Thanks to James Gardner, Buenos Aires has in English what it hardly has in Spanish – a history of this city as understood as a biography of its people and its “truly world-class architecture” from its very beginnings (in 1536, not 1580).
Such is the big picture but Gardner’s core parameters are much narrower in both space and time. Many of the world’s capitals and big cities are worth both a visit and a mention in his book (sometimes more than once) but only five in his esteem have genuine aspirations to being the centre of the universe – Paris, Rome, London, his native New York and Buenos Aires (the Southern Hemisphere’s only representative) even if the latter’s claim is not so much grounded in objective reality as in a supremely subjective confidence that the Aleph of Jorge Luis Borges lies here. This city only competes in that exclusive league – that is the real basis of comparison.
Some might understand Buenos Aires as the urban sprawl from Escobar all the way down to the Buenos Aires provincial capital of La Plata, but not Gardner – he limits himself strictly to what is known as the Federal Capital. The temporal limits are perhaps even narrower than the spatial – while this book spans almost half a millennium, the only history which really matters to Gardner is barely half a century. Until Julio Argentino Roca promoted this city from provincial to national capital in 1880, it was relatively a backwater even after colonial times. Once urban planning deserted all taste to build the Obelisco as the city´s symbol in 1936, before brutally amputating downtown with the Nueve de Julio avenue in 1937 usurping the Avenida de Mayo, they had basically lost it in Gardner’s view, never to return – today’s citizens still call themselves porteños without a port or a view of the River Plate. This city has been around during six centuries but its soul is thus encapsulated in the “Paris of South America” between 1880 and 1937.
Gardner is an architecture and art critic by profession and it’s not hard to detect from the wealth of architectural terminology dotting this book – words like aedicules, pilasters, oculus windows, narthex, swags, acroteria, acanthus leaves, chamfered corners, dentilated cornices, machiolations, etc. Esperanto for most readers, which does not make this book any less readable.
Following an introduction, a geographical sketch and a detailed account of Pedro de Mendoza’s Buenos Aires between 1536 and 1541 (succumbing to hunger rather than the attacks of the indigenous population), Gardner takes almost a quarter of the book to arrive at the definitive foundation of Buenos Aires by 65 Spanish settlers arriving via Asunción and one Ana Díaz on June 11, 1580. The author is impressed by the city’s grid (today between Independencia and Viamonte from south to north and Leandro N. Alem and Salta/Libertad from east to west) within a few days of that creation.
The Juan Baltasar fort was built in 1594 and then history almost stops until the viceroyalty is established in 1776 – Lima monopolised Spanish imperial commerce (apart from the slave trade, which came to account for around 30 percent of the 1800 population of 45,000) while the silver city of Potosí dwarfed Buenos Aires. A lively contraband thus privatised wealth at the expense of public architecture apart from the churches. Becoming a vice-regal capital upgraded the city but 34 years was not sufficient time for transformational change.
Gardner chronicles the British invasions of 1806 and 1807 in considerable detail as almost as much a birth of nationhood as the famous days of 1810, which are given shorter shrift. We then proceed almost directly to the Rosas years (1829-1852), preceded only by the brief 1826-1827 presidency of Bernardino Rivadavia, “the most modern man of his age” who lacked the time, pragmatic ability and political skills to bring his grand visions to life. Gardner’s portrait of Juan Manuel de Rosas is perhaps the most balanced this reviewer has ever read. He neither whitewashes the “tyrant anointed by God” like many revisionists (if anything, he exaggerates the numbers of the Mazorca death squads) but he also depicts him as a complex personality with a supreme mastery of the mechanics of power, rather than the cardboard villain described by his more institutional successors.
Until 1852 Buenos Aires is barely a city – the next three chapters, “Buenos Aires, The Big Village (1852-80),” “The Paris of South America (1880-1920)” and “The City of the Masses” (1920-46) chart the milestones of its evolution to something approximating today’s urban dimensions. Bartolomé Mitre is the star of the first of those chapters with foreign architects already starting to arrive and get to work on public buildings while the conventillos arose to house a population rising to 200,000 and beyond despite the yellow fever of 1871 (which moved the wealthier classes from south to north) with the railways making their advent. In the second of these chapters Gardner devotes 50 pages to describing how meat and wheat along with immigrant labour were channelled into splendid Beaux Arts buildings (residential and public) which he expertly describes – Torcuato de Alvear (mayor from 1883 to 1887) is the hero of urban development here. By the Centenario of 1910, perhaps the climax for Gardner, the population has reached 1.7 million. Thereafter the city acquires subways (as from 1913) and tramways to transport its millions, tango and skylines (with Buenos Aires now trying to imitate New York rather than Paris) but it all seems downhill from there, architecturally and otherwise with time only for Clorindo Testa – Gardner can barely disguise his preference for the city of the oligarchs to the city of the masses.
Space is lacking to detail his political coverage of modern times but his takes on Peronism and the terrorism and military dictatorship of the 1970s are as balanced as his portrait of Rosas. A must read for all lovers of this city.
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