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Everyone on the map
HemisFair called itself a confluence. These are the actual streams. Dotted lines are people; green water is the river. Tap any name to read their story.
The brilliant, largely forgotten outsiders who converged on San Antonio’s 1968 World’s Fair, and the trajectories that carried them through and beyond it.
The fair & the city beneath it
In 1968, San Antonio, a sleepy, out-of-the-way, overlooked city in the far southern reaches of the United States, hosted a World’s Fair. HemisFair. And for a brief window, something happened here that has never been written about.
Ample ink has been spilled about the fair’s transformative effect on San Antonio’s business community. How it turned a dusty cowtown into a tourist destination. The real estate developers. The fat cats. Those whose careers were never in much doubt before or after 1968. That story has been told, often in gratuitously self-congratulatory fashion.
This is not that story.
This is about the brilliant architects, visionary educators, avant-garde composers, street performers, psychedelic rockers, folklorists, and radical poets who also converged here, drawn by the fair’s gravitational pull into the same few city blocks at one of the nation’s most pivotal and tumultuous moments. Freaks, weirdos, dreamers. Most have since disappeared into obscurity. San Antonio used eminent domain to raze 92 acres and displace 1,600 residents to build the fair. O’Neil Ford resigned in protest. The fair opened April 6, 1968, two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Project Y, the Youth Pavilion, became the fair’s countercultural nerve center: Fluxus happenings, psychedelic light shows, Robert Ashley’s revolutionary theater, bread happenings, avant-garde dance. Right outside the gates, a man with oil drums and a pickup microphone played for the crowds who couldn’t afford admission. These visionaries could be found inside the fair, right outside it, and everywhere in between. The freeway was already coming. The only true shock is how much of this history has been concealed.
Everything I kind of do in my life right now was sort of solidified during those six months at HemisFair.
Same ground, three times
Three maps of the same blocks, lined up on Commerce Street and South Alamo Street. Pick two, then drag the line across.
- 1966
- Property Map S.D. #5, Civic Center Project No. 5 (Tex. R-83), Urban Renewal Agency of the City of San Antonio, Sept. 1, 1966. Pink marks businesses, blue marks public buildings.
- 1968
- International Exposition HemisFair ’68 visitor map, H. M. Gousha Company. It is a promotional drawing and not to scale, so its edges drift by a few yards.
- Today
- Current street map of the same blocks (Google Maps).
Psychogeographic maps
Guy Debord called it the dérive: drifting through a city on foot and letting its currents, not its signs, decide the way. These are walks taken across San Antonio, drawn on the real streets.
The loop
100 miles on foot
One walk around the city, start to finish, beginning and ending at the dot.
Rock peace
A peace sign walked across San Antonio: the ring along Loop 410, the stem down San Pedro Avenue, the arms out Nogalitos and Presa.
Vanished venues
19 rooms the music left
Clubs, ballrooms and dance halls that are gone, closed, or turned into something else, pinned on the city’s real creeks. Tap a record for its story. A solid ring is a known address; a dashed ring means only the street or area is known.
Archive
Posters, photographs, recordings, and ephemera from HemisFair ’68 and the musicians who passed through it. Material will be added as the research develops.
Posters & print
Nothing pinned up yet.
Photographs
Archival photographs coming soon.
Recordings
Tapes still being dug up.
Documents & ephemera
Ticket stubs, programs, letters.
The work
- Print
Book manuscript
The book I wish already existed. Full-length nonfiction tracing the trajectories of the brilliant, largely forgotten outsiders who converged on HemisFair ’68, and what happened to them after.
Draft in progress - Print
Libretto / zine
A parallel text: condensed, recomposed, image-integrated. Printed on newsprint. Art object and exhibition companion. Free at the installation.
Planned - Audio
Original recordings
Original compositions responding to each musician’s arc. Recorded on analog equipment, minimal production. Cassette release with liner notes that extend the manuscript’s arguments. The recording and writing inform each other.
Planned - Installation
Physical exhibition
CRT-screened video. Archival photography. A stage element evoking Project Y, the fair’s countercultural nerve center. A custom interactive instrument. Some of the subjects are still alive and will be present at the opening.
Venue in development - Site-specific
Walking component
The HemisFair site still exists as a park. A web-based tour activates on-location via QR code, layering the present park against the 1968 fairground map and the neighborhoods demolished to build it.
In development - Digital
This website
Permanent public archive: audio, manuscript excerpts, archival images, video, full documentation. Built to outlast the exhibition. Free and open.
Prototype
About the project
San Antonio has an underdog syndrome. A habit of assuming the interesting things happen somewhere else. Beneath the Freeway is a direct argument against that assumption.
This is the book I wish already existed, the one that says, hey, cool things happened here. World-class artists pushing boundaries. Avant-garde provocateurs making straight folks question their normal lives. Folklorists constructing a full picture of Texas society beyond the cowboy mythology. In a state so enamored with its own mythology, HemisFair was where the official narrative and the outsider tradition collided. The fair was conceived from the margins, by a liberal Jew and an uncompromising Hispanic, and it provided a platform for others on the margins. Blacks, Jews, women, homosexuals, progressives, challengers of orthodoxy.
And once the fair closed, so did that opportunity. The power structure reasserted itself. It became business as usual.
The title names a geography. The interstate came through. The neighborhoods are gone. What remains is a park, a tower, and an enormous amount of music made in this city by people who were here, and whose stories, until now, have gone mostly untold. The weirdest thing is just how brilliant these people are. And how few people know about them. Simultaneously weird and hopeful. It means there are still nooks and crannies to discover in our overexposed world.
The project takes multiple forms because the subject resists single containers: book, cassette, installation, walking tour, website. Each form reaches a different kind of attention.
About the author
Bill Baird is a musician, writer, and multi-media artist living in San Antonio. He received an MFA in Electronic Music and Digital Media from Mills College (Oakland, CA) and a Bachelor’s from the University of Texas at Austin’s Plan II program.