St. Mary's Strip History Project

https://community.sacurrent.com/event/love-letters-st-marys-strip-history-project-with-the-walk-offs-the-babylonz-and-math-problema-38909807

Love Letters: St. Mary's Strip History Project with The Walk Offs, The Babylonz and Math Problema Love Letters: St. Mary's Strip History Project with The Walk Offs, The Babylonz and Math Problema The second annual Love Letters event is happening on Feb. 27 at Jandro's. This year we have the The Walk Offs and The Babylonz with Math Problema. Be ready to share what you love about the St. Mary's St...

Our second annual (!) Love Letters event is happening on February 27th at .tx . This year we have the and the rockin us with Math Problema ( and ) with their all vinyl curated set of punk, post-punk, disco, post-disco ( you get it).

Be ready to share what you love about the St. Mary's Strip. We'll have Valentines and stationary, and your stories will be added to the love letters collection.

Event link : https://www.facebook.com/share/1NCiYEGRiX/

New digital collection up now! What is believed to be a photo album of Bob Popp's owner of the St. Mary's Bar and Grill. The album mainly consists of autographed band publicity photos, with some construction and live performance images. Several photos were signed to Bob Popp. Photo album was gifted to TEX POP - Texas Popular Music Museum from an estate sale purchase. Thanks to Michael Ann Coker for sharing this album for digitization.
https://stmarysstriphistoryproject.omeka.net/collections/show/6

Happy New Year, St. Mary's Strip community.

The last quarter of 2025 kicked my butt, (was 2025 good for anyone?), but this past week I've been able to dedicate some time to uploading some material to our digital collections site: https://stmarysstriphistoryproject.omeka.net/.

In 2025 the project commissioned Ray Tattooed Boy to created a logo. I put on two live music events; our Love Letters event in February with Pleasure Delay, Kitten Mitten, and Snowbyrd; and a history harvest in July with Los #3 Dinners and Michael Martin and the Infidels. Both events were held at Jandro's Patio Garden, which is such a great spot to do these events. I spoke with La Playa Santa Maria owner JB Gouger and general manager Angie Montana about the restaurant. I also enjoyed conversation with the Rodriguez family of Tobin Hill about growing up in the neighborhood and seeing the changes as the highway moved in and St. Mary's St. began to change. I hosted two information sessions with Jessica Anderson of the Office of Historic Preservation on the project at St. Sophia's Greek Orthodox Church. Thank you to Greg and the church for their hospitality. And we had a small data crawl event pulling information from city directories.

Wow, okay, a lot took place in 2025. I've been feeling really guilty about not doing more research, digitizing, utilizing the interviews I've conducted with folks, and lack of vignette writing.

2026 will hopefully bring collaboration with other memory workers and a summer of city directory research with an undergraduate student from Trinity University. I need to finish my vignette on La Playa and start working on other places like St. Mary's Bar and Grill, St. Mary's Brew Co. and Krazy Kat Music. I also want to do something on the theater scene on the strip in the 1980s. It already sounds too ambitious, haha.

This project was always meant to be a collaborative project, so if you have the time, room for a volunteer commitment, and a passion about a particular place, era, aspect of the St. Mary's Strip, please reach out and let's connect.

I think 2026 will be a year of a lot of change for the strip, which makes this work all the more important.

Last night on the St. Mary's Strip!

Wow! What an evening at @jandros.tx! Michael Martin and the Infidels were phenomenal (I've only seen Michael Martin perform solo or more acoustic) and Los #3 Dinners always know how to get a party started and shared many good times about the strip. Thank you for supporting this project by playing the event. Thank you to volunteers Katie, Patricia, and Vanessa holding down the scanning booth, George for being the door guy, Hondo for sharing historic The Scene footage of the St. Mary's Bar and Grill, the bar crew at Jandro's and @cosmoinserra for the quality sound (and being my dance partner). These meet ups are created to bring people together and to share what the strip means to them. So many of us found our love for, and/or got started with live music on the strip. In my mind, last night was what the strip was all about. If you attended, please share photos and videos with me. I am trying not to be so photo dependent and have a crappy camera, but moments like this certainly deserved better documentation.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DMi_jf4OJ7O/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Several months ago J.B. Gouger, owner of La Playa Santa Maria reached out to me about the project and we had a great time talking about the creation of the restaurant and it's nine years of operation. Today I met with him again and general manager Angie Rowe Montana who brought some memorabilia and the original hand written menu concept. We'll be scanning that, along with (hopefully) the materials you bring tomorrow night at the history harvest and meet up. Thank you J.B and Angie for sharing your memories with me.

Can't stop, gotta rock! The St. Mary's Strip History Project is hosting their next meet up and history harvest on July 26th at .tx. Michael Martin and the Infidels and the Los #3 Dinners will be playing. The Infidels were the house band for the Crazy Horse Saloon (now where Jandro's is) for many years and The Dinners were a regular on the strip. Please bring out your flyers, pictures, menus, music schedules of any event or place on the strip from the 1980s,1990s, 2000s - if I can scan it on a flatbed scanner, bring it- to add to the website and digital collections! It's an early show with doors opening at 6 and music starting at 7. $7 at the door. Thank you to Eric and Michael for sharing pictures!