Ice Houses

[luvhoops34]

When I first moved to San Antonio from Corpus Christi in 1979, I was mystified by the term Ice House. I had never heard it before. We sure didn't have them in the part of Corpus I was from.

But in San Antonio they were common place. I gradually got used to calling convenience stores, Ice Houses. Even though they really weren't a true Ice House.

Now almost 30 yrs later, I still call them Ice Houses....:D

[luvhoops34]

Oct. 20, 2007, 10:10PM
TEX-ARCANA

How did ice houses come about?
Demand for cold beer uncapped new industry

Ice has almost always taken a back seat in Texas icehouses.

It was the foundation, to be sure, whether it was shipped from the North in the mid-1800s or when the first ice plant opened in San Antonio as the Civil War began.

But it was chilled beer that made icehouses community staples in San Antonio, Houston and several towns around them. "When beer started being bottled commercially, and not just served from a keg, they would stack wooden cases of beer on top of blocks of ice," said Rhett Rushing, folklorist at the Institute of Texan Cultures at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

"When it was quitting time, a number of lumber yard employees, train employees, flour mill workers, would get off work and head straight for the icehouse."

That was around the 1880s in San Antonio. In Houston, Rushing said ice was a revolution for shrimpers and fishermen who could use it to transport their fresh catch to town. Of course, Houstonians also figured out that while ice was sitting in storage, it may as well keep beer cold.

The region's large German and Czech communities, where beer was a vital part of the culture, helped usher icehouses' natural progression to beer joints by the 1920s, a tradition that flourished after Prohibition ended in 1933 and continues today despite myriad other leisure choices.

"Icehouses followed the beer, you can bank on that," Rushing said.

"The ones that were frequented and made money, they followed the beer."

Over the years, icehouses in San Antonio and Houston took on distinctive looks.

In San Antonio, they're typically enclosed spaces and remain simple beer joints; in Houston they're ringed by garage-style doors kept open in the summertime, and many regularly serve food and offer live music.

Rushing explains the architectural difference with a word that may never have been uttered in the old-time working man's ice house: "thermodynamics."

"Houston still gets a Gulf breeze. If you open the garage doors, you get moving air," Rushing said. "In San Antonio, you don't get moving air until sunset, a north breeze. So to keep cool inside with the ice, you closed the door."

mark.babineck@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/5231651.html