Buenos Aires Journal: Architectural Heritage Threatens to Crumble

Photo by Anibal Greco for The New York Times.

From The New York Times April 16, 2013: 

BY EMILY SCHMALL

BUENOS AIRES — As Concepción Martínez, her husband and two daughters pulled into the last subway station here, cheers and clapping erupted from the throngs of people, some wearing turn-of-the-20th-century dress, waiting on the platform.

Camera flashes lighted the tunnels as passengers took their final rides in the saloonlike wagons — with their wooden benches, frosted glass lamps and manually operated brass doors — of South America’s first subway line.

“Every day, I ride this train into work, so this is a kind of goodbye,” Ms. Martínez said.

The antique Belgian-built cars, a symbol of Buenos Aires’s early-20th-century wealth, were taken out of service this year, and their retirement is a poignant example of the city’s struggle to preserve its physical history as some of its icons and infrastructure crumble.

An audit last fall cautioned that much of Buenos Aires’s underground transit system was in a dangerous state of disrepair, and that the city’s oldest line — linking the presidential mansion, the Casa Rosada, and the Constitución regional train station — should be removed from service immediately.

“Maintenance is not considered adequate,” the audit said, citing a train disaster in Buenos Aires last year that killed 49 passengers and wounded hundreds more.

But a local reaction against the retirement of the La Brugeoise trains, known here affectionately as Las Brujas, or the witches, has fueled a debate over which elements of Argentina’s rich cultural heritage are worth saving.

“They want to modernize and expand, but they haven’t considered how the trains move people emotionally,” said Gerardo Gómez Coronado, who oversees architectural protection at the city’s planning department.

Preservationists say illegal demolitions, chronic underinvestment and unimaginative architecture that is replacing the historic buildings threaten to erase the city’s heritage as a mecca for European immigrants, who arrived in boatloads to what was, at the beginning of the last century, one of the richest countries in the world.

“Argentina promised to be a very, very important country,” said Teresa Anchorena, an artist and member of the National Commission of Museums, Monuments and Historic Places, which lobbies for the protection of hundreds of sites throughout the country. “Argentina’s broken promise is reflected in its buildings.”

With its ornate cars, the Buenos Aires subway was the first built in Latin America and the 13th in the world, ahead of the systems in Madrid, Tokyo and Moscow. At the time, Argentina was the world’s ninth-richest country, according to the historic incomes database of the British economist Angus Maddison.

In 1910, newspapers in 80 languages were available in Buenos Aires. The city had the region’s biggest zoo and a well-regarded research center on infectious diseases. Argentina’s gross domestic product per capita was nearly twice that of Spain’s and nearly five times bigger than Brazil’s, according to the database.

Decades of fighting seized lands from the indigenous Patagonians and greatly expanded Argentina’s agricultural opportunities in the country’s south. The ensuing economic bonanza fueled by beef and grain exports, which continue to be core industries here, drew millions of immigrants from Europe.

The most successful among them flaunted their good fortune by commissioning famous European architects. Immigrants financed opera houses modeled after those in Vienna and Paris, the world’s biggest Edwardian train terminal, and a private mansion that was a tribute to the French palaces of Louis XIV and is now the French Embassy.

Many buildings, including the Palacio Anchorena, built by Ms. Anchorena’s mercantilist grandfather, who was prominent during Argentina’s gilded age, are protected by law from demolition along streets like Alvear Avenue, a prime example of Argentina’s belle epoque.

But in many neighborhoods, city code has been flouted, and historic buildings have been demolished at astonishing speed since Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001, when the country defaulted on nearly $100 billion in sovereign debt, plunging half of the population below the poverty line.

Government leaders justify a laissez-faire attitude toward new construction by framing it in terms of economic recovery, Mr. Gómez Coronado said.

For many architects, the Buenos Aires of old was a tabula rasa, with buildings often containing myriad influences from across Europe. The result is a synthesis that is uniquely Argentine, said Mónica Capano, a former Buenos Aires cultural minister.

“This eclecticism is the city’s identity,” said Ms. Capano, president of the Network for Patrimony, an umbrella group that advocates preservation.

The draftsmen of the famed architects copied the designs of their European teachers, building entire neighborhoods of Tudor homes or German chalets. Italian immigrants built lay society temples devoted to Galileo, da Vinci and Verdi, structures the likes of which are thought to exist nowhere else in the world, said Fabio Grementieri, an architect who specializes in buildings from the early 20th century.

“People undervalue it because they say it’s only a copy of Europe,” he said. “Strangely, Argentina has consecrated tango and literature, which are a great mixture of cultural influences, but not the third manifestation of this mixing, which is architecture.”

Preservationists acknowledge that new construction is inevitable but complain that too little of the city’s history is being spared. One of many buildings at risk of demolition, preservations say, is the 1923 Palacio Barolo, a mansion commissioned by a self-made millionaire and designed in accordance with the cosmology of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

“They want to demolish this,” warn posters plastered onto the sides of a row of houses in San Telmo, the first Spanish settlement in Argentina, now a Buenos Aires neighborhood. Inside one of the semi-dilapidated buildings, the antique décor has been stripped and a family of squatters has moved in.

Building codes eased after each of Argentina’s three coups from 1956 to 1977, Mr. Gómez Coronado said, and the city’s ornate spaces have been subject to decades of urban redevelopment.

In the jagged skyline of Palermo Soho, a tree-lined neighborhood, stately Spanish-style casonas, which are houses built around a courtyard, sit awkwardly alongside high-rise apartments.

The countless once-grand and now grimy homes across Buenos Aires, with their neoclassical columns and crystal chandeliers, stained-glass cupolas and unhinged lattices, are testament to years of political and economic upheaval, Ms. Anchorena said.

“What’s happened to these buildings is a little like what’s happened to Argentina,” she said. “These buildings are witness to the Argentina that still could be.”

The decommissioned subway cars now sit on a vacant lot, and some have been vandalized, according to local news reports, with pieces torn off and hawked over the Internet.

But Alberto Rosenblatt, who has played the violin in Buenos Aires’s oldest subway stop for years, said he was not nostalgic about the old trains.

“They are already 100 years old,” he said. “This is an opening for another 100 years, but of progress, not regression. We will not always be looking backward.”