Our hood...

This might be a random post but I wanted to give a little context to this blog by explaining where we live and what makes it so awesome!

First of all, this is our 100+ year old home in the Tobin Hill district of San Antonio, Texas. This picture makes it look a lot better than real life by the way because its from the realtor's website. Notice how you can't actually see the front lawn? I'm pretty sure that was on purpose...

Anyway, San Antonio is a pretty awesome city for a lot of reasons but part of what makes it awesome is its focus on urban revitalization. Tobin Hill is the most recent neighborhood to benefit from the public works projects and tax incentives that the city is offering to bring the area back to life. Here's a map of the area, which won't mean much to you if you've never been to San Antonio, except that it shows you that we live just north of downtown and just west of our city's famous "Riverwalk".

This picture is from Tobinhill.org

 

 

Ironically, this neighborhood was considered one of San Antonio's first suburbs in the 1880's because it was outside of the city center. Now our city is so sprawling that most people consider our neighborhood to be "downtown" and the "suburbs" are a good 30-40 minute drive away!

 

Here are a few things that I love about our neighborhood:

 

-Its one of the few truly walkable neighborhoods in San Antonio. We live across the street from several bars and restaurants and many more are within a 5 block radius. I can get burgers, pizza, hot dogs, tapas, Greek food, Mexican food, Jamaican jerk, sandwiches, and pancakes in less than a 8 minute walk from my front door. Not great for my waistline though. Can someone please open a salad place?

 

-We're really close to downtown. When you live in a big city I think it's hard to get downtown very often and enjoy the parts of your city that usually just tourists get to see. Living close makes it easy to visit our favorite restaurants, see shows and enjoy the sites of our city.

 

-Our neighborhood is really a mixed bag when it comes to it's residents. Because its an up and coming neighborhood, and its near a university, we have families who have lived in the area forever, college students and professors and young families (like us) who are moving to the new "cool" neighborhood.

 

In summary, I love where we live and if you're in San Antonio, you should check out our hood! Now enough talking, here are some pictures from our evening walks on the northern reach of the river...