San Antonio, USA and Wuxi have been sister cities and they are both famous for being waterfront cities intercut by canals. In the following time, we will lead to the San Antonio River in Texas, the USA, to show you how the River Walk has become an important part of the city's urban fabric and a tourist attraction in its own right.
San Antonio, located in south-central Texas, is the seventh largest city in the United States. The River Walk in the city center is about 4.5 kilometers long. On both sides of the river, there are tall palm trees, oak trees, and low tropical shrubs. On the winding river, a stone arch bridge like the ones in Suzhou is seen at intervals of every tens of meters. Staying here, you will have the feeling as if you were in the southern areas to the south of the Yangtze River in China.
Historically, the San Antonio River was once a rushing river of less than 2 meters wide with garbage and other pollutants floating over the water. In September 1921, a disastrous flood along the San Antonio River took 50 lives. Plans were then developed for flood control of the river. Among the plans was to build an upstream dam and bypass a prominent bend of the river in the Downtown area, then to pave over the bend, and create a storm sewer.
Work began on the Olmos Dam and bypass channel in 1926. However, the San Antonio Conservation Society successfully protested the paved sewer option. No major plans came into play until 1929, when San Antonio native and architect Robert Hugman submitted his plans for what would become the River Walk. Although many have been involved in development of the site, the leadership of former mayor Jack White was instrumental in passage of a bond issue that raised funds to empower the 1938 "San Antonio River Beautification Project", which began the evolution of the site into the present 2.5-mile-long River Walk.
After decades of hard work, San Antonio has extended its River Walk to combine waterfront commercial facilities with a park-like environment. The San Antonio Olympic River has become the most beautiful part of the city, bringing considerable tourism revenue.
However, how to avoid pollution of rivers such as cruise ships, sewage, and tourists' garbage has become a new problem. Based on the concept of ecological restoration, the local government has made efforts to provide habitat for fish and wild animals by improving water quality and vegetation, provide shade to the water surface through plants on both sides of the river bank, reduce the average temperature of the river and maintaining a higher oxygen content in the river, excavate the original concrete floor of the river bottom, pave with pebble to increase the penetration and circulation of the water body, transform the original drainage outlet of the river for the sake of purification and changing the oil-filled cruise ship into electricity to protect the water quality.
The government has also required surrounding hotels, restaurants, etc. to ban the discharge of sewage into rivers. The river management agency has launched the "Bio Conservation Plan", with 23,000 trees planted in the past two years, attracting about 190 species of birds to nest here.
The transformation of the San Antonio River brought about changes in the city's appearance, bringing popularity, creating a waterfront scene and injecting new vitality into the development of San Antonio. Today, this river, known as "Venice of the United States," brings $3.1 billion in economic revenue to the city every year, making it the brand window for San Antonio to go global.
(Source: ourjiangsu.com)
