Along the shores of the Río de la Plata, about 14 million people live in an urbanized area measuring roughly 40 miles by 20. We're on foot today, thank you, and will stick to the street that was intended to make Buenos Aires the Paris of the Americas.
Late in 2017, people gather at the Plaza de Mayo to celebrate the LGBT community. In the middle stands the Pyramid de Mayo, created in 1811 to celebrate the revolutionary war begun a year earlier. For a city created in 1580, 1811 may not seem very old, but the pyramid is actually one of the oldest things in the city. The Plaza de Mayo itself was created when an arcade was demolished in the 1880s. Behind it is the Casa Rosada, the presidential office.
The police on this day have set up barriers.
They're also ready with the kind of equipment that small-town police departments in the United States can only dream about.
We've jumped up over the barrier for a view of the Casa Rosada. The statue is of General Belgrano, one of the many heroes of the war for independence. The Casa Rosada behind him sits on the site of a Spanish fort demolished in 1873 to make way for a post office. The post office is still there: it's the left half of the building, converted in 1898 to a government house with the addition of the right half and the triumphal connecting arch. Pretty good for patchwork.
Maybe the pink color, which has many explanations, was really chosen to distract viewers from the mismatch. Does a good job of it, too.
Here's the other side of the building. This was the intended front side, because it faces the river—or faced it, past tense, because an artificial island now blocks the view.
A changing of the guard. Funny how the lack of guns makes them seem like they're in costume for an operetta.
The building behind them houses the national bank of Argentina.
In the space between the Casa Rosada and the old river bank, Juan de Garay gives one of those "This is the Place" gestures. An earlier Spanish settlement had been attacked by Indians and abandoned. Fifty years later, in 1580, Garay, who had recently been governor upstream at Asunción, came back and tried again. The city survived this time, though Garay didn't: he was ambushed by Indians and killed three years later, about age 55.
There used to be a park sloping down to the shore, which looked like the open sea because the Rio de la Plata is about 30 miles wide here, but the city's proudest collection of high rises now blocks the view. They’re on a former building-materials dump. We'll come back to this in the folder called Puerto Madero. Everybody loves tall buildings.
Here's what Garay looks at. The building in grand isolation is the former Central Post Office. It closed in 2003 and was converted to the Nestor Kirchner Cultural Center. Ironically, it was completed in 1928 and it a close copy of the rear facade of New York City's old post office, which was torn down in 1938. Well, what do you expect? Nobody can keep up with the style leader.
Facing the old post office is this unusual building from 1912. The man behind it was Nicolas Mihanovich, and, though he had many financial interests, the foundation of his fortune was the Argentina Navigation Company. Hence the lighthouse, which once did shine over the sea.
We've come back to the fenced-off section of the Plaza de Mayo, and now we're looking away from the water. You recognize Belgrano and the pyramid, but there are a couple of other prominent features here. For example, the tower. Hazard a quick guess as to its date?
Correct date: 1931. Welcome to the city's legislature.
The tower peeps over the town hall of 1610, rebuilt many times, most recently in 1940 by Mario Buschiazzo, nephew of another Buschiazzo, whose name will pop up time and again, fittingly for the city's director of public works in its heroic age.
The lesson is this: not everything that glitters is old.
Look like a church to you? Me neither, but facing the old town hall this is the Metropolitan Cathedral, with a facade from the early 19th century. The architects were French and presumably unwilling to design another Gothic heap. The pediment, from the 1860s, shows Joseph and his brothers, an apparent allusion to peacemaking between the parties who fought each other during Argentina's revolutionary war.
The interior, consecrated in 1791, is churchier and, of course, older than the facade.
A chapel houses the mausoleum of General San Martín, whose body was returned from Europe in 1880. He had died there 30 years earlier and, contrary to what you might expect of El Libertador, had lived there the last 25 years of his life.
The female figures represent Argentina, Chile, and Peru, the countries he freed from Spain.
Two blocks south of the plaza, this is the church of St. Ignatius. There's been a church here since 1686, but Perónist mobs burned it and other churches in 1955, so this is a reconstruction.
Same here, with the Basilica of San Francisco. The Franciscans got a grant of land from Garay himself, but the church was not consecrated until 1783. It collapsed in 1807 and was rebuilt early in the 20th century in what has been described as Bavarian Baroque. No wonder: the architect was the German Ernesto Sackmann (1874-1968). The central statues up top show Saint Francis flanked by Dante and Giotto and with a kneeling Columbus.
Like the church of St. Ignatius, this one, too, was destroyed by fire in 1955.
Just north of the plaza and in a secular counterpoint to the churches on the south, there's a city in the sense of the City of London. Among the banks here is this one from 1940. Seems late in the day for such classicism, but it echoes the face on the opposite site of the building, from 1876.
Here's the 1926 Banco Frances del Río de la Plata. The bank itself, the oldest private bank in Argentina, was established in 1886 but was acquired in 1996 by Spain's Banco Bilbao Vizcaya.
The banks attract protesters who, especially with that little pink compressed-air horn, make an amazing amount of noise.
Somehow the people in the nearby offices carry on, in this case in this Ministry of the Economy building from 1939. The almost indecipherable logo indicates that the building now houses the federal administration of public works.
A block away, a tired Julio Argentino Roca, Argentina's president for 12 years, makes his escape down Avenida Roca. The fencing hints that someone would like to deface the monument. One contender: the descendants of the Indians Roca killed during the "Conquest of the Desert" in the 1870s.
We haven't seen anything modern except for the towers at Puerto Madero, but here's an exception. It's the City Hotel, opened in 1931 by David Hogg, a Scotsman resident in Buenos Aires. It's been sold more than once and has operated since 2001 as an NH hotel, but go back to the South America Handbook for 1949. There, the City is described as "the largest and most modern hotel in South America... [with] 500 rooms, each with private bath, filtered ice water; all public rooms air-conditioned." The best bit: "The only English hotel in Buenos Aires." Some Scotsman.
The confusion extends to a cunning blend of Art Deco and Neo-Gothic. The entrance suggests a blade ready to drop.
We've started walking from the Plaza de Mayo west along the Avenida de Mayo, closed today for the LGBT parade. Down at the far end is the green dome of the Congreso de la Nación.
Quick version: Garay in 1580 laid out a gridded city of nine blocks by 15. Each measured 150 varas by 150, or about 130 meters square. Blocks were separated by streets measuring 11 varas or about 9.5 meters. The grid was greatly expanded in later years, but not the block size or the street width.
Come the late 19th century, the illustrious Torquato Alvear decided as mayor to build an avenue 30 meters wide and fit for a Paris of the Americas. It took a while, because property had to be condemned, and the street did not open until 1896, by which time Alvear had moved to a tomb in the Recoleta Cemetery. The street was designed by Juan Antonio Buschiazzo (1845-1917), uncle of Mario—the architect who designed the plaza's old town hall.
The avenida was soon lined with grand buildings that might have satisfied Baron Haussmann. Here's what is now the Casa de Cultura, run by the Ministry of Culture. Up top, however, you can faintly make out part of the name La Prensa, ("The Press"), and this building was indeed the home of that conservative newspaper from 1898 until Juan Perón expropriated it in 1951.
The architects, Carolos Agote and Alberto Gainza, are said to have been inspired by Charles Garnier. Completed in 1898, the building is topped with Pallas Athena holding the sacred fire of Prometheus. Perón, like most dictators, didn't share the implied adulation of a free press.
We've come down a couple of more blocks to the Avenida 9 de Julio. What can we say except "Hold hands, children."
Named for Argentina's Independence Day (9 July, 1816), work began on the road in 1935. Some of it opened in 1937, but the greater part only in the 1960s. Even so, the road is only two miles long.
The corner building on the right was designed by Juan Antonio Buschiazzo, the same man who engineered the Avenida de Mayo. Built in 1893 for a rancher, it's one of the oldest buildings on the street and was intended as residential apartments. It apparently contained one of the city's first elevators. It later became a hotel (and is now a hostel), but along the way it has lost much of its trim, including a cupola and balustrades.
The view south along 9 de Julio. The central lanes are for buses. Think you could throw a ball across the street? Cast a line? The street is 500 feet wide. The building blocking the road is now the Ministry of Health but was originally the Ministry of Public Works, from 1936. The figure on the wall is supposed to be Eva Perón.
We're looking east from a point just five minute's walk from the Av. 9 de Julio. The bubbly building in the center is the Palacio Barolo, from 1921. It's flanked by a non-entity from the 1960s and, on this side, by the Edificio la Inmobiliaria.
The Edificio La Inmobiliaria was, as its mellifluous name says, built by a real-estate company called The Real Estate Company. Designed by Luis (Luiggi) Broggi, it opened in 1910 to celebrate the centennial of the 1810 Revolution, but it was always intended as office space for rent. Its familiar name was the Heinlein Palace, a droll reference to the Heinlein company, which ran a ground-floor shop selling Argentina's first toilets equipped with a siphon.
Another view, this time including the Barolo.
Luis Barolo, an immigrant, became a cotton grower and Argentina's first importer of cotton- and wool-spinning equipment. He commissioned Mario Palanti (1885-1979) to build the tallest office building in South America. Completed in 1923, it kept the record for about a decade. It's apparently a coded version of Dante's poem, with the upper floors representing heaven. The beacon is supposedly visible from Montevideo, where Palanti designed a twin tower, which also survives.
The Galicia Norte is a residential apartment building from 1975.
We've edged farther west still to the Plaza Lorea, a rare bit of green space in the city. The fenced monument?
Hard to imagine that someone would want to deface something so modest, yet there’s a protective fence.
The Palace of the Argentine National Congress is enhanced by jacarandas, native to Latin America though widely planted elsewhere.
The park designer was Carlos (originally Charles) Thays (1849-1934). He arrived in Argentina in 1889, became director of parks and walkways, and stayed in that position until his death.
The Palace of the Argentine National Congress was designed by Vittoria Meano, an architect who had arrived in Argentina in 1884 and who a decade later won a competition to design this building. Nine years later, with work well underway, he won another competition to build a legislative palace in Montevideo. Returning to Buenos Aires, he found his wife in bed with another man. A few minutes later, Meano was dead. The other man was sentenced to 17 years in prison, and Meano's wife was deported back to Italy. Work on the Congreso continued in the hands of another architect, a Belgian named Julio Dormal, who finished the building in 1906 and managed to survive its completion with years to spare.
The iron fence around the Monument to the Two Congresses hints, yet again, at protesters quick to deface celebrations of the social order.
Notice how many people (and dogs) hang out in the park? That's because there are darned few of them. Parks, I mean. Far fewer than in Paris: Ssh!
The dome's elongated profile is reminiscent of the dome of the Sacré Coeur Basilica, which is only a couple of decades older. Was this another nod to Paris?
Jules Lagae was the sculptor of the Monument of the Two Congresses, placed in 1914. The name alludes to the Constitutional Assembly of 1813 and the 1816 Congress of Tucuman. Both are represented by the figures reaching up to the central figure, representing a unified Argentina. At her feet lie the evil snakes she has bested.
High above the Congreso's entrance of honor is a 20-ton quadriga, its creation the high point of the career of Victor de Pol. We'll see another of his works, a condor, if we get to the Recoleta Cemetery.
Below the quadriga, a tent is set up by protesters objecting to the closure of an old Pepsico snacks factory in Florida, a crowded Buenos Aires suburb. Six hundred workers wanted their jobs back. "We blame the government of Mauricio Macri..." the Central Workers' Union said. (Telesur, 18 July 2017)
Meanwhile, a protest march comes up the Avenida. "JP" is the Juventud Peronista, or Peronist Youth movement.
The protest fell on International Women's Human Rights Defender's Day. The March of the Cap is a national movement that began in Cordoba in 2007.
Snap and run.
Getting people to join the march wasn't a problem.
Watching the protest: Mariano Moreno, remembered as the founder of journalism in Argentina but politically active himself at a dangerous time. Born in 1778, he died in 1811, allegedly poisoned.
A peaceful spot in a peaceful country?
