Char Miller

  • Urban Scrawl

    Cities are tough to nail down. They are a jumble of kinetic streetscapes and energetic neighborhoods, of landscapes open (blockfaces) and closed (cul-de-sacs), held [...] Full Story

  • Sunburned

    City in the Sun is perhaps the most important book about San Antonio you’ve never read. Written in the 1940s by a self-styled “newcomer,” [...] Full Story

  • The Corps of New Orleans

    There may be no better way to acknowledge Hurricane Katrina’s fifth anniversary than to admit it offers a partial answer to that age-old paradox: [...] Full Story

  • High Country Thirst

    There were days when Tom Bell must have wondered what he had been thinking. In August 1969, he purchased Camping News Weekly and a [...] Full Story

  • San Antonio Days

    The hotel-balcony striptease is a not uncommon occurrence along San Antonio’s fabled Riverwalk. Friends with lofts overlooking the seductive tree-lined waterway report disrobed amblings [...] Full Story

  • The Shelf Life of the Presidential Mind

    Presidents read. Or so they tell us. They believe in the power of the book. Or so some have professed. The cousins Roosevelt were [...] Full Story

  • Ike’s Wake

    The following article contains an error requiring clarification as noted. Galveston looks like a war zone. Sections of the 61st Street pier still stand, [...] Full Story

  • Ike’s Wake

    Galveston looks like a war zone. Sections of the 61st Street pier still stand, but the rest was splintered in Hurricane Ike’s churning surge. [...] Full Story

  • Ike’s Wake

    CORRECTION: The following story contains an error. Based on inaccurate initial news reports, the Observer reported that Galveston’s bronze seawall memorial to the victims [...] Full Story

  • Body Politic, Rest & Motion

    Human history is about the movement of people through space and across time. Americans especially have made a totem of this idea. It’s embedded [...] Full Story