Antonio River north of downtown wasn’t exactly the postcard River Walk.

DAVID: We had four feet of water coming across the site in a flood event. And the flood events could happen every 15 to 20 years. So we had to get that water under control.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Architect David Lake again

DAVID: So we worked to fast track a two eight foot diameter pipes to take the flood water off of Broadway. Pearl said, we don't have time to wait for the city to do this. We gotta do this now. So we will build it. And you'll reimburse us.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: At the same time, they were helping re-shape the river itself, extending the River Walk north, but making it feel different than the tourist core.

DAVID: There was an opportunity to work with the county who was improving the river for flood purposes and engage with the city of San Antonio and the San Antonio River Authority, to extend the river from downtown's Riverwalk up to the Pearl.

And we designed that interface from downtown, which is two miles away. Up to the site and improved it for a hundred year flood plain. But we also thought about how do we make this different from the Riverwalk? And we created a long linear lake as a terminus to the extension, and we knew we were bringing the riverboats from downtown up through a lock to this level.

And so this became the great turnaround for the river barges. But more importantly, it gave us a pedestrian linkage, bike linkage backed through downtown south, all the way to the missions.

DAVID: So now you had a 16 mile loop along the river. We've really taken the river back to its ecology. So the river's one of my favorite places because it tells a story of regeneration, of restoring habitat.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: That public–private pattern shows up everywhere in Pearl. Streets, utilities, lighting, zoning — all of it got re-thought with support from local allies.

BILL: The city and county and San Antonio River Authority have been incredible partners in this undertaking. They bought into the vision and they said, yes, we want this to happen, and what can we do to make it happen?

So they created some really permissive zoning without setbacks, without parking requirements. I mean, it was really helpful. They created a special zoning that allowed us to own our own streets and control our own streets, which was important.

We did a public private partnership with the city to solve the massive drainage issues that were here. And it was basically a $4 million pipe, 24 feet wide and four feet tall that we built from Broadway all the way to the river. And the city paid 96% of it. Because they were contributing 96% of the water.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And because they owned the streets, Pearl got to decide how they should feel. Not wide, hot, overlit car corridors, but streets you actually want to walk.

DAVID: There's only one public street at Pearl. All the internal streets are private, which means that we didn't have to adhere to lighting.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Architect David Lake.

DAVID: Typically streets are way over lit and we took a cue from Rome and its lighting where they just strung tables across the street and lit with [00:29:00]simple fixtures at the center of the street down onto the streetscape. And by doing that, you don't have high source glare, ugly lighting, putting weird shade and shadow on people. But more importantly you could look into the buildings.

You can close the street anytime, and suddenly it becomes an event street.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Shade was intentional. Trees were intentional. It’s master planning, but it’s not stiff.

DON: Every time you make a move in architecture, you're responding to where you're at in a time and place.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Architect Don McDonald.

DON: Because there were a handful, maybe five significant historic buildings on the Pearl Campus and there were significant structures, but unrelated. And so the question is, do you infill?

Which is contemporary architectural theory as a strong counterpoint to that. Or do you build on that local vocabulary and in this case, we felt like there wasn't enough fabric to respond with a counterpoint. And so we said, let's build on that historic fabric. What were the materials they used?

Why did they use brick? Why did they build this barbarian architecture? Who were these people? And so, every move we made was a response to that history.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Pearl didn’t try to erase its industrial past. It used that past as raw material. Old trusses became screens. Tank lids became cabanas on a pool deck.

SHAWN: These benches here, you can see the rebar pattern in here, so these were old columns that we salvage and cut up and use as benches.

BRIAN: I mean, you can get a five star dinner and you can also go fishing.

SHAWN: Yeah, can go fishing down San Antonio river.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And because of choices like these, what started as a contaminated, fenced-off, flood-prone brewery is now the kind of place where — if you’re a local — you can just show up on a Saturday with no plan.

Which brings us to today.

Twenty years ago, this was an empty industrial site. Now it’s full. Families. Service workers. Startup founders. Hotel staff on break. People grabbing lunch. People taking photos. We asked a few of them what Pearl means to them.

Victoria Farias: I think the Pearl for me is a space to come with friends, but also if I want to do some work outside of the home, which also has a lot of different areas to do that.

I've been people watching today, I see like a lot of, joy movement, kids, families. I love the food hall too,

Moses Torres: It's a magical place. family friendly, you know, a hip place to be it's a very entertaining place, and you want just a nice, chill place. Enjoy some good food. Enjoy some laugh with your friends and you know, just good old time, this will be a good place to come and explore. 'cause they got almost everything for everybody in this place.

Kevin Guerrier-Paul: I think the Pearl matters to San Antonio because I think it's the heart of it. it was definitely the spot to be for families already, but now it's just people know and as they're moving in, they know the pro is the spot to be.

Part 3 — What Pearl Is Now / The Future

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Pearl is famous nationally, sure. The hotel wins awards, the restaurants get written up. But inside San Antonio, people talk about it differently. They talk about it like it’s theirs.

BILL: We absolutely were committed to Pearl being non-transactional. And by that I mean everyone feels welcome. They're not expected to come here and be customers, They're expected to come here and just be here.

And so oftentimes you'll see moms come up with strollers and a rolling ice chest. They've brought their own food and drink, and they're planning on parking here for the day and enjoying the day, and then leaving, and in my opinion, that's what makes the place special . It's a place for San Antonians to call their own.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Beth Smith is Vice President of Marketing, PR, and Media at Silver Ventures. Before that, she was Chief Marketing Officer for Hotel Emma, the 146-room luxury hotel at the heart of Pearl.

BETH: When Kit acquired the property the brewery had closed in 2001. He acquired the property in 2002 and it was like a bomb had gone off and there were ashtrays and coffee cups were just left in the building. And most. People would've just cleared it out, thrown the stuff away, and started gutting the place. He had a unique vision and he just had everything cataloged and put into a warehouse.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: That salvage warehouse is why Pearl doesn’t feel like a stage set.

BETH: Hotel Emma and the Pearl is probably the best example of industrial repurposing I've ever seen. It is so authentic and so well thought out. We have three chandeliers in the elephant cellar ballroom that were originally brought in from Germany for the brewery; they were bottle fillers. The tanks that held the beer are now banquettes and the bar on the third floor pool is an old pearl beer truck that's been repurposed.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: It’s not just a design move. It’s a way of carrying the place forward. What belonged to the community then still belongs to the community now. And you see that in how they handle the hard moments, too.

BETH: When the pandemic hit and every hotel in San Antonio closed their doors, we decided not to close the hotel because we looked to what Emma Kaler would've done, And she kept the brewery open. So we kept the hotel open and we kept our employees employed and we went to work every day, even though there weren't many guests there we kept it going. But she clearly became our role model in her strength and her kindness and her sense of community, her integrity and her grit, mostly her grit.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: The character of this place goes back to a woman who kept the brewery alive through Prohibition and the Great Depression. That grit never got smoothed into architectural cliches.

And, Pearl is still growing beyond the original footprint, on the other side of the river.

BILL: Oxbow have several sites on the west side of the river across from Pearl

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Oxbow Development Group CEO,  Bill Shown.

BILL: There's 337 apartment units. Phase one is wrapping up now. Phase two will, will finish up in the springtime. We have 166 key hotel across the river that's under construction that will be operated by Emma Hospitality. Every room has a sitting room, but it will not be five diamond. It will be a more affordable option for those who can't afford hotel Emma.

We have about $800 million worth of stuff, either under construction or in pre-development, in and around Pearl and on a site that we own in downtown.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: That raises the obvious question: how do you keep this from turning into just another upscale riverfront district that pushes people out?

DON: You're walking a fine line on these projects and you're always looking around to say, at what point. Do we respond and at what point is it too much? And do we pull back? And so I think that's always when you're weaving this thread of an American city, that's the line you're walking.

And, What is San Antonio? It's an interesting, a merger of a lot of different cultures that could only ever have occurred in this unique place. And those are the things that we like to tap into. So it really feels like it's of this place.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Architect Don McDonald says you can read a city through its buildings the way you read a book: layer by layer, era by era.

DON: Looking at these ideas that are frozen in stone. At a hundred years, San Antonio will be 400 years of architecture, and I would hope that we would just be part of a stitch of that evolution of architecture

BILL: You can be aspirational and financially successful. not only financially successful, but transformational, You can transform communities and have a really positive impact and make a good financial return.

We believe that the world is absolutely hungry for places that are authentic and real that have a story. And we've been practicing and learning for 20 years. We know how to do it.

CREDITS

BRIAN MAUGHAN: If you want to check out photos of Pearl, visit us at builtpodcast.com. Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode was produced by Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Emmanuel Desarme. Our location producer in San Antonio is Patrick Davis. Our editor is Genevieve Sponsler. Production support by Adriana Rozas Rivera. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Special thanks to our guests, and to Anita Centeno, Victoria Farias, Moses Torres, Kevin Guerrier-Paul, Patty Muth, Jessica Gonzales, Christina Berlanga, Alexa Verola, and to everyone who talked to us at Pearl.

Thanks for listening to BUILT—where we explore bold developments in distinct markets, reshaping our BUILT world.