Downtown San Antonio

Authors: Joan Marston Korte and David L. Peché · Foreword: Mayor Julián Castro · Publisher: Arcadia, Images of America · Published: 7 January 2013 · ISBN: 9780738584911 · paperback.

Part of Arcadia’s Images of America series — captioned photographs with short chapter introductions tracing how the urban core evolved. For placing a factory, warehouse, or storefront in context, the visual timeline of streets, signage, and construction complements fire maps, directories, and newspaper ads.

Disambiguation (resolved 2026-06-14). This is one co-authored book (Korte + Peché, ISBN 9780738584911). The project’s two 2026-06-08 web records earlier inferred that Korte and Peché had written separate same-titled books — that was wrong: Amazon, Arcadia, and Google Books all list both names on the single 2013 volume. Peché’s genuinely separate Arcadia book is San Antonio’s Historic Hotels (2019, ISBN 9781467102476, foreword by Henry Cisneros) — a different title, not to be confused with this one.

Relevance to H&H

Directly relevant — through co-author David L. Peché:

It contains a first-person H&H account. Peché included his father, Manuel Peché, in this book as an H&H Coffee delivery driver — the story of his disorienting first day on the route (lost without a map) — with a photograph (his father with an H&H can). Peché: “In honor of my dad and our city’s rich history, I included him in my book, Downtown San Antonio.”
The project used this book to identify its first tin. The H&H can pictured with Manuel was the reference for identifying/contextualizing the earliest tin in the collection.
The author is a living project source. David L. Peché is the project’s Peché contact; he and his family gave the 13 June 2026 museum tour of 601 Delaware, which deepened Manuel’s story (bottle-washing across Delaware → the H&H rail dock). See the contact record.

The rest of the book is general downtown SA visual history; the H&H-specific value is the Manuel Peché page/photo.

In the collection. Held at 601 Delaware — artifact HH-LIB-2026-0005 / accession HH-BOOK-2026-0005, and cataloged on Libib (the “H and H” library). Remaining: verify and transcribe page 127 (likely the Manuel page) and register the H&H-can photo as its own artifact reference. Peché’s other Arcadia book — San Antonio’s Historic Hotels — is also in the collection but is not yet accessioned in the KB (gap to fill).

Downtown San Antonio

Relevance to H&H

See also