To the list of local cultural institutions that are struggling or already a sore memory – the ballet, the symphony, the old opera and the Museo Alameda – add theFund, the workplace giving program for the arts that County Judge Nelson Wolff kickstarted almost a decade ago. This year, if a couple of outstanding pledges come through in time, theFund will distribute approximately $80,000 to its 25 affiliates, less than its executive director, Rod Rubbo, earns in a year.

In 2011, theFund distributed $65,000, just $20,000 more than it earned that year from managing the concessions at Luminaria, the one-night citywide art festival held in HemisFair Park in March.

“It’s been kind of an up and down situation,” Rubbo said, noting that theFund had been in operation only a few years before the recession kicked in.

Yet United Way, the social-services fundraising juggernaut whose model inspired united arts campaigns like theFund, just celebrated its biggest year yet, with more than $50 million in contributions. An oft-cited fundraising standard for united arts funds is that they can expect to raise 10 percent of the local United Way’s goal, but San Antonio has fallen far short of that potential.

It’s a few days before Thanksgiving and I’m sitting on the ground floor of downtown's Finesilver Building. Nina Duran, editor in chief of the bilingual newspaper La Prensa de San Antonio, sits across from me in her father's chair. The office, filled with Tino Duran’s photographs and memorabilia, could easily pass for an art curator's loft in Lower Manhattan.

La Prensa is distinguished not only by its bilingualism, but by a unique and perhaps culturally induced golden rule that’s kept its readers whistling a happy ranchera since 1989: it prints only “positive news.” But Duran says she hopes her twice-weekly paper is also "an unbiased source.”

"I'd like my readers to know they're not being spoon-fed an idea. All we're doing is trying to showcase what's out there," she says.

I gently challenge her: But isn't a publication biased if it spoon-feeds positivity?

“Yes, that's true. But there are plenty of other places to get negative news,” she says, describing a media system saturated with unsettling headlines. “I'm referring to crime.”

La Prensa is an Alamo City independent-business success story. Nina’s father Tino, now 78, is the paper’s publisher, and older brother Tino, Jr. is director of operations. Nina, the youngest of five siblings, has three brothers and one sister. Stylish and attractive, she appears younger than her 31 years.

"I think we do a great job of showing what a family can do in the city of San Antonio ... what togetherness can do,” she says.

The gruesome, complex plot in Karin Slaughter’s latest, Criminal, holds its own nicely, but the takeaway for the reader is a more encompassing horror. Amid the waves of torture as the storyline shifts from mid-1970s Atlanta to present day is a pervasive portrait less about the sociopaths who perpetrate the damage than the ceaseless abuse that is wreaked on the novel’s women — cops, criminals and victims. This twisted world — a thinly disguised, familiar reality — demands both tactical adherence to role-playing in a men’s game and fearless, heroic opposition to it.

I will admit that I had trouble settling into the story. There was the porn-violence of the assaults, the jolts of time-jumping, and the relentless declarative sentences that made me feel as if I were reading a newspaper feature story. Somewhere it began to kick in; an anger so deep it had to be approached in oblique, terse syntax. It became impossible to look away. I admit I got hooked.

In 1960, just as the suburban design pattern was beginning to dominate American cities, Kevin Lynch published a book about how people mentally map the urban environment, and how the design of cities can facilitate or inhibit this process. Lynch argues in The Image of the City that a “vivid and and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image … can furnish the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication.” Further, “a good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security” as she moves from place to place, and even “heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience.”

Based on the anecdotal data I have informally collected — from learning to drive in San Antonio, and later learning to navigate downtown, discussing the urban core with newcomers and life-long residents — most people have trouble visualizing the structure of our city center. There are sections of grid at odd angles to each other, while major thoroughfares meander through the district turning this way and that. Streets that run parallel for some distance later intersect. There are many one-way streets, which further complicate navigation. Many of these characteristics are discussed by Lynch as factors that detract from what he calls the imageability of the environment.

What if we could build a simple transportation system that cuts through downtown, simplifying access to destinations off the major thoroughfares? Say, a line that runs north-south, and a line that runs east-west, taking riders within walking distance of many cultural assets and public spaces?