About this tour
Alamo Heights and Olmos Park are two of Texas's earliest planned suburbs, built one right after the other along the same stretch of the San Antonio River north of downtown. This short driving loop starts at the flood-control dam that made the land north of Alamo Heights buildable, then threads an 1859 ranch house that gave the whole suburb its name, a hidden midcentury-modern residence easy to mistake for something else entirely, a 1931 faux-bois trolley stop, and the campus anchor of a college older than either suburb. It's compact, but it traces exactly how this stretch of the city stopped being ranchland and became a neighborhood.