Public input helped keep ‘Los Lagartos’ at newly renovated San Jacinto

For nearly 100 years, San Jacinto Plaza’s layout remained largely unchanged.

City officials said the decision to redesign it was based on the opportunity to give El Pasoans a better functioning park in the center of Downtown.

Since talk of the San Jacinto renovation plan began about five years ago, that plan developed over time. The initial plan called for the removal of the Los Lagartos statue, but that all changed at a city council meeting back in 2011.

“The committee consensus is the plan does not represent in general the character of inherent architectural and historical cultural elements of El Paso,” El Paso historian Miguel Juarez told council, objecting to a San Jacinto Plaza redesign plan paid for by El Paso billionaire Paul Foster. The initial plan from SWA Landscape Architects removed the Los Lagartos statue from the plaza.

“We had a park that didn’t function like a good central urban park should,” said City Rep. Cortney Niland, who recalled that meeting, which turned the focus back toward keeping the statue in its original spot.

“Originally it was a private-public partnership and I thank Mr. Foster for actually being the catalyst to get the ball rolling. The community got involved and was very emphatic about the designs and the preservation of the Lagartos and the things they wanted to see in their Downtown. And I think what ultimately what they will see is their vision has come to fruition and its absolutely fabulous.”

One of the features of the new San Jacinto Plaza that was original to its design are the pathways that extend all the way from the Los Lagartos statue to the outskirts of the park, allowing people to enter it from any angle.

“The alligators, I feel, represent the soul of the community,” said Juarez, who looks back at that 2011 meeting on the Foster plan as a turning point for the project. “He wanted something good for El Paso, but at the same time there needed to be community input and there wasn’t. The whole intent was for us to provide input because it’s our plaza. The city council accepted about 90 percent of those recommendations.”

“I think the ultimate design that we came up with now,” Niland said, “pays homage to that but kicks it up on a metropolitan level that’s really state of the art.”

Juarez said it was worth the fight to keep Los Lagartos at the plaza.

Niland pointed out the same designers Foster suggested and paid $250,000 for developed the final plan for San Jacinto as well.