01/02/2026
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.
