From Texas Public Radio:
A large art installation in San Antonio may be one of the city’s oddest and most overlooked artistic works. But that obscurity is what makes it special to so many of its admirers.
Traffic flies by at high speeds on Wurzbach Parkway on San Antonio’s northeast side. Across from Heroes Stadium, just west of the massive smokestacks of the long-dormant Portland Cement company, there’s a city vehicle maintenance facility. David Newman of the city’s Solid Waste Department says it’s not exactly a suit-and-tie location.
“It’s a blue-collar setting – industrial, really,” he says.
Buses, garbage trucks and other vehicles come and go at all hours for maintenance.
“The actual name of the location is the Northeast Service Center,” Newman says. “But I don’t know anyone that calls it that. Everybody calls it the ‘Tool Yard.'”
The tools that give the Tool Yard its name are right out front, between the Parkway and the entrance to the service yard.
“And they’re large – I mean, they’re larger than life,” he says.
“The giant tools made the facility what it is today,” says Debbie Racca-Sittre, director of the city’s Department of Arts and Culture. Those giant tools are 11 15-foot steel hand tools: a hammer, a screwdriver and several kinds of wrenches.
