Down Argentine Way

An art, architecture, and culture critic, and frequent contributor to these pages, Gardner traveled to Buenos Aires for the first time in 1999 and—like many visitors—fell under its spell, a great part of which has to do with its extreme unlikeliness. For it is a European city set down improbably in the Western Hemisphere. As Gardner writes in his preface: “I am aware of no other city in North, South or Central America that consciously sought to become a European capital, let alone that succeeded so well in this capricious quest.”

How that happened is the subject of this book. Gardner wrote it because, wanting to learn more about this glorious urban anomaly, he found no books in English on how it came to be. The city that gave us the Peróns and the tango was surprisingly unrepresented on library shelves. There was literature by its famous son Jorge Luis Borges, one of whose poems is quoted from in the introduction: They tell me that Buenos Aires had a beginning, but to me it is as eternal as water and air. Gardner cites this line as proof of his own belief that Buenos Aires has a quality that only a very few cities possess, one that is unconnected to age, size, beauty, or place in history. And that is “the ability to awaken in its inhabitants a vague and poetic sense of infinity and eternity converging upon a single place.”

To anyone who has had the pleasure of strolling Avenida de Mayo on a Saturday morning, that statement does not ring hyperbolic. But of course Buenos Aires, like all cities, grew gradually out of emptiness. Founded in 1580 (15 years after St. Augustine, Florida), the first settlement was located near what is still the spiritual heart of the city, the Plaza de Mayo. The Spanish explorer Juan de Garay drew up the grid that, over time, would be filled with gracious apartment houses and elegant theaters. Gardner calls it “perhaps the most conspicuous example of a grid in urban history,” noting that not even New York’s is adhered to with such unwavering consistency.

In those early years, the grid was rather grim, “a relentless series of muddy, filthy streets.” The city’s role was to serve Potosí, the silver mining center in Alto Peru (what is today Bolivia), and about the only trade that its citizens were permitted was in the hides and fat of cows (since meat, of course, could not be healthily exported). This period of dormant subservience lasted two centuries—though livestock flourished on the pampas, to such an extent that large herds of cattle were occasionally driven to the river banks to repel invaders.

Things took a turn for the better in 1778 with the enactment of the Free Trade Law and improved even more with independence in the early 19th century. The sun in the middle of the Argentine flag, we learn, is not just any sun; it is El Sol de Mayo, the sun that appeared, after a week-long absence, on May 25, 1810, the final day of meetings to declare independence.

While distancing themselves from the Spanish, Porteños (as the residents of Buenos Aires are called) were showing admiration for the British. The city boasted two tea salons—la Fonda Britannica and the Esmeralda Tea Garden—and one of its newest and most fashionable hotels was the Hotel de Londres. London was where the most famous portrait of Bernardino Rivadavia was painted.

One of the pleasures of this book is reading about towering historical figures you’ve never heard of (unless you’ve been to Buenos Aires and walked the streets and crossed the plazas that bear their names). Rivadavia, president of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata and former ambassador to London and Paris, was the first to embody the dream of re-creating Europe in the port city, “the defining dream,” as Gardner calls it, “of Porteño history.” Yet it was the Europe of England and France that attracted him and others who followed; Rivadavia’s goal was to eliminate the influence of Spain.

He created the prestigious University of Buenos Aires and advocated for the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences. Possibly his greatest achievement—though it wasn’t accomplished in his lifetime—was to relieve the monotony of the urban grid by widening certain streets into major boulevards.

Rivadavia was followed by Juan Manuel de Rosas, a dictator whose only contribution to the city and the country seems to have been a legacy of fear. Gardner goes so far as to suggest that because of Rosas, Buenos Aires could possibly be “the birthplace of totalitarianism.” He calls Rosas’s secret police, the Mazorca, precursors of East Germany’s Stasi. An infinitely more endearing character was Bartolomé Mitre—poet, biographer, translator, founder of La Nación newspaper, and president of Argentina during 1862-68. Gardner includes a poem that the young Mitre wrote to his beloved hometown—the first line of which you can almost imagine being sung by Carlos Gardel—and remarks: “In the entire corpus of earlier Argentine writing, no one had expressed so forcefully or so personally a love of the city of Buenos Aires itself.”

The city was about to become a lot more lovable. The seed of its transformation was carried, oddly enough, by a French steamer, Le Frigorifique, that arrived in the city on Christmas Day, 1876. Its principal cargo was meat; its aim was to show that, thanks to new French refrigeration techniques, perishable foods could safely be shipped long distances. With herds of cattle on its pampas, Argentina did not need meat from Europe; but thanks to Le Frigorifique (a name as historically noteworthy as the Maine, and much more fun to say), Europe would soon be receiving meat from Argentina.

After centuries of circumscribed commerce, the country, and its capital, climbed into wealth. By the turn of the 20th century, Argentina was the eighth-richest country in the world, and Buenos Aires was on its way to becoming “the Paris of South America.” The City of Light was not the only model for the 20th-century Argentine capital, but it was the predominant one.

The city’s newfound prosperity attracted immigrants, many of them Italian, often from Genoa. Large numbers of them settled in La Boca, the colorful neighborhood now popular with tourists. Its brightly painted houses, Gardner explains, are the result of happenstance: The inhabitants used whatever paints were left by sailors painting ships at the nearby docks and, because quantities were invariably small, one house could get several blocks of colors. He also notes, as further evidence of Anglophilia, that the local soccer team—the Boca Juniors—carries an English name, as does River Plate (stopping short of mentioning that they both play an originally English if not necessarily gentlemanly game). European Jews were also an important part of immigration; the Jewish community in Buenos Aires is, today, the seventh largest in the world.

But Gardner’s focus is more on the buildings than on the people who live in them: Even an international star like Gardel gets little attention, though it is noted that the art form that he helped popularize—the tango—was “the first cultural invention of the Rio de la Plata to conquer the larger world.” Out of the streams of European influence emerged a music quintessentially Buenos Aires.

Even the architecture, while lavishly—slavishly—European, occasionally experienced an alteration on the new continent. The use of wrought iron was so widespread, even in the poorer neighborhoods, that it became a kind of defining symbol of the city. In a more unusual development, the corners of blocks were blunted rather than run together at right angles, so that every intersection “becomes a theater for four separate urban events, whether a shop, a restaurant, or a residence, each clamoring in some colorful and emphatic way for the attention of the pedestrian.” One finds this blunting, or chamfering, in some other cities, but nowhere is it as ubiquitous as in Buenos Aires. It is also one of the things that makes it such a delightfully walkable city for visitors, who are often oblivious to this contributing factor.

The city’s Golden Age lasted from 1880 to 1920, and the years following it are covered with diligence, if less exuberance. During the repressive rule of Juan Perón, Borges lost his job at the Biblioteca Nacional and was assigned one as a state poultry inspector, which he refused. The physical city fared even worse (deprived as it was of the option of refusal), and the architecture of the time was, for the most part, a reflection of the awfulness of the regime.

But most of the stylish buildings still stand in the city on the banks of the Rio de la Plata (even if one can no longer see the river). The beautiful parks remain, as do the grandiose monuments, the energizing streets, the theatrical intersections, and the elaborate sculptures in Recoleta Cemetery, to which Gardner devotes several pages. You come away from Buenos Aires with a strong desire to visit Buenos Aires—or if you already have, to return and see all the things that escaped your notice.

Thomas Swick is a writer whose most recent book, The Joys of Travel, will be published in May.