TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Larry DeMartino (LD)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: February 20, 2006
LOCATION: San Antonio, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Melanie Smith, Jennifer Gumpertz, Robin Johnson
REELS: 2350, 2351, 2352

Please note that the recording includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers mark the time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera background noise, unrelated to the interview content.

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas and it’s February 20th, 2006. We’re in San Antonio, Texas and we’re at the home of Larry DeMartino, who is a landscape architect here in town who’s been involved in a number of civic efforts on everything from flood control to sign review, water quality and many other issues as well. I just wanted to take this chance to thank him for spending time with us. I thought we might start by asking if there was a point in your childhood where you were first maybe introduced to the outdoors, to landscape, to protection of green things.
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LD: Well, yes, you know, I was born in ‘39 and that was when everybody was having victory gardens and I had two grandfathers, both born in Italy, that had turned the backyards of their houses into extensive vegetative plots where they were growing things to eat. So I remember my grandfathers, both of them, who grew fruits and vegetables in the backyard and roses in the front yard. And I was always helping them and always intrigued about things that grew. I loved plants and the ground that they grew on and that came from both my maternal and paternal grandfathers, who were avid gardeners.
DT: Were you given jobs to do in these gardens?
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LD: Yeah, to a certain extent. They were always very trusting of me or, as most gardeners aren’t, of help. But I remember being involved in the watering and then some of the harvesting and in the cleanup before winter came and in the spring to get things ready for planting. I was tormented as a youth by one of my grandfather’s gardens that was full of snakes and I still have a hatred for—for snakes to this day because the garden just seemed infested with them. They would stake the tomatoes so that they grew
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vertically and so that the fruit would ripen properly. It was western New York; you didn’t have that many good days of sun. And one day I went to get some tomatoes and there was a snake coiled around every s—tomato stake and it scared me. I know snakes are our friends, but if—as a child, it was terrifying.
(misc.)
DT: I understand that you grew up in Niagara Falls and I was curious if the mix of a very industrial town and also one of the most scenic spots in America had any influence on your interest in landscape?
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LD: Well, I grew up witnessing air pollution to the extreme that leaves were very damaged by the belching of the factories. And of course, as a child, I had chronic bronchial asthma. But of course, my father worked in those factories and so it did provide an income for our family. So there was always this issue of yeah, those plants are—you can’t breathe the air and the—and the leaves are turning brown, but we’ve got to earn a living. And—but it was primarily an industrial town and I didn’t leave till I went off to college in—Michigan State University in East Lansing. It was the first time I didn’t have asthma and I slowly began to realize that it was that bad air that I had been
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breathing every day, all day long, day in and day out that had caused the—these respiratory issues that I was chronically involved with. Of course, years later, Niagara Falls became famous for the Love Canal scandal, one of the worst pollution extravaganzas in America. I don’t think there was a paper—a newspaper that didn’t cover the Love Canal, which was perpetrated on the citizens of Niagara Falls by Hooker Elemic—Electric Chemical Company, who, by the way, my father worked for. But stuff was dumped and actually leaked into the creek behind our house. It was pretty—pretty dicey and—and now novelists are getting involved in this, not just the news. My sister is
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the curator for all of Joyce Carol Oates’ writings and papers and plays and things and Joyce’s recent book was called Niagara. And it details in novel form the implications of the Love Canal and the folks who lived and resided there. My mother’s 89, she doesn’t live too far from that major, super clean up site. And of course, it led to the demise of the factories and also the demise of the town. I think the population has probably shrunk by forty or fifty thousand people. That’s had a profound influence on me as I—as I think back on it.
DT: After growing up in Niagara Falls, you say that you went on to Michigan State for your training as a landscape architect. Can you talk about some of the influences there and some of your professors or the other students?
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LD: Well, I went to Michigan State to study horticulture. My interest was primarily plants and—and I had a very strong background in—in the sciences, particularly chemistry and biology. And horticulture was the thing that I was interested in when I was looking for a place to go to college and Michigan State University East Lansing had a—a very, very good program. And of course, I was also looking to get far away from home. And so I went to Michigan State and while I was there working on my degree in horticulture, I started taking classes over in the school of landscape architecture. And I just became intrigued with the notion of being able to shape the earth and—and the things
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that you put on it in such a way that mankind and the earth are not just sympathetic with one another in their—in—in—in their co relationships, but that mankind can also improve the situation of—of—of—of the earth, which I see as mankind’s role. I’m not just interested anymore in—in landscape efforts that are neutral toward the land and the earth. I think everything we ought to do ought to be ari—aligned with improving the situation. Just creating a neutral situation is—is not something I’m interested in. But landscape architecture is a way to improve the situation of man and land and earth. I
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always believed that, I still believe that. Anyway, my training there was in those aspects of the landscape. Not just pure design, but looking at those factors in the shaping that improved the situation. And I’m not just talking about derelict and worn out landscapes, I’m also talking about coexisting and improving situations in raw nature, which is a whole, completely different thing. When I was at Michigan State University, there was a design professor there by the name of John B. Fraser and John had just graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. And he—he brought a—an interesting design aesthetic, one which you could probably call the latest thing out. The Harvard Graduate
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School of Design always turned out these cutting edge people. And he had a great influence on me. One of the things that he taught was really interesting. It was the seminar and he got this book called Man’s Role in Changing The Face of The Earth. And the book was a compilation of seminar—or symposium—symposium papers presented at a yearlong symposium hosted by the Werner Green Foundation.
(misc.)
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LD: And—but this book—I still have it here. It’s still very valuable to me. It’s this little—Michigan State University, 1960. Man’s Role in Changing The Face of the Earth. University of Chicago Press. Edited Lewis Sauer, Marsten Bates, Lewis Mumford. So in 1960, there was huge amounts of information put out by scientists on
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man’s tenure of the Earth and all over the world. It’s interesting that if you look at some of these articles today, they’re still—they still apply to today’s situation. So in this seminar group with Professor Fraser, we got to look at not just the design of gardens, but the design of—of—of everything involving the planet. And we came up—we started to learn about geomorphology and a whole bunch of other unpronounceable names. But they began to form a scientific basis for looking at and understanding the world and man’s tenure of it and what he has done to it, good or bad, over the course of that tenure.
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Everything from little African villages to major metropolitan areas, what people did there. What was their relationship? And subsequent to that also, I became very intrigued with the writings of J.B. Jackson. J.B. was a wonderful person. I loved him dearly. He traveled around the United States on a motorcycle, which I felt was suicidal and he’s from New Mexico. I’ve done quite a bit of work in New Mexico and hung around a lot of the places in New Mexico that he—he hung around at. I—I—I—I—I try to see parts of New Mexico the way he saw it in order to better understand J.B.’s writings. When I
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was teaching at the University of Texas, I brought him here to speak to the architecture students. He presented a whole different world to them. With the establishment of this Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at UT Austin, I like to think that perhaps J.B. and his great insights and his—his readings and—and—and just the manifestation of who he was and what he said had some impact on that. I think you need to have a school of landscape architecture in this day and age if you’re going to have a good school of architecture.
DT: So if I’m following you, in the late 50’s and early 60’s, you saw in Michigan State that there was a kind of a broadening of landscape architecture to include environmental design and studies issues, is that right? That landscape architecture was seen more broadly than just designing gardens?
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LD: Yeah, I think in a way that’s true, but—and the—historically, landscape architecture was that broan—broad view. The—the person who coined the term landscape architect was Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park, who did the Boston Park system, who—who designed projects all over the United States. Stanford University, parks all over America. But his approach was not one of an isolated little garden, his approach was one of looking at the urban form and mu—mu—what made it work? Olmsted was interesting in that he never practiced alone. He brought and created landscape architecture out of the interdisciplinary—as an interdisciplinary effort. He
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always used the best architects. He always used the best geologists. He always used the best water and soils people. He always used the best engineers that he could find in putting his work and his efforts together. And it’s interesting to note that before Olmsted was doing all of this, he had come to Texas. He was a great masterful journalist and writer and his book on Travels Through Texas is an important document because it, in a sense, is landscape architecture because the essence of Travels Through Texas is the
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descriptions of the land and the people on it that he wrote. He had a way of writing and a way of recording what he saw that was phenomenal. And the basis of landscape architecture right now is what do you see? How do you record what you see, what you hear, what you smell, what you feel? Not to the extent that you develop analysis paralysis, but that you identify the features and record them. Now within Olmsted’s writings, it’s important. For instance, one of the things that he talked about was the difficulty of hunting buffalo in Texas. And you say well—well—well, why is it hard to
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hunt buffalo in Texas? You go out to the hill country right now and you can see a buffalo or a deer and get a shot at them. You couldn’t see them because the grasses were taller than a buffalo. Now those grasses are remnants, they’re gone. Those blue stem grasses you no longer see. I once traveled around San Antonio trying to find a stand of blue stem grass. I virtually had to go five or six miles along a railroad right of way to find a stand of blue stem. You want to know why the Indians burned it? So that they could hunt the buffalo because they couldn’t find the buffalo. Buffalo’s this high. This whole place was
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covered with grass. If there hadn’t been the grass there, there would be no Edwards Aquifer because it’s the plants, the grass, the blue stem that collects the rain and, with its roots, transfers this water to underground storage systems. We know that. These grasslands go from Texas all the way up through—to the Great Lakes and recharge all of those aquifers. Not just the Edwards, but the underground aquifers that—that are a little bit west of the Ogallala, a little bit west of the—the Mississippi River. The—the
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grasslands are extremely important and they harvest water. Not only rainfall, but think about it. You know how our temperatures change here drastically? In the morning, it’s cool. In the summer, it’s hot. But if you go out and look at grasslands in the mornings, what are those leaves, those millions of leaves, that huge area covered with? It’s covered with mist, condensation and as it heats, it condenses, goes into the crown of the plant and into the ground and into the aquifer. So it’s not only harvesting rainfall, but it’s harvesting the humidity in the air each and every day, even the days that it doesn’t rain. Olmsted was important because we virtually had no record of how tall those grasses were
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unless you looked through that book, Travels Through Texas. So he was a recorder of what he saw and to me, Olmsted, who founded the profession of landscape architecture, knew back then what this profession had to do. It was not until perhaps in the 60’s that landscape architecture rediscovered itself as a group of individuals or a profession that assessed the conditions of land and worked with people who wanted to put something on it and how you reconcile the—what you’re doing to the l—land in terms of what you want and—and not denigrating it. And—and how to be socially responsible in your use
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of that land. And that’s pretty much what the profession does. Years ago, somewhere along the line, landscape architects got known as garden designers, posy planters. But that’s not a landscape architect. A landscape architect is a person who deals with the land for social benefit. We’re not here to design the gardens for the rich of Europe. Those are not landscape architects. The landscape architects are the ones who go into cities and
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establish parks and parks all over the place and the linkages between parks. Olmsted, of course, had people who—who—who—who followed what he—what he prescribed. One of the greatest was in Kansas City and a—a—a—a—Kessler. George Kessler. And George Kessler from tra—traveled from—from Kansas City to Dallas and did work in Dallas. Kessler Parkway is a community development which he did. And Kessler really understood Dallas more than even Dallas understands itself today because he understood what the Trinity River and its tributaries were all about. And the City of Dallas has spent
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hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on flood control and water quality issues because they didn’t take the advice of Kessler, George Kessler. The things that he told them to in reports that you can still find today along the streams of the Trinity River are still valid. S—so it’s—it’s this great continuance between Olmsted and Kessler down to people right now. In a way, it—it—it—it—it’s reconnecting with the formation of the profession. Olmsted called landscape architecture the practice of architecture in a democracy. So it’s interesting then to me that most of his biographers are attorneys.
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Most of his biographers and his earlier biographer, Albert Fine, was an attorney out on Long Island. I brought him also to UT to speak to my students about Olmsted. So that was—that was their—you see, Olmsted was interested in democracy. He—he—he was a phenomenal man, close friends with Abraham Lincoln. Headed the—founded the Red Cross, headed the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. These were social issues that he was involved in. His park—Central Park was a place—a breathing space,
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the lungs of the city. You can say well, Europe had great parks. Europe did not had great parks. Europe had hunting preserves for the rich that were open to the public at the discretion of the rich. They were not designed as places for public recreation. Those were invented here in the United States by Frederick Law Olmsted. So there’s this great tradition and I like to think that there’s an awakening on the part of people as to what landscape architecture actually is. I think many of the architects now—I think that’s why you’re beginning to see more and more schools of landscape architecture, particularly on
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a graduate level, opened in schools of—of architecture. UT desperately needs a school of landscape architecture. You can’t just keep turning the tools out.
DT: Now how did you come to Texas? You’d been at Michigan State in East Lansing. And then I understand, later worked in New York for the Rockefeller family and for Nelson Rockefeller, for one of his agencies when he was governor. Is that correct?
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LD: Yeah. I—I left Michigan State and I, of course, wanted to go to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which back in those days cost ten thousand dollars a year. You have no idea how much ten thousand dollars a year was back in those days. Getting admitted was not particularly a problem because of the head of the school at that time was Hideo Sasaki and I had studied under Sasaki while at Michigan State. In fact, while I was at Michigan State, I probably saw more of him—of Sasaki than the—the students at
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Harvard did. But anyway, I went back to Niagara Falls to work and found the bland—blind ad in the newspaper looking for some nebulous kind of person and I applied for the job. The job was for an organization that was just getting established that had been identified as a public benefit corporation by the State Legislature of—of New York. It was one of the super programs that Nelson Rockefeller put together. He had a superfund for cleaning up the Adirondacks. He had a superfund for cleaning up the—Lake Ontario,
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where there was not one foot of public property along the entire shore of—of—of Lake Ontario. He was dying to clean out the Adirondacks, which were one little—little family cottage right after another and all these little outtakes in the middle of this vast state park that was in the process of being turned over into private use. It’s got—and he had a number of other programs—mental health facilities, urban development corporation, which I helped him form. But the program that I went to work with was called the State University Construction Fund of New York. And the state university system was very
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new in New York. It consisted of a few teachers’ colleges, but most of the schools in New York were private and Nelson wanted to establish a state university system. It was actually the youngest state university system in the country. So through some kind of magic mirror act, the money appeared to do all of this. So I went to work for the State University Construction Fund. I—I—I—I think I just got lucky. I—I was hired by a bunch of people doing the interviews who were all retired military. And I had worked for a retired military officer one summer when I was with the National Park Service out in
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Utah. And anyway, they had to have me and I went to work there for the enormous sum of 7500 dollars a year. And to put that in perspective, I think I was making more per year than anybody in my graduating class from Michigan State University. And I went into this—this super agency, who—who thought they needed a landscape architect and they—and—or maybe they liked this young, acidic whippersnapper. They used to call me the infante terrible of the construction fund. I don’t know whether—I have to still think about that. But anyway, we were to vastly increase the size of the state university system,
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which was to build four major state universities in the state, each with a population of 25,000. Buffalo, Stoneybrook, couple of others, and 35 college campuses in 35 different towns. And so the task was daunting, jaunting and so I really cut my teeth on that program. It was important in that we put design teams together to develop campus plans for every one of these sites. So it was a—a long master planning process, the process of which hadn’t been defined. Somebody had to write the process. Besides hiring all these architects and engineers and landscape architects and all the host of—but you have a
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blank check to do this. It was unbelievable—unbelievable. It was like, you know, government by edict. And we never had to worry about the state legislature. Nelson Rockefeller was a very powerful man and the state legislature was sort of an appendage of the governor’s office. Nelson got what he wanted and he wanted to build a major state university system and he did. So we signed all these contracts to do these master plans and do all these studies. But we actually had to publish documents and write contracts to
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put all these different interdisciplinary teams together and get them to work together and they had traditionally not worked together. Of course, New York City had a vast treasure trove of name architects. But to go and tell Yo Ming Pei that has to work with a landscape architect sort of gave him a, you know, a case of the yips. Or Gordon Bunshaft at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill who didn’t want to do that. I remember we kept going to him about following the procedures and this land was sensitive that you had to build on. And old Gordon put the cigar in his mouth and say give me enough money and I’ll put the whole fucking thing in one glass box. Well, that comment caused the cancellation
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of the largest contract an architect ever signed in history. So we got very lucky and I was at the right place at the right time to bring this program to volition. You have no idea how big that program was. This is the largest construction program at its time on the face of the earth. University of Buffalo, which was one unit, was larger than Brasilia and it’s there today. It’s still pretty good looking. We accomplished a lot. We had a motto that said good design doesn’t cost extra and every time architect had to sign a contract that he would bring the building in on time and under budget—or on budget or he had to
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redesign it at his own cost. We’re the first agency ever do that. But that takes responsibility in house. You have to have the procedures and the mechanisms and the support to show them how to do that. The interesting thing, I think, about the construction fund was that—including secretaries, this program never had more than 100 employees managing the largest construction program in the world. And we built those
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35 college campuses in seven years. Seven years. And made a lot of front covers of architectural magazines. So in a sense, what happened was that for a person who wasn’t even 30 years old, I was now heralded into the world of design in New York and design in other places and—because I was the client for some of the biggest name architects in the country. And we stuck pretty much to New York architects, but later on, we branched out to some of the other ones around the country who were really good, like Harry Wiest in Chicago and—and some of the others. We damn near ran out of good
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architects in the state of New York and nearly l—everything had to be drawn in those days. You know, there was no CAD and so everybody had to hand draw and—and—and—and create drafting offices for—for doing this. But it was a fabulous experience. I was…
DT: How did you get these interdisciplinary teams to strike a balance between something that’d be aesthetically pleasing, something that would work well and something that would deal with these sensitive, ecological areas that these construction projects were being dropped into?
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LD: Well, w—w—we had processes for the design teams to bring their work into our office for review and the process was extremely important. And it was a predetermined process and they were bound to the process by the contract. Actually, the contract that we wrote was one of the most significant things we ever did. We didn’t use any standard AIA contract. We were looking for architects and design professionals to do more than they traditionally did under AIA contracts. Bind them contractually to the full job as we described it. So we would bring these projects in for review and then we would give
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them written comments from the interdisciplinary teams we had in the office, including the construction teams. And during the various phases of a project, they would get these written comments. And then they would—their report would either be returned, say okay, or returned with comments or redo this section. But while you’re redoing the section, continue work. And that—so the first thing was the written comment. If that didn’t work, some of us would get on the plane and go to New York and have a little conference with the design teams in New York or some other city or on the site. If that didn’t work, we would have what we call the come to Jesus meeting in the office in
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Albany. And everybody would sit around the conference table and we would talk. And if nothing worked, quite frankly, I’d spend a week doing drawings and I’d go and pin them up on the wall and say draw that. A few times it got down to that. Sometimes some of us had to go and worked out of people’s offices. Leave the office in Albany and go to New York and work out of people’s offices there. It’s amazing, the lack of training that a lot of well-known architects had in dealing with buildings that are going into small communities—thirty-five small communities in the state. You know, in some cases, the
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population of these schools was larger than the population of the town and nobody even bothered to think what the town’s sewage capacity was all about or what the politics of the town was, much less what the geography was all about. So it became that kind of a process. So in a lot of ways, in addition to being a—a client, we were an educator and eventually I headed up the research section and we would contract for research with some of the top practitioners. People in the—at MIT, we did research documents, performance specifications for a whole bunch of things. Site design and site budgeting, the acoustical
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environment, the luminous environment. The Acoustical Environment was a fabulous book that we published with Bo, Brannock and Newman—Bob Newman. Top—top—top acoustics engineer in the country at the time. Bill Lamm from MIT, William Lamm Consultants and Lighting. Everybody’s talking about how to get natural light in a building. Bill Lamm wrote our document called The Luminous Environment, which is an important document to this day and everybody’s still using those performance criteria instead of the—the performance criteria for lighting from the IES that were written by
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General Electric. I mean, the whole notion that you can heat a building with light bulbs is gone and the whole notion that you have to look into day lighting in a building is new. But in 1965, at the State University Construction Fund, getting natural lighting into a building was not new. So we looked at a whole bunch of things. Even the materials in laboratories of the bench top and—and also the psychological issues that are important in design. A lot of people feel uncomfortable in laboratories, we found out, because there
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was no place for the eye to focus. The minute you put something for somebody to focus in—so we went into a lot of those kinds of psychological issues related to architecture. We did that with the University of London and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. So we did an enormous amount of research, even in perception. And then we took these documents and packaged them in with the programs for the buildings so that they had a huge base. They had a program, a budget, a time schedule and stacks of research to go and do and design your buildings. It’s unfortunate that this agency no longer exists. But
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on the other hand, we were set up to do a job and when we did the job and it was over with, we shut down. How many people do that? So that was a learning experience for me for about eight or ten years that was phenomenal. It allowed me to go on the lecture circuit for quite a while.
DT: And this took you through much of the 60’s and I assume that shortly after that, you came to Texas, is that right? Can you talk about how you came here?
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LD: I came to Texas in 1970. You know, Texans are—are—are really interesting people in a lot of ways and two of the most interesting people I met were O’Neil Ford, the architect and Sam Zisman, the planner. The—these people seemed to have an approach to design and—and doing things the right way that a lot of people didn’t have. And I don’t know quite how that came about, but it probably came out of this whole
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notion of growing up in the Depression and being poor. But I came here to look after Sam’s three adopted children in 1970—he unfortunately got a heart attack and died—and started teaching here at UT Austin in the school of architecture under Alan Taniguchi. I taught a course in landscape architecture to 140 students seated out in this vast lecture hall. And shut my office and practice in New York. Kept one job that I had in Puerto Rico and put the car in the moving van along with my holdings and moved into this
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neighborhood where I—I am in 1970. So I looked forward to—to being with O’Neil Ford. I wanted to figure out how he did what he did. You know, O’Neil Ford was idolized by architects in New York. He was far more famous in New York than he was in—in Texas. And I remember him getting up at an AIA convention to speak and everybody in the place stood up and applauded. And maybe because he wasn’t in competition with them for their work in New York, but people idolized what he said and the work he did. And the opportunity to—to come here and be a father, even though I
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was a bachelor, and also be associated with O’Neil in some of his projects was very exciting to me. Of course, also teaching at UT had its appeal. But UT Austin was not anything like some of the other schools that I had been lecturing at particularly in the—in the 60’s.
DT: What was it that O’Neil Ford was so admired for?
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LD: You know, O—O—O’Neil could speak so beautifully. He mastered the English language. He had a tinge of the blarney and he was an iconoclast. And he could rip just about anything apart and do it nicely. I’ve heard him—and he was a historian. I’ve he—heard him actually rip apart Hellenic and Hellenistic architecture and talk about how those architects back then didn’t know what they were doing. And he could be convincing about it. Now when he did a hatchet job on his contemporaries, that was even more penetrating than humorous. O’Neil was a person who knew how to cut to the quick and he did—he didn’t much go along with the fashion, shall we say. Post-modernism, I
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remember, just about dro—and he had all kinds of names for that sort of stuff. And he was—he didn’t care who he insulted. Do it to their face or in public, but if he thought your architecture was banal or trendy and not serious, he’d tell you about it and everybody else within earshot. So I found him honest and I liked what he did and he seemed to have a wonderful approach and a good set of values toward what you have to have to build a building on the land. He was very sensitive man in what he did. And very careful about limited use of resources. I think that came up—came from growing up
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in Pink Hill, Texas during the Depression. No education. Damn near starving to death. And how you establish an architectural practice with all those things, all those limitations and then just as soon as things get going, having World War II hit and lose off—and have to go off to war and then get restarted again. I think you learn something in that process about trying to get the biggest bang for the buck and doing good things with the least amount of materials or—or—or wearing out or things that have deleterious effects on the land. He was very sensitive to those kinds of things. Course, like the rest of us, he was more sensitive verbally than he was in practice, but we all suffer from that.
DT: So one reason for coming to Texas was to work with O’Neil Ford, but I guess the other was to be teaching at UT Austin and I guess to restart your practice here in a new state for landscape architecture. Can you talk about how you both taught and practiced and how you tried to maybe bring some environmental concerns to your students and to your clients?
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LD: Well, for me, in a sense, I don’t know whether they mixed, teaching and practicing. It’s pretty tough, at least for me. If I’m teaching, I’m so absorbed in preparation for classes and lecturing that other things fall by the wayside. And then of course, the time pressures of large amounts of practice is just—they did not mix well for me. But I was adamant about teaching here. I needed the money. Didn’t have a job. But I was adamant about bringing landscape architecture as I knew it from the
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Olmstedian tradition here to a school of architecture in Texas. I mean, can you imagine teaching about aquifers in 1970 to a group of architectural students in—in—in—in Austin? Aquifer, what’s that? You know, you should’ve seen the spellings of aquifer that I got back on tests. What’s an aquifer or this or that? They had trouble with—with the language. Architects—for—for a profession that’s so full of buzzwords, they have
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real problems with any other profession’s language. And so—but that’s another story about English proficiency among professionals. But I sought to bring landscape architecture to these students in—not in the garden design sense. I mean, they fully expected me to get up there and start showing pictures of plants and that they were going to have to learn the names of these plants and these flowers. That’s what they thought I was going to do because that’s what—that’s what had been given to them beforehand. But the issue was not what you plant around the building; the issue was whether the
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building belongs on that particular piece of land at all. And to get students to realize—especially architecture students—that the most important decision that you make is not what to build or how to build, but where not to build? Where not to build? Sam Zisman wrote a wonderful book for the Bureau of Reclamation. Sam was my mentor. Called Where Not To Build and it’s the most important decision that we can make because the cost of—of reclaiming lands that we shouldn’t have built on in the first place is going to bankrupt America.
DT: Can you give us some examples of why you shouldn’t build in one location or another?
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LD: Absolutely. You know, we have to be very, very careful of building in flood plains because if you build in flood plains, somebody’s going to have to buy up all that property. It’s cheaper to buy the flood plain when there’s nothing in it than when it’s full of building. So it’s that kind of stuff. To go in there and make decisions about where not to build. Lot of these areas where you don’t want to build are—are extremely what we would call high sensitive environmental areas. A lot of them are related to water. There’s areas that I’m willing to work in and then there’s areas that I, as a landscape
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architect, am not willing to work in, in terms of superimposing a certain density of human development. I think any landscape architect that’s willing to put, say, a resort community in an estuary is a fool. And an estuary, visually, is a wonderful place to build because you have this usually freshwater stream intersecting with a saltwater body of water. Well, New Orleans. Ninth Ward. You know, that’s one extreme example. But I’ve done work in Mexico with tropical estuaries that are even more sensitive and—because these—these estuaries are rich and they need to be understood. Most of them are bird rookeries. So you not only have matters of the land and sedimentation and water
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quality and vegetation, but you’ve got issues of—of—of birds, rookeries and that’s—you—you know. So the landscape architect, or anybody who’s going to go and do anything there, or an architect who’s going to put up a building needs to have this information so that he knows what to do. But in a lot of cases, the issue of where to build, where not to build is—is the most important decision. Now, in New Mexico, where I’ve been working, New Mexico is very fire prone and there are areas that are going to burn up whether you have a building in there or not. And fires are wrecking
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havoc all over America. It wasn’t an issue when they burned and there wasn’t anything there, but now that there’s a bunch of high priced houses that don’t belong in them, everybody’s making it an issue. Or what about these idiots that go on these mountain views along the Pacific Ocean in California and then go, oops, you—my house fell down in a mudslide. Well, you know, I’m not too sympathetic to these people and under f—Disaster Relief Act, how much of that do we have to continue to pay for? It’s up to somebody to say you can’t do that, you know? I think we’ve reached the limit of—of—
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of—of—of how many disasters the federal government—we know that the cities and the states and the counties can’t pay for cleaning up this mess. Now we’re going to the federal government. And now, the state of—the state of—e—everybody’s complaining, includes the state of Texas, that Washington isn’t paying its bill for hurricane relief. Well, it’s no surprise to me. In Dallas, at Bachman Branch, which was the first stream that I studied in Dallas or in this state, is interesting because Bachman had been studied by Kessler from Kansas Sta—Kansas City. Kessler told them Bachman Branch, which
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flows into the Trinity—the Trinity River drains all of Dallas. It’s got two—two major forks, the West Fork that comes out of Fort Worth, which is about was—when I was working there, the most polluted stream in America, and the East Fork comes out of Dallas, which was probably the most pristine. And it all meets in downtown Dallas. So [coughs] but at Bachman Branch, Olmsted said define the land that floods. The hundred—wh—you might say—let’s say that’s the Hundred Year floodplain. Put a
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parkway on one side and a parkway on the other side. Build homes only on one side of the parkway and leave the stream in the middle that floods between the two parkways as a park strip and you make this continuous. And you do this all over Dallas with all your streams that flood. And you get an open space structure of where not to build for the whole city based on this study of its natural features. Well, the City of Dallas didn’t pay any attention to Kessler and people built really expensive houses on Bachman Branch where they shouldn’t have built. And then they expanded Love Field and they—oh, God,
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Dallas has done some of the stupidest things. Dallas extended one of the runways into the upper part of Bachman Creek and filled in the floodplain. By that time, nothing was working. Everybody was getting flooded out and the city was spending millions of dollars on pumps to pump storm sewage and—and—and sanitary sewage out of this low-lying area. Finally, when I was studying it with Health Associates, we looked up what—they asked us to identify what the alternatives were. And we identified the fact that the City of Dallas has already spent more than what the value of the real estate was along Bachman Branch in public improvements to keep those people there. And we suggested
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that they buy the floodplain and buy these people out. And that was the first time, to my knowledge in Texas, that a—a City Council voted to buy impacted people out as opposed to going in there and deepening the channel, concrete lining it, putting in more improvements. Well, what the hell, you going to go and concrete line these people’s scenic beauty? That had gotten down to be the only solution. So the solution was instead
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of conveying more water, buy out the flood prone areas. Course, these people didn’t want to sell because they, you know, they want to live there. So the city was smart, they took the value of the house and put it in an escrow account and they said whenever you want to sell, here’s the money. The offer still stands. So the critical decision is where not to build. The City of Dallas could’ve saved billions in costs to municipal improvements just by paying attention to Kessler and not building where he said.
(misc.)
[End of Reel 2350]
DT: When we were talking before, you were explaining one of the most important building decisions is not how to build, or what materials to use, so much as where not to build. And I think you gave building in a flood plain as an example of a mistake. I think locally here in San Antonio, one of the concerns is building in the recharge zone. Can you explain some of the examples of how that’s played out here, and your role?
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LD: Well, we have a different kind of aquifer here than most people are familiar with. You know, most aquifers are sand aquifers, so that if it rains the sand filters out to a certain degree the impurities that enter the aquifer. But here we have something called a karst aquifer, which is openings in limestone. So basically, where the rain falls and hits the ground, the water in the aquifer is not—is the exact same—contains the same contaminants that the rainfall has, and it picks up the stuff—the surf—the contaminants of the surface runoff, and it goes into the aquifer directly. And then once you put a well in, you get essentially that kind of thing. Now originally I had talked about the role of
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grasses. And of course, grasses that are over the—in the thin layer of soil, or the soil over the aquifers, absorbed and—and purified some of that water. You get rid of the grain—the—the dense grass covers through grazing or burning or urbanization, you get rid of that na—the filtration process that it—it provides for making sure the water’s clear, or clean water quality, but you also get a—a—a reduction in the amount of water. But we have this vast system of aquifers that surround San Antonio. Actually, San Antonio is an island between two huge aquifers. The—the Greenwood on the south side, and on the north side, the Edwards Aquifer. So you know, the—the Spaniards and the Indians
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weren’t stupid. They came here for two things. They came here, one, for water, because this was really an oasis out in a desert, and they came here for pecans. Pecans grow in the estuaries and in the flood plains of where all this water was collecting. And they came here for the water to drink, and—and to harvest the pecans. They got fat on pecans. Pecans are very nutritious. But in order to get pecans to grow, you’ve got to have surface water. And here—we have this interesting thing called the San Antonio River that just comes up out of the ground out of our Edwards Aquifer, and makes its way down to the estuary, and—and—and—and—in—in—in—in—in—in the bay.
DT: What was the concern about building on top of the Edwards Aquifer, on top of the recharge zone?
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LD: The—the—the—the—the—the issue’s a multiple one. Water quality is directly related to impervious cover. And the more impervious cover you have, the—it—it has the tendency to do two things. One, lower the volume of water that goes into the aquifer. It’s carried as surface runoff and goes directly to the stream. And secondly, if you have an asphalt surface that’s polluted, and you take it as natural runoff, then the polluted water goes directly in. Also, there was a whole problem in—in—that we had here in San Antonio with a bunch of wells, derelict wells that people were throwing all kinds of things in. You know, dead cows, their garbage, and everything else. One of the big things we did in San Antonio is to get those wells capped. It was direct infiltration. So
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what we have here is a two-fold problem. One of water quantity, maximizing the surface water to go into the aquifer as a storage tank, or—or directly into a stream and go down to the—the bay, the Gulf without going into the aquifer, and then also the other important of—of water quality. And as I said, water quality is directly related to impervious cover, or the amount of impervious cover. And the—the more impervious the surface, the less water quality you have entering the—the—and—and that’s just a matter of urbanization. So that’s why this whole issue of impervious cover in terms of building over the top of
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the aquifer is important. In a way, you know, given all circumstances, aquifers, particularly karst aquifers, are so sensitive you shouldn’t build over the top of them at all because you should try to maximize the amount of water that’s recharged so that you can pull it out of a well, or it can go to the stream, or you know, store it so it doesn’t evaporate, and—and—and to maximize also the water quality that you pull up in—in the wells. And so you shouldn’t build at all. Well, the issue then becomes, well, be reasonable. How much are you going to allow? You can’t just say none. Well, you know, if it was up to me, knowing what I know, I’d say none. But…
DT: What did you say? I mean you served both on the Water Quality Committee that was…
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LD: Yeah. Well, I said—I—I said—I said some things that I thought were reasonable. One of the things I said was you had to plug all these wells, and all the wells had to be permitted, so that you had to know where the holes were that were possible pollutant sources. The second thing that you said was that filling stations, it’s a real problem with leakage. I mean we have here in San Antonio, no necessarily over the aquifer, a major problem with filling stations whose underground storage tanks leak. Every time you go to fix a street in this town to repave it, and you—you go into an environmental study that
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the government requests, you find out that the soil is infiltrated with gasoline from some old filling station that isn’t there anymore. So you have to deal with direct source pollutants first. And—and then that means that you have to look at your zoning laws. That certain kinds of things you can’t put over the top of an aquifer. You obviously can’t put a—a dr—a dry cleaning—industrial dry cleaning facility over the top. You obviously can’t put a—a plating—something that plates, you know, tin and metals over the top. We’re talking about keeping those things that are direct pollutants through the zoning laws from ever being located on top. I mean the whole issue came up about funeral
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parlors. Well, embalming fluid is very dangerous. I mean you do not want, you know, that stuff getting in your drinking water. So what we’re doing here in San Antonio is trying to find something that’s reasonable and, you know, what is the impervious cover? Now if you talk to the scientists, and the people who really know what they’re doing, they’ll tell you no. Well, you could put it on a committee, like I have been put on, you’ve got to find out what the level of tolerance is, and you’ve got to do it quickly, because in the absence of that, you get nothing. And when you have nothing on the books—you
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have nothing on the books, the problem still goes on because you have to understand, if you don’t have a water quality ordinance on the books, unless you have a moratorium, that building’s going on anyway. The developers in this town have always believed that their solution was to delay, delay, delay everything, so that they can get in there and build whatever they got to build, while people like me are sitting around the table arguing over what they should build and what the ordinance that’s going to restrict them ought to be. So you have to understand the game that you’re playing. And—and—and—and you can say, well, I’m going to go to, you know, scientific data. The scientific data says don’t do
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anything at all. So I get stuck with this—you know, with the politicians and the elected officials in this town putting me on these committees, putting me on this committee to go and deal eyeball to eyeball with some pretty unfriendly people who don’t want any ordinance at all. What we’ve got now works. What do we need any ordinance for? You know, it’s the takings. You know, you’re—you’re going after my—my r—American God-given right to do w—w—you know, whatever I want to do. If I drill a well, I have—own all the water that I can suck out of there, you know. Or I can do anything I
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want to the land. I paid for it. It’s mine. Well, you know, at what point do you say you have a social responsibility, because isn’t that part of democracy is all about? And—and—so it’s—it’s hard always to rely on scientific data, because in some of these areas, particularly karstic aquifers, and some other issues that you’re dealing with, the data says don’t build over there at all. But you have to find a reasonable thing. So if you can slow
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it down—if you can slow it down, say there’s only so much impervious cover, you can kind of spread the pollution out to the point where, you know, if there’s so much water in the aquifer, it’s going to dilute those—those pollutants. And maybe it—you know, at a certain point—I mean then you—s—see, this city has no sewage—water treatment plant. No water treatment plant. All we do is take water out of the aquifer and chlorinate it, because it’s required by federal law. Now, you’re talking about having to all of a sudden build the first water treatment plant that’s ever been built in San Antonio. Now, we
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process our sewage here for reuse water, and—and that’s been a—a huge step forward. But scientific data is not on these people’s sides. But they don’t want to listen to scientific data. They’ll sue you. And—and—and—and—and—and—and then it’s a problem. It’s a problem for people like me, who with a strong science background, a strong academic background, believe that stuff.
DT: Speaking of a lawsuit, can you talk a little bit about the litigation that arose over construction of the UTSA [University of Texas at San Antonio] campus?
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LD: Well, it’s interesting how that—that happened. The—UTSA was actually built, or located before a lot of this stuff even happened. The interesting role that UTSA played, the lawsuit involved a new town being built over the aquifer called Ranch New Town. It was one of these ‘60s new town programs where we’re going to go in and
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build these new urban developments as satellite cities. And there was one here that was going to be called Ranch New Town. And it was not only that over the top of the Edwards Aquifer, it was over the hot zone of the Edwards Aquifer. I mean you could drop a cow down those sinkholes. They went directly in—you know. So there was a lawsuit toward Ranch New Town. And it went to court. And if my re—recollection is right, the current mayor of this town, Phil Hardberger, who was an attorney back then on that lawsuit, the environmentalists or whatever you want to call them, won a la—lost that
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lawsuit. Ranch New Town is still there. Never got built because of economic times. But they lost the lawsuit. But the basis upon which the judge made the decision is really interesting. The judge said the State of Texas went here and built UTSA, and they built it knowingly over the top of the Edwards Aquifer. Yeah. Why should private enterprise, i.e. Ranch New Town, be held to a higher standard than the State of Texas? The State of Texas should be showing leadership. The State of Texas went and built this campus over the top of—of—of—of—of—of—of—of the aquifer, why should you hold private enterprise to a higher standard than—than the leadership that government shows? He
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says that’s a problem in my courtroom, and I understand that point of view. So interestingly enough, you know, they went out there. That whole thing was in a in—in—interesting thing, the—the—that was Mary Ann Smothers Bruni. Mary Ann owned that land. The governor at that time wanted it. She gave him a s—section in the middle, held onto everything else, and they b—they built it out there. O’Neil Ford was the architect. I
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remember them running around the office trying to figure out late in the game, after the buildings were up, what they were going to do with the surface runoff of the parking lots over there. But it became a hot issue. It became a hot issue. Subsi—and interestingly enough, the person who was in the leadership of this lawsuit was Cathy Powell, who’s a—teaching urban studies at Trinity University. Her husband was Boone Powell, who was working for O’Neil Ford that was the architect for the buildings. Isn’t that hilarious? You know? So—but it’s interesting, and that’s why I say where not to build is so
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important. Government needs to show the leadership. And that’s why we write ordinances, and that’s one of the reasons why, you know, when they call me to work on these things, I’m interested in the leadership that the city holds. But I’m also interested in the fact that if you, the City of San Antonio, put these ordinances on the book, every ordinance that I write, or work on writing, I tell the city, you cannot exclude the City of San Antonio from any part of these ordinances because we’ve had history of that in San Antonio, where the city says they’re exempt from their own ordinances. Can you
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imagine? In order to get an ordinance passed in San Antonio, the c—somebody from the city will stand up and say, well, the City of San Antonio has to be exempt from it? And my answer to them is always the same. If you exempt yourself from this ordinance, the ordinance, if it goes to court, will not stand up.
DT: Can you give us some examples of where the city has sought to exempt themselves from an environmentally related ordinance?
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LD: Absolutely. We have an ordinance here in this neighborhood along the River Walk, and now it’s extended for the entire length of the City of San Antonio, RIO-1, RIO-2. It’s an overlay talking about development related to the river. And here in this neighborhood, all our development related to the river is part of Brackenridge Park and Brackenridge Park Golf Course. So this neighborhood association was established to protect Brackenridge Park, not the neighborhood. That’s in our charter. We’ve been to the Supreme Court on that and prevailed. The city wanted to be exempt. In the original
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draft of the ordinance, the city was exempting itself from the zoning laws of RIO-1, RIO-2, and the city was the major property owner along the upstream section of the San Antonio River. What did they think we were working on those ordinances for? It was to bring the city and the Parks Department into alignment. They built on the banks of the San Antonio River inside Brackenridge Park next to the golf course this huge barn of a building. Big metal barn of a building. Looks like a church. You know what that thing is full of? Chemicals—chemicals to put on top of golf courses. It’s their central storage
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facility. It’s two hundred feet from the banks of the San Antonio River. Major storage facility. And they come in here and build this thing without asking anybody in my neighborhood. And they wonder why I get upset. I don’t just get upset about the chemicals that they’ve been putting on that golf course since day one, we finally got them
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to stop, but they have the chemical storage facility right next to the river. And they want to be exempt from those kinds of actions. Now supposing you wanted to build a chemical storage facility as a private guy on the banks of the San Antonio River. Do you think you’d have any—you think you’d have any problem? Well, the city wants to be exempt from those—those rules and regulations. And they don’t want to have to move that thing. Well, they’re going to move it. They ain’t going to store that stuff in there anymore, or they’re going to end up in court, and they know it. So it’s those kinds of
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examples. The city also wants to be exempt from Historic and Design Review Committee. Can you imagine that? When I was on the Fine Arts Commission, the Fine Arts Commission had to review the design of every project built on public land. They hated us. They finally got rid of us. But they want to be exempt from their rules and regulations. You know, the city owns lots of historic preserva—historic buildings. But they want to be exempt from the same rules and regulations that they put on private enterprise for historic structures. That doesn’t work. And—but it was the precedent of—
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of—of—of UTSA and Ranch New Town that says judges are not willing to hold private enterprise to a higher standard than the government that puts these rules and regulations in place.
DT: Let’s talk a little bit about the rules that are imposed on private enterprise, and some of the attempts to freeze those regulations. I think that there’s been a long debate about grandfathering, and vesting rights. Did you have any role in trying to understand those (?)?
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LD: Well, yeah. The two—the—these were issues of course in the bul—billboard ordinance, and in the sign ordinance. And they kind of prepared me for the work later on in—in—in working on the drainage regulation, and the water quality regs. There are always issues of vested rights, and free speech, and on and on and on. And these are good things. But you have to deal with them the way you would deal with them in a contemporary American democracy. Getting down to the issue of—of—of—of—of vested rights, people think that they can do whatever they want with land, and that they
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have a vested right. In San Antonio, it had to do with the fact that they sent some letter that they had some intention of developing. And no matter what they did to that land, by virtue of a one page letter that they intended to develop the land, freedom from whatever rules and regulations forever that the city might impose on that piece land subsequent to that letter of intent. That means that we’re supposed to freeze society for their benefit, you know. Some of them got up at City Council the other day and said, well, I went away to college, and it was X number of dollars when I was a freshman. By the time I was a senior, it was this number of dollars. How come I couldn’t be grandfathered on my—on my senior tuition versus what I paid when I was freshman? So vested rights is a big deal for the lawyers who are involved in these situations. You see, a lot of people think that, you know, who makes the money off the land are the property owners, and the
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engineers, and the this, and the that. Let me tell you, the big bucks are the lawyers, the litigants. These guys, they’re in there suing, sometimes rightfully so, sometimes not rightfully so. And sometimes these people who own this property or developments don’t even know the diff—the—the deal. It’s like Jarndis versus Jarndis. I mean I’m going to—you—you need a lawyer, you know. You can—fine, you can have an engineer and all this kind of stuff, but you need somebody to represent you down at City Hall because the City of San Antonio and the staff down there are out to screw you, and you’ve got to have a lawyer. And you don’t want to go down there and deal with those people. And
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that’s the kind of stuff that goes on here. And vested rights is a big issue. And it’s going to be a bigger issue in Texas than ever before, because we have a land commissioner right now. I mean an Ag. Commissioner right now, Susan Combs, who’s going to be running as Land Commissioner. And this woman, Susan Combs. This is more than a year ago, April 14th, ‘05. This is her—her plea to run for Ag. Commissioner—I mean to Land Commissioner. Of course, she was going to run for Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s spot before that, until they told Kay she had to stay on. Texas Turning to Ledge—Legislature
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for Protection of Public Property. Her ending sentence is “The legislature has an opportunity to reaffirm a right we’ve all taken for granted: owning and enjoying private property. The time is now and the stakes are great. Let’s preserve the value Texas hold dear. No taking of private property without just compensation.” She’s running. And this is a woman who’s a rancher from West Texas. And God bless her. But she believes that
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any time you want to do—any time somebody puts—if a municipality wants to put some controls on a piece of land, and it restricts the value of the land, they want compensation. And that’s what she’s going to car—carry forward as the state’s Land Commissioner. And she’s going to be elected. And municipalities all over the city need to be organizing now to see how they’re going to deal with her. She is funded by the Texas Cattlemen’s and Ranchers’ Association. And these are people with a very rural mentality. And they are the curse of the major metropolitan areas in this state. And basically, what’s happened here is that the urban centers, the urban counties don’t even have land use
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control. In other words, you go to Bexar County outside the city of San Antonio, no land use controls. You can do anything you want. You go to Houston, the counties surround it, no land use controls. You go do Dallas, the counties that are surround it, that are not within municipalities, if you can find any anymore, no land use controls. So the counties cannot even begin to think about any kind of rules and regulations involving land use. Even the efforts by legislators to have counties declared urban counties, based on population, has failed because of the rural vote in Texas. And these county judges, and
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these county commissioners are going crazy trying to find some basis for legislating what goes on in these areas which will may eventually be annexed in some cases by cities with no infrastructure. You got to go in and put them. They’re built in flood plains. They’re hazardous. They’re this, they’re that. The streets don’t meet qualifications for thickness. And they can’t put those controls on because the state legislature won’t let them, and it’s
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going to get worse with Susan Combs in there. Her cousin lives down the street, and her stepsister’s the next block over. So I can talk freely. Now, where are we going, and what direction are we—are—are—are we headed in? In terms of San Antonio and this vested rights, we had it taken care of when we wrote those rules and those regulations. We thought we had. But the lawyers find loopholes, and the city gets upset about the loopholes. While the loopholes are being discussed, the development is going on, because the staff gets scared in terms of handing out building permits that the city’s
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going to get sued. And like in the words of Ken Brown, “The city’s out there handing building permits over the top of the Edward’s Aquifer like candy.” Like candy. So Thursday I was at City Council. And I expressed my frustration with serving on these committees. And—and—and—and—and—and—and the—if—if I wasted my time because no matter where you drive, you can find flagrant violations of these ordinances. And I says I’m wasting my time. And, you know, and in the matter of vested rights, the big issue is whose rights? Whose rights? The guy who’s out for a—a—a fast buck? Or
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your children and my children and their children, who are going to have to pay for this mess? Vested rights and purchase, the—let me tell you something about the State of New York trying to protect the watershed of the—the Adirondacks where all the water comes from, but goes into the Hudson and supplies New York’s water supply, the state’s water supply. The state had to go in and buy private property inside the Adirondack Preserve. That’s been going on for thirty-five years. They’ve spent billions. Goes back
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to you going to buy it developed, or you’re going to buy it undeveloped. The most progressive thing we have going on in the city right now is buying up sensitive land, because if you don’t buy it up, these idiots are going to go and build on them. And eventually the destruction that this is going to cause to the environment, and to the livability of the city, is going to require the taxpayers to go and buy it developed. And how much more times the cost? That’s the inevitability of all of this. And so that’s why vested rights are important. To bring people to the table to say what’s reasonable in
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terms of development. Now, we all have this thing about fifteen percent impervious cover versus thirty-five percent impervious cover versus forty percent impervious cover. But let me tell you something. You know, what’s impervious cover? Just what is impervious cover? Here’s a report from the Texas Water Resources Institute. You know, people are talking about this Golf San Antonio, and the PGA, and this and that, and putting these subdivisions in. And they get up there, and they tell you, well, it’s going to be lawns, it’s a golf course, it’s going to be people’s front yards of St. Augustine grass.
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That’s pervious cover. Oh, yeah? Well, let me tell you something. I hate to flitch through this, but I want to get it right. Bear with me a second. Here. Research Report. The pervious areas in an urban watershed can also contribute to an increase in runoff. The infiltration rate for maintained laws can—lawns can be as low as one-sixth of that for land remaining in native vegetation. That’s measured. This reduction is very significant because thirty-five to eighty-five percent of the total surface area in an urban watershed
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may be maintained in laws—lawns. The decrease in infiltration rate may be caused by compaction during construction, or by disturbance of the natural soil profile by adding or removing topsoil during landscaping. What the hell is this all about? See what I mean? You can take scientific data to the table, nobody wants to listen to it. These people spend years on this stuff. Measuring. (?). To them, or to a n—standard engineer out there, whether it’s native grass or St. Augustine grass, it’s the same. Grass is grass. Well, grass is not grass.
(misc.)
DT: So far we’ve talked a little bit about landscape design, and about flood control, and about water quality, and recharge zone issues, and this problem of grandfathering and vesting. You had a good point when we were off tape about another strategy for trying to control inconsistent land uses. And I think it involved nuisance law. Can you talk a little bit about that?
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LD: Yeah. We don’t know where we are with this vested rights issue, no matter how many rules and regulations that we passed here in San Antonio. We do know that the rules that we passed on Thursday are not more stringent than state law, although the developers in the development community are complaining that they are. We have to make very sure in San Antonio that we do not pass laws that conflict with state law or—
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or—or are—are more overbearing than what state allows. Of course, these people also go to the state legislature and get these laws passed on the heels of local ordinances. It seems the state legislature will pass any cockamamie law for these—for the lack of land use controls. Of course, we can’t get a school funding bill passed, but we can get these cockamamie vested rights bills passed with great ease. But the issue is…
DT: Do you think that the common law of nuisance might be able to trump or at least augment the positive (?).
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LD: Absolutely. Texas has very weak environmental laws. But we have some the strongest public nuisance laws in the state, and in the country. So there was a—when we passed the water quality ordinance, the attorneys on the opposing side told the city attorneys that these—this rule—these rules, these water quality regulations would not stand up under a lawsuit utilizing the state’s environmental laws. But the attorneys that our side brought in said that we could argue them on the basis of public nuisance laws, which were very strong in Texas. And that seemed to—that was the only way—that was the argument that allowed us to take that to City Council, and give them some reassurance that we could argue these cases when and if we were going to get sued under the public nuisance law. And I think we still need to consinue—continue to do that because polluting water, doing a lot of these—noise, visual, a lot of these things can be looked at as public nuisances, and we need to start looking at them and arguing them in
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law as ob—as—as violations of—of public nuisance. And as you get into an urban area versus a rural area, public nuisances become more and more important.
DT: Let’s talk about another aspect of this effort to try and find ordinances that will be effective and won’t be challenged in court. I think that you worked on the sign ordinance here. The (?) sign ordinances. Can you talk about some of the balances you had to find?
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LD: Well, we—we took a—a multiple approach on that. One of the first ones that we passed had to do with proliferation of billboards. They were going up all over the city. And just as soon as the Highway Department would get through building the stretch of roadway, like 1604, they were—there were like the—the—the—the—the last contractor in was the—the billboard people. And of course, they started going up in areas where new development was happening. And these people who were going to develop along 1604 didn’t want these damn billboards in their front yard, you know, or like Burma
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Shave signs. So we had to come up with a—a billboard ordinance. And we looked at a—a number of other ones. And actually, the most restrictive one in the country was Houston. Said no billboards shall be built at all. Well, the minute you tell somebody they can’t do anything at all, you end up in court, because that’s the way it is. So you have to be reasonable. And you also, besides being r—reasonable, you have to come up with rules and regulations that treat everybody the same. You see, you cannot be arbitrary
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and capricious. And—and—and then in terms of billboards and signage, you have the whole issues of freedom of speech. And these billboard companies, at one time before Clear Channel bought them all, they were all owned by a company called Metromedia out of Secaucus, New Jersey. And they had a staff of lawyers that were defending lawsuits on billboards all over the country, and winning. So we had to be very careful with our lawyer in San Antonio that we didn’t end up in court with Metromedia who owned most of the billboards in San Antonio. Of course, if you’re going to get them to
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come to the table to discuss a meaningful billboard ordinance, you’re wasting your time. Metromedia of Secaucus, New Jersey is not going to show up at City Hall to discuss being reasonable. So we had to do this sort of without their benefit, but there were local billboard ordin—owners who were in competition with these out-of-towners. So you have to come up with something that’s good for them because they’re being squeezed out by these big guys. So once you understand the politics of the situation, and the legality of the situation, you can sit around the table and start trading, which is what any ordinance
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involves. By the time it gets to City Council, you’re lucky if you have a bare minimum of standards. You’re just hopeful that you got the foot in the door, and that over the years ahead you can amend ordinances once they’re in place to make them more restrictive. But quite frankly, the stuff that’s going on out there is like a giant elephant. Well, the only way you eat an elephant is one bite at a time. So basically, what we’re involved in is—is—is—is—is—is one bite at a time. In terms of the billboard ordinance, we
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couldn’t do what Houston did because the day we put the thing on the books, somebody’d filed suit and the ordinance would be held in abatements until the suit’s resolved, which is what happened in Houston and other places. So you have to come up with something that’s reasonable that lawyers don’t feel comfortable about suing on and winning. They don’t want to lose because they’ll lose their clients. The billboard industry’s a big client. The whole sign industry’s a big client for attorneys. So we decided somewhere along the line that, how about if you want to build a new billboard in
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San Antonio, you have to take two down? Well, everybody thought that was a horrible idea. But Gene Camargo at that time, who was head of Building and Zoning for the city, and one or two city attorneys said, hey, that’s pretty intelligent. If you want to put one billboard up, you have to take two down. Two of yours, two of somebody else’s, you can trade around. And once we were able to get across that hurdle of two down for one up, we’re able to solve a lot of problems. First thing is that the billboards that were going to come down were the older ones. And most of them were concentrated in the inner city
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which is where we wanted to get rid of most of them, because that’s where there were too many of them. Back to back, illegal. So then one—once you come up with something that’s reasonable in that—like that, then you can start looking at other rules and regulations. Like spacing, size, height, all of that stuff.
DT: On the new ones.
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LD: On the new ones. But what—what—once you deal with the proliferation issue, and get everybody to agree to that, because the big problem is the numbers, then once you’ve done that, then you can start dealing with the other issues. Now, in terms of other sign things that we’ve done, we’ve gone in—we—we did—that was the first ordinance, which was the billboard ordinance, and that’s become famous all over the country. Two down for one up. Everybody’s doing that now. The second thing we did was start looking at—s—other signs in areas related to high density corridors that we thought ought to have a scenic look. So we came up with something called The Scenic Corridor
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Ordinance, where a group of folks who wanted to control billboards or any kind of signage in a certain area, could all get together and come up with their own rules and regulations as long as those rules and regulations were the same as the rules and regulations that we came up with, or more restrictive. So that was an enabling ordinance that a group of businessmen and a group of neighborhood associations, and a group of parks advocates could all get together and create a zoning overlay that’s called an Urban Corridor Ordinance that controls signage in that area. That was easy to pass because it
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was an enabling ordinance, and folks had to get together to do it. The third one that we passed was the touchiest, actually, which was on-premise signs. And this is the city telling people what kind of signs they can put up on private property. Not in the public right-of-way, on private property. And man alive, that was a bloodbath. An absolute
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bloodbath. I was co-chairman of that committee along with an attorney representing the sign industry who was the co-chairman. You never—I never saw so many participants at a meeting on any issue in my life in San Antonio. But we got on-premise sign control, and good on-premise sign control, and we strengthened the board that does on-premise signs. Issues of safety. These are electrical appliances by and large, have been addressed. Them falling over in windstorms. Businesses vacating and leaving the signs up, and then a new one goes up, and the old sign stays there. I mean they get to be—
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ch—ch—ch. I mean you—you—you go all over town and there’s old signs from years ago still up. How do you deal with them? How do you take them down? And what the responsibility is? So in a—in—a—a—a way in drafting ordinances, for those kinds of issues, prepared me really for the cutthroat dealings on—on the Water Quality Ordinance, and on the Drainage Regulation Review Committee. And if—and in—in fact, the Drainage Regulation Review Committee had already started. And the—this sounds very egotistical, but the water quality reg. thing was falling apart. The mayor’s Water Quality
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Taskforce was falling apart. And one of the councilmen came to me and said can you serve on that committee? And I said, no, I’m doing drainage reg. Well, we’ll put off the Drainage Regulation Review Committee’s work for a year if you’ll go work on that thing. So I did. I went there. I mean it was a mess. They had no ground rules. The public and the lobbyists were sitting at the same people with the mayor—mayoral appointments. No ground rules, no organization. I don’t know how the hell they were
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able to come up with anything. So I says, you get—you know, you got to have ground rules. You got to have ground rules. You can’t all talk at the same time. These simple kinds of things. So after about a year of that kind of finagling, and—and getting serious, we—we—we got a bite out of the elephant on water quality. So here we have mechanisms to deal with water quantity, storm drainage, and water quality, but it’s going—I’m going to be dead before those rules and regs are going to be what they ought to be to protect the health and safety of the people who live in this city.
DT: It seems like these ordinances are always influenced really strongly by the politics in San Antonio. And I thought one of the really striking things you’ve been involved with was the neighborhood associations to try and build the political support, the grassroots support, to make these things happen. And I was wondering if you could talk about your role in the San Antonio Coalition of Neighborhood Associations.
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LD: Well, you know, I—I—I—I—I’ve always been concerned about environmental issues. It was obvious that the City of San Antonio was going to grow when I came here. And grow phenomenally. It had all the characteristics of cities that are going to grow. The most important of being that it was undiscovered, you know. Houston and Dallas had already been discovered, but boy, this was the place, you know. And quite frankly, I was upset about it ending up like Austin, which I think has turned from one of the most beautiful cities in Texas, if not the world, into one of the ugliest places I’ve ever seen.
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And that happened, you know, over ten or fifteen years, which is a small timescale. If that had ever happened to San Antonio, we wouldn’t have a tourist business. But anyway, looking for—in—in—in—try to create an environmental body of people was tough back in the ‘70s. The members of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and those sort of folks, were quite frankly middle class and upper middle class white folk. And that’s a relatively small percentage of the population in San Antonio. So we had to find a political base. And a—a—a political base. And the base basically that we—we identified was the neighborhood movement. So this—this neighborhood here, River
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Road Neighborhood, was the first cities—the first city neighborhood association. There’d been a historic district here, or there, but this is something, first thing called a neighborhood association versus a historic district versus a homeowner’s association. A neighborhood association. Not a homeowner’s association, not a historic thing, but a neighborhood association. And what is a neighborhood association? First thing, a neighborhood association is a neighborhood. And that’s any group of people in a geographic area that decide that they’re a neighborhood. And they have boundaries, and
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they have definitions. And they have a charter, and bylaws, and a 501(c)3, and they’re set up to do business under the laws of the State of Texas. And we accomplished all of that. And so we—River Road Neighborhood Association got together with a couple of other neighborhood associations, and we said we need to have a mechanism for getting together to talk about citywide issues. And so we formed, many, many years ago, the San Antonio Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, which was an organization that became huge, and became a political force. A lot of people didn’t like us. Henry Cisneros did not like the neighborhood movement in San Antonio.
DT: What was the threat that he saw from the Neighborhood Association?
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LD: He was used to politics as—Henry’s an old time politician. He was brought up by a bunch of old-towners—old-timers and power brokers. That’s who he owes his allegiance to. This allegiance that we were creating to—creating—was a grassroots, people in neighborhoods who were going to start making a difference at the polls. And our big issues were all environmental issues. Code compliance, flooding, tree preservation, all of that. The environmental movement, which is large and growing and expanding in San Antonio, started with the inner city neighborhoods which had mixed
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ethnicity, mixed economic standard, common problems, and nobody ever paid any attention to them. And they started—today, in this city, if you want to become a councilman, you do it through the organization of neighborhood associations in your district. If you want to get elected mayor, you appeal to the neighborhood associations. And the neighborhood associations take those issues directly—their issues directly to council people and talk with them everyday. This is one of the vast—the biggest and vast transformation that this city has ever had. And it put an end—they have brought time limits to how long you stay in office, so that we get rid of these crooked dynasties that
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we’ve had. Every time somebody—I mean I have noble politicians come to me asking me to support extending term limits. And I tell them, why, so we can have Frank Wing back? So we can have these people back? So we can have these people back that fought us for years and never got off the bench there, and got reelected year after year because they were a hero among a—a minority establishment, like a Patrone? Neighborhoods got rid of the Patrone system in this city. They got rid of this city being run, having council meetings at the San Antonio Country Club. Grassroots enabling and
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empowering people to have a—a voice in local government. It is the biggest—San Antonio became one of the most important cities to visit in terms of two things, historic preservation, and neighborhood movements. National meetings have been held here to see how we did what we did. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t people out there doing better than we’re doing now. But the neighborhood movement, and—and—and—and—and historic preservation in neighborhoods started here in this community. And that’s, to me, why it’s livable. Now, if you look at a lot of people involved in the—in the—in the
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movements in these issues related to water quality and—and—and—and—and—and—and—and—and—and—and the other issues, they did not come up from the Sierra Club, they did not come from the Audubon Society. All those people came out of neighborhood activism.
DT: What were some examples environmental problems that the neighborhood associations really took under their wing to work on?
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LD: Histor—historically, the big issues have related to drainage, and to water. The reuse system that we have now where we take reuse water and treat it, takes sewage and treat it, one of the first things that I did as chairman of the San Antonio Coalition of Neighborhoods Associations, was stand up at a SAWS meeting and promise the support of all the neighborhoods in San Antonio (?) a program of reuse water. There wasn’t one developer at that meeting. There wasn’t one person from the Chamber of Commerce. Me, and a bunch of neighbors getting up, and SAWS, San Antonio Water System, they
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said you know, where’s everybody else? And you actually want this? You want us to go and spend millions of dollars of rate-payers’ money to put in and interrupt neighborhoods with these waterlines we’re going to be digging through your streets and in your right-of-ways? You want that? This is—it’s reuse water. It’s the only water we own. It’s the only water we own. Once it’s taken out of the ground, as long as it’s in the pipes and it isn’t discharged into a stream, it’s the only water San Antonio owns. So let’s
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use it, and reuse it, and reuse it while it’s ours, because the minute we get rid of it, it’s—belongs to the State of Texas. So one of the first things we did was bring in line the Reuse Water Program. And we fought for it over and over and over again. Of course, later on, a lot of other people joined on the bandwagon. But we were the first. And I had become chairman of that organization two days before that meeting was held, and I got a
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phone call from the previous chairman saying you got to get down to the City of San—out—down to SAWS and talk in favor of this. I said, talk in favor of what? I don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, you—you—you know, Larry, just go, be there, and get up and say something. Sign up. So we’re very proud of that. As, you know, not just the—the—the—the—the political thing, but in terms of—of—of—of drainage, the amount of flooding in this city, and the loss of life due to flooding is a di—is—is a disgrace. Is a disgrace. And we—we—we—we have the rules and regulations in place to begin to
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assume that situation, but it’s going to take the neighborhoods to get the city to enforce those rules and regulations. There was a hundred year flood plain desi—defined for this neighborhood years ago. It has now been updated. They have tripled the number of houses inside the hundred year flood plain. Tripled. A neighborhood south of here on the San Antonio River on Symphony Lane over by San Jose Mission, there’s a—a—maybe a hundred houses there. Every house is in the flood plain. Subsequent—subsequent to rules and regulations, flood plain insurance, the federal government, city rules and regulations. Can you imagine? Subsequent to all of these things the hundred
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year flood plain, which FEMA s—says you can’t increase, is going up. Well, you know, what I’ve told River Road is that you’ve got to do something about this. And we’re going to be polite it for a while. And then when we can’t be polite about it anymore, we’re going to have to go to court and sue because quite honestly, when you’re dealing with issues like this in the City of San Antonio, and the River Authority, and all these
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other agencies, and most of the water comes from the City of Alamo Heights, by the way, this bedroom community just north of here, that has no impervious cover regs, no rules and regs—it’s where all the rich people live. And they take all their runoff, dump it in the river, and it flows by my neighborhood and puts my neighbors under water. Well, you know, this is a dicey situation, so you deal with these people, you know, in a reasonable fashion. And then when it gets unreasonable, you take advantage of the fact that you already have standing to sue which costs you a big bunch of bucks in the first
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place, so you have to go out into the community, join with other neighbors that are getting s—flooded out, and sue. You got to sue somebody, sue the city, sue somebody. But that’s the reality of the situation because we’re at the point right now where the Public Works Director blows us off. We’re at the point where one agency blames another agency, and then you pull them together in the meeting and they get in a fight. And here’s my neighbors sitting there watching these department heads, agency heads fight. And it’s our taxes that are paying their salaries, and they’re calling each other
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nasty names. So those are the kinds of issues that neighborhoods get involved in. And I know we’re going to have to sue. And it’s probably going to cost us a half a million to three-quarters of a million dollars, or maybe more. And you’re talking about a hundred property owners who are largely elderly, and middle class or lower middle class having to go out and raise that kind of money. But we did it before. But what are we going to do? The hundred year flood plain has doubled the number of houses with all these rules
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and regulations in place. So you draw a new line. And then twenty years from now, they—they’ll get a new line. And where is it? How many houses are going to be gone then? And how much more of the city is going to be flooded? With these regs in place? And you go and talk to these people about why haven’t you done something about it? Ah—ah—ah. You know, in the old days, you could go complain to FEMA. I sat down with FEMA the day after Katrina over at St. Mary’s University in a meeting. And I’ll tell you, even before all this stuff happened about FEMA, I—the words out of my mouth to
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those people up there from FEMA, this isn’t the agency it used to be, and it’s not carrying out its individual—its original mandate. What the hell is going on? You’re not to provide insurance to communities that do not put in place and enforce ordinance within your guidelines. And that is supposed to protect me and my neighbors from increased flooding over those Army Corps of Engineers lines. And here it’s not working. Well, we’re not going to do that. We don’t think we’re in that business anymore. I says, who told you you weren’t in that business anymore? Did you go to Congress to find out you weren’t in that business anymore? Well, we’ve had one correction over in—and—and I
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says, I got a copy of that damn thing. It’s right here from the Federal Register. It doesn’t say you don’t carry out that mandate. Well, you’re talking to a bunch of ribbon clerks over there. They probably all been fired by now.
[End of Reel 2351]
DT: We’ve talked a little bit about your training and the tradition of landscape architecture before, but we haven’t really talked about how you’ve applied here in your own garden around your house. And maybe some of the techniques you’ve used here and dealt with, the dry climate you’re in, and using native plant materials. Perhaps you can talk about that.
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LD: Yeah, well, architects, if they’re smart, have somebody else design their houses for them. But—it’s tough because you have to sort of put your money where your mouth is. And—but I’ve—I did my garden, and a lot of the gardens in the neighborhood. And they don’t really have any kind of visual identity to them as being done by Larry DeMartino. But they have certain basic principles about them. And if you’re going to look at gardens and—in and around San Antonio, you really have a couple of basic things to look at. You’re either on limestone real close to the surface, like the White Cliffs of
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Dover, and much of Austin, or you’re in these black clay soils whose parent material is Ingleford shale, and has high expanses and shrink characteristics, which means when it’s wet, it compacts and raises in elevation, when it’s dry it cracks and splits in crevices. The limestone ones are—are—are—are tough because most of them have been grazed and goaded to the point where there’s no soil to plant anything in. But in these low-lying areas, such as here in River Road, we have these deep expansive intractable clays that are a real challenge. Over here we have the problems of the high density and the alkalinity of the soil being such that it greatly limits the plant vocabulary in terms of the stuff that you can go to a local nursery and buy. We also have the problem of being near the river where you don’t want to pollute that river, so you want to be really careful about it. And
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you don’t want to increase the surface runoff to the point where you contribute to the flooding. In other words, one of the principles might be is when it rains, try and hold the water on your land as much as possible. As we already indicated, clipped lawns have a very high runoff coefficient contributing to flooding. It isn’t quite as bad as asphalt or concrete, but it’s pretty close, especially if it’s clipped. And—so I don’t like lawns unless they’re Bluestem and four or five feet tall. Most of our grasses here are very—that are what I would call environmentally sound, are pretty—pretty tall. Although I guess
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there’s quite a bit of work being done by Ladybird and—and the people there in Austin, on closer clipped grasses that you don’t have to cut, and don’t use a lot of water. Unfortunately, here, when it rains, they rot out. So we have to be very careful about that. So I’ve limited myself to trying to solve, or do a few of the things here that I’ve done on much larger projects. The first being minimizing impervious cover, which means that you infiltrate the soil with the natural rain as much as possible, and build up and actually store water in the soil where the roots are. And so I’ve done a couple of things here wh—
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which—which augment that. First, almost all of the pavement is decomposed granite, which is a wonderful median to walk on underfoot, and enriches the soil. And that material is local from Llano, Texas, not too far from here. Makes a good surface to walk in. And it gets away from the need for slick surfaces. Decomposed granite will store enormous quantities of water and transfer that water to the roots of plants and into the soil underneath it. So a lot of my gardens have extensive use of decomposed granite, or
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granular material that actually traps and stores water. Also, one of the things that I did in that median between the sidewalk and the curb was to raise the height of the curb with some broken concrete, and make a berm full of dirt and—and plants so that when the water runs off my dri—off my property, it’s stored over the top—it’s stored on top of the sidewalk. And you can’t walk on the sidewalk for maybe half hour or so during a heavy rainstorm. But that water instead of going over the curb and into the San Antonio River, finds its way into the roots of my pecan tree. And so I’ve done that on several projects. I
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got in trouble with that, actually, at Our Lady of the Lake University because the city code says that you must have a certain fall between the base of a building and the curb. And I—I alienated that with some berms to store the water on the campus instead of dumping it in the street, and the city didn’t like it, and was refusing to grant a building permit for whatever it was we were doing out there until—but sanity prevailed finally out there. So we—we—we—we do have rules and regulations still on the books in San Antonio and other municipalities that discourage us from doing things the right way.
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And no matter how well-meaning these people are, that everybody’s lot ought to drain, there’s issues of, you know, drain completely while it’s coming down six inches per hour, or you know, be free from standing water, you know, an hour after a rainfall. Here, in terms of the plant selection, I like to collect plants. And I’m not only interested in native plants, but I’m interested in anything that’ll grow. And—so this is a collection of stuff from all over the world. Some of it’s experimental and comes from China, some of it is
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tropical and it’s supposed to be too cold to grow here, but I’ve done a lot of work in the tropics. I think for a long time I was probably the only American landscape architect that worked in the tropics. It’s amazing that landscape architects in America except for one or two when Florida became temperate plant landscape architects, but I think education’s changing, that people have to—if they’re going to be a landscape architect, they have to learn how to work all over the world.
DT: How would you (?) plants that’ll use little water? I know that’s always a concern here in San Antonio.
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LD: Well, plants don’t use that much water. Basically, most of the water is lost to evaporation and runoff. And the poor little plant doesn’t use that much water. Most of it’s wasted through evaporation, watering at the wrong time, spraying it into the air, or—the—the—the soil here absorbs water. This clay absorbs water very slowly, so the water virtually has to stand on the soil for a certain amount of time before it will be absorbed because the molecular particles of these clays are—are cul—they’re so fine, they’re colloidal. And they’re very, very tight, particularly when they’re dry. And the water has to stand on them for a certain period of time to—to be absorbed. If you’ve got a granular soil with a lot of sand in it, you know, it’ll go right into it. But this stuff is very dense. If you have a—a jar of sand and you poor water in it, you don’t have to stir the sand and the water to mix it. But if you’ve got something fine, like flour, and you pour the water on
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top of it, you usually have a layer of flour, a layer of flour and water, and a layer of water. You have to either wait until it—for it all to go down to the bottom, or stir it and mix it. So here we can stir it and mix it by adding enormous amounts of organic material to the clay. Or you could just let the water sit on the top. Now what we’ve done here is really kind of interesting in that we’ve—we’ve delayed the time that the water goes to the street by building this berm along the sidewalk. And then we’ve tipped the driveway so that it’s tipped not to the street, but to the side yard. And we have no lawn. None at all. The
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rest of the pavement is all decomposed granite. The house is up on piers, so—and it has a very small square footage. This house looks huge, but it’s only twenty-seven by twenty-seven feet, and it’s three stories high, so it has minimum land area coverage. What we’ve tried to do is to keep everything mulched so that there’s no bare dirt, so that there’s either a plant, very densely planted, plus being mulched with a good thickness of mulch. And so—so what happens is that when the sun hits the mulch, if the sun hits the dirt, the—all goes up to evaporation. But if you have that layer of mulch, it insulates and keeps the
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moisture in. You’ve got to mulch your—in terms of adding organic matter to the soil so that it absorbs the water more easily, and so that it acts as a buffer to the—to the sun. In some cases, I’ve completely covered yards with these arbors like you see, just because there’s a need for—for instant gratification. People want shade, but you go and plant a—a tree out there, and maybe their children or their grandchildren will enjoy the shade from it, but they’re certainly not going to. So sometimes we’ve gone in and covered yards completely with lat structures and put the planting underneath. And by the time the plants have grown, the lat structure’d rotted, and you just take it and, you know, use it for mulch.
DT: Speaking of the long run, and children and grandchildren, do you have any advice that you might be able to hold out for future generations about some of these problems you’ve been working on?
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LD: Well, yeah.
DT: Either in landscape design or in some of the political work you’ve done?
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LD: Yeah. I think a couple things have happened. I think this Ens—Enron scandal has scared the hell out of a lot of people. So I think the moral compass is starting to change. Locally, we’ve had three city councilmen hauled off in—in cuffs for taking bribes. You know, that does more good than all the proselytizing that anybody like me can do. People’s moral compass gets out of whack. And you can write all the ordinances that you want. But I think we’re getting to the point now with the Internet and with the availability of information, that a lot of people can’t argue, can’t use the argument of ignorance anymore. I think we’re getting to that point, where you just can’t say I didn’t know the gun was loaded, because there’s too much information out there and it’s too
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readily available. And if people would use the information that they’ve got, and act in a moral way, thinking about not instant gratification, or what they want, or what their ego wants right now, but think about what they’re doing in terms of their neighbors, and in terms of the world around them, in terms of taking care of the land and their communities, these are the kind of values that are really important in professionals, for professionals to have. You know, it’s tough for an architect to say, well, that building shouldn’t be there, because then he’s out of a job. It’s tough for an engineer to say, well,
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it’s the wrong thing to do to—to—to—to pave that creek with six miles of concrete liner, it’s—y—y—you know, because you’re out of a job. But a—you know, at some point, we have to quit worrying about the commission, and start worrying about each other, and—and—and—and—and what we’re going to contribute when you st—when you look back—on your life, and what kind of regrets you had about the things you did, and what kind of a person you were. And you know, all that stuff piles on you after a while. And—so I w—I w—I—I—I would tell young people to be absolutely unabashed in their
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activism, in there manifesting their beliefs. They’ve got to do this, because by bouncing this off of other people and off the society, you find your own place, you know. Tempers your own will. The most intelligent people are those who last the most—lost the most battles because what that does is pre-disaster you for the future. And—so I’m invig—I—I—I—I—I believe in a society that’s invigorates itself. Invigor—invigor—we’ve invigorated our society here in America through immigrant—immigration that has
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invigorated our society and kept it alive. We have invigorated our society by continuing to reinvent ourselves over and over again through education and through giving. Giving of information freely to those who come after us, you know. They didn’t do that for years. There were trade secrets that people took to their death. Now everybody seems to be eager, except for Bill Gates, to give away everything that he knows, because, you know, he doesn’t know that that’s the smartest thing to do is to give it all away because it comes back and—and—and—and—and—and—and—and—and it—that’s the essence of
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free trade, you know. And that’s our future. So I—I would tell people, young people particularly, that they need to embrace the feel—the future. They need to be very honest with themselves and other people, and enjoy the journey of life. The journey. You know, the most important thing is not starting or completion, it’s enjoying the now. Enjoying the now, enjoy the journey of life. And you can enjoy it if you’re open, and honest, and sharing, and willing, and eager, and excited. That’s what I would—I would say. And I hope my daughter, you know—that’s what I would want for her. And that’s
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what I would want for, you know, for students or for young people coming up. We have a unique opportunity in this country because of—of—of—of—of what we are and how we’ve solved our problems. And what we solve, and how we solve here, will solve eventually the problems of China, we’ll eventually solve the problems of Africa because we have tried them on ourselves first, and we know what works and doesn’t work. But we have to be very open and free in helping these people, assisting these
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people solve their problems. Now some of them are going to make the same mistakes we have. But if we’ve solved problems, eventually they’ll come around to—to—to—to—to the ways and the means that work. You know, this country during the industrial revolution lasted a long period of time—we’ve destroyed vast areas of America. But China has had industrialization for a short period of time. And already, within the short period of time, these people are starting in the government, they’re starting to become concerned about environmental issues because they live now in a place that in a short
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period of time is the worst there, the this, the worst that, the—you know. So they’re beginning to look to answers which we have. And so I’m—I’m hopeful a—a—about the future and—I—I think a lot of young Americans, free of prejudice and free of a lot of constraints would e—ea—eagerly attack the world, and do a good job at it.
DT: Good advice. Thanks. Appreciate it.
End of Reel 2352
End of Interview with Larry DeMartino