48 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE TheCoastalBend.com • Bring back The Sparkling City by the Sea. In 1955, Bob Cronwell was working in South Texas as the general manager of a col- lection of professional baseball teams, when he identified the need to organize lo- cal businesses and municipalities in an effort to promote tourism to the region. He gathered support and founded the Coastal Bend Tourism Association in 1955, and then the Corpus Christi Convention and Visitors Bureau the next year, which he ran for 31 years. Bob's strategy was to visit all of the main feeder markets for tourism to the area and invite local and national travel writers to visit us. Before long, Bob Cronwell earned the title, “Mr. Corpus Christi,” published the very first Coastal Bend Visitors Guide, and most famously coined the slogan, “The Sparkling City by the Sea.” Bob put the city and region on the nation's vacation map for the first time. In the four decades since Ole Bob retired from the CVB (now called Visit Corpus Chris- ti), tourism to the region briefly peaked in the 1990's, when 10,000 bowlers from across the U.S. held their annual tournament here, and then rode a steady decline as competing Texas markets expanded their “tourism product” portfolios. The Coastal Bend remained stagnant in expanding its base of attractions, losing opportunities by major developers to build a 1,000-room hotel and hospitality zone near the conven- tion center (now called the Hilliard Center), a Kemah-style entertainment zone on one of the bayfront landmasses, a massive Bass Pro Shops boating center at the old Memorial Coliseum site, a Sandestin-style resort on Lake Padre, and a San Antonio Riverwalk-style entertainment zone along a navigable canal on North Beach—com- plete with eleven man-made spoil islands off the beach that would provide wildlife habitat and ideal ocean science field study zones, all while reducing the cost of ero- sion mitigation and providing a protected zone for swimmers and families. Along with the North Beach development would come the cruise ship industry. We can dream of how life would be better for all of us if these projects had come through over these many years—a widely broadened tax base, thousands more hospitality jobs and those related to tourism, larger and more frequent convention business downtown that extends across the region—and best of all, more for all of us to enjoy and an improved quality of life that motivates our kids to want to stay in the Coastal Bend. The problem is, that each and every one of the aforemen- tioned, long-lost tourism product projects, were killed within Corpus Christi City Hall, at the behest of those who demanded a benefit for their allied interests, i.e. a construction contract in the case of Landry's, or those who saw one of these new developments as a threat to their business. As a result, we can't compete with San Antonio, Austin, or the Hill Country for millions of new tourists, and the billions they would spend here, because there is little to do but sit on the beach and fish—and thank God for those activities, which sustain our tourism industry as it is. Our spring community festival known as Buc Days has survived as a growing col- lection of events that includes the two-week-long carnival, the professional rodeo and series of Country music concerts, and of course the illuminated night parade. Over the past decades, Corpus Christi was home to two other annual festivals that not only brought the community together, but also attracted thousands of visitors to the Coastal Bend from across Texas, and in fact around the world. What started as the city's celebration of America's bicentennial in the fall of 1976, Bayfest was held on the northernmost stretch of Shoreline Boulevard for 34 years—it was the most anticipated and beloved festival for generations of Corpus Christians, and it's time to bring it back! Forever thanks to our beloved Joe Gazin. In a life that lasted a tragically-short 23 years, Selena Quintanilla earned the title of “Queen of Tejano” throughout the United States and Latin America, especially Mex- ico. Selena created a musical genre and style all her own, and few artists’ following of millions of fans has grown for three decades after their passing. For five years, from 2015 through 2019, Fiesta de la Flor attracted over 30,000 fans from across the U.S. and Latin America for a three-day celebration of Selena and Tejano Music. Top: The USS Lexington Museum on North Beach, along with the Texas State Aquarium, two of the most popular tourist attractions in Texas; Above: Sandestin Resort on Florida's Emerald Coast, the developer of which once intended to build a similar resort on Lake Padre; Right: A proposed five-star, 1,000-room hotel built ad- jacent to the Hilliard Center. Below: The 2019 North Beach Redevelopment Plan designed to alleviate flooding while creating our ‘Riverwalk.’
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