About this tour
Southtown is San Antonio's proof that an industrial dead zone can become an arts district on purpose. This drive starts inside the Blue Star Arts Complex — a 1910s ice warehouse turned gallery hub and the birthplace of the city's contemporary-art scene and its first brewpub — then loops through the modest Victorian streetcar blocks that connect Blue Star to King William, before finishing at Confluence Park, a set of sculptural concrete pavilions built to teach the river's own ecology. It's a short route, but it covers a century of Southtown reinventing the same stretch of riverbank.