Two years of wandering in the Andes and jungles of South America is, in a way, the best possible preparation for a visit to the largest city south of the United States. The man who approaches it from this corridor will experience to the full the astonishment it is almost certain to produce upon an unprepared visitor; he will be in ideal condition to recognize the urban artificialities which make it so great an antithesis of the rural simplicity of nearly all the southern continent. Like the majority of Americans, I suppose, though I had now and then heard rumors of its increase and improvement, my mental picture of the Argentine capital was as out of date as the spelling “Buenos Ayres” that still persists among even the best of English and American authorities. It was the picture hastily sketched by our school books of not so long ago, and, except in the matter of a few decades of time, it was essentially a true one.
A bare half century back the City of Good Airs had the appearance of a Spanish town of the Middle Ages, and worse. Though it faced the River Plata at a point where it is more than thirty miles wide, it had no real harbor. Travelers landed from ships by first transferring to rowboats far out on the yellow-brown horizon, then to ox-carts driven hub-deep into the shallow, muddy stream. The streets were so innocent of paving that business men often remained at home lest they find it impossible to extricate themselves from the quagmires that masqueraded under the name of calles. Temporary wooden bridgelets were laid across corners from one scanty raised sidewalk to another; at the height of the rainy season even horsemen were sometimes mired in the very heart of town. Men still living tell of a pool in the present bustling Calle Rivadavia about which sentinels had to be posted to keep careless people and their horses from drowning in it. Municipal lighting was unknown. A few public-spirited citizens hung up tallow candles before their houses; wealthy residents, obliged to make their way through the bottomless night, were attended by menials carrying lanterns. There were neither water pipes nor sewers; each citizen dug his own well beside his garbage heap. In winter the one-story houses, stretching in solemn yet disordered array down the narrow, reeking streets and built for the most part of sun-baked mud bricks, became slimy, clammy dens in which disease bred and multiplied. The hundred and some thousand inhabitants, mixtures of Spanish adventurers and Indians from the great pampas beyond, had but little contact with the outside world and were correspondingly provincial, conservative and fanatical.
Such was Buenos Aires within the memory of men who do not yet consider themselves old; such it is still in the average imagination of the outside world. It is with something stronger than surprise, therefore, that the newcomer finds the Argentine capital to-day the largest Spanish-speaking city on the globe, second only to Paris among the Latin cities of the world, equal to Philadelphia in population, resembling Chicago in extent as well as in situation, rivaling New York in many of its metropolitan features, and outdoing every city of our land in some of its civic improvements. Personally, I confess to having wandered its endless streets and gazed upon its unexpected cosmopolitan uproar in a semi-dazed condition for some time after my arrival. It was hard to believe that those miles upon miles of modern wharves, surrounding artificial basins capable of accommodating the largest ships in existence, backed by warehouses that measure their capacity in millions of tons, were situated on the same continent as medieval Quito, that the teeming city behind them was inhabited by the same race that rules languid La Paz and sleepy Asunción.
The greatness of Buenos Aires has been mainly thrust upon it. Of all the cities of the earth only Chicago grew up with more vertiginous rapidity. The city of to-day has so completely outreached the plans of its unsuspecting founders that it is constantly faced with the problem of modifying existing conditions to meet metropolitan requirements. It was a comparatively simple matter to fill in and pave the old quagmires that posed as streets; it was quite another thing to widen them to accommodate modern traffic. Laid out by Moorish-influenced Spaniards in a century when the passing of two horsemen constituted the maximum demand for space, the streets of old Buenos Aires are narrower and more congested than the tightest of those at the lower end of Manhattan Island. In most cases the problem has been frankly abandoned, for nothing short of destroying all the buildings on one side or the other of these medieval passageways could improve them. The result is that a walk through what was the entire city fifty years ago, and which is now mainly the business section, is an ordeal or an amusing experience, according to the mood or the haste of the victim.
The Porteño has made various bold attacks upon this problem of congestion. Nearly thirty years ago he hewed his way for a mile and a half through the heart of the old town, destroying hundreds of buildings in his insistence on more space. The result is the Avenida de Mayo, somewhat resembling the boulevards of Paris in the neighborhood of the Opéra and stretching from the already old and inadequate Casa Rosada, or presidential palace, to the new congressional building, which resembles and in some ways outdoes in majestic beauty our own national capitol. But this chief artery of downtown travel is, after all, of insignificant length compared with the mammoth Buenos Aires of to-day, and the older flanking street of Rivadavia, once the principal highway to the pampa beyond, cutting the entire city in two from the waterfront to the open plains, is quite incapable of handling the through traffic which refuses to risk itself in the constricted calles of the downtown labyrinth.
Similar heroic treatment has been applied in other parts of the old town. Wherever the stroller wanders he is certain to come out often upon an open space, a little park or a plaza, which has been grubbed out by the bold demolition of a block of houses. I cannot recall another city where parks are anything like as epidemic as they are in Buenos Aires. There is not a point in town out of easy strolling distance of one or more of them, some so tiny that they can be crossed in a hop, skip, and a jump, the largest, aristocratic Palermo, so large that one may wander for hours without crossing the same ground twice.
Buenos Aires is not a city of skyscrapers. Built on a loose soil that is quite the antithesis of the granite hills of Manhattan Island, with unlimited opportunity to spread across the floor-flat plains beyond, it has neither the incentive nor the foundation needed to push its way far aloft. Custom in this respect has crystallized into requirement, and a city ordinance forbids the height of a building to exceed one and one-third the width of the street it faces. The result is that while it has fewer architectural failures, fewer monstrosities in brick and stone, the city on the Plata has nothing that can rival the epic poems among buildings to be found at the mouth of the Hudson. From a distance it looks curiously like one of our own large cities decapitated to an average height of three or four stories, with only here and there an ambitious structure peering timidly above the monotonous general level. Flat and drab are perhaps the two words which most fully describe its general aspect.
On every hand the traveled visitor is reminded of this or that other great city; it is as if one were visiting a newly laid out botanical garden in which the origin of most of the plants, taken from old established gardens elsewhere, is plainly evident, with only here and there a native shrub or a curious hybrid to emphasize the changed conditions of soil and climate. When one has noted the origin of nearly all its human plants, it is no longer surprising that Buenos Aires seems more a European than an American city. Architecturally it most resembles Paris, with hints of Madrid, London and Rome thrown in, not to mention certain features peculiarly its own. This similarity is the pride of the Porteño and every recognition of it is a compliment, for like nearly all Latin-Americans, he is most enamored of French culture. Not only is he accustomed to refer to his city as the “Paris of South America”—all South American capitals are that to their own people—but he copies more or less directly from the earthly paradise of all good argentinos. The artistic sense of the Latin comes to his aid in this sometimes almost subconscious endeavor; or, if the individual lacks this, there is the guiding hand of the community ever ready to sustain his faltering steps. City ordinances not only forbid the erection of structures which do not fit into the general scheme of a modified Paris, but Buenos Aires rewards those who most successfully carry out its conception of civic improvement. Every year the building adjudged the greatest addition to the city’s beauty is awarded a bronze façade-plate and is relieved for a decade from the burden of taxes.
It would be unreasonable to expect a community with such pride in its personal appearance to permit itself to be disfigured by an elevated railway system. Besides, as it is spread evenly over an immense space of flat country, “B. A.’s” transportation problem is scarcely serious enough to require this concession to civic comfort. Of street-cars in the ordinary sense it has unlimited numbers, plying in every direction; all they lack is freedom to go their way unhampered in the oldest and busiest section of town. Their one peculiarity, to the American, is that they refuse to be overcrowded. No one may enter a tramcar while its seats are filled; nine persons, and nine only, may ride on the back platform. If you chance to be the tenth, there is no use insisting that you must ride or miss an important engagement. The car will refuse to move as long as you remain on board, and if there happens to be within call one of the spick-and-span, Britishly imperturbable, New-Yorkly impersonal policemen of Buenos Aires, you will probably regret your insistence. It will be far better to accept your misfortune with Latin courtesy and hail one of the taxis that are forever scurrying past. Or, if even the modest demands of these well-disciplined public carriers are beyond your means, there is the ancient and honorable method of footing it. The chances are that if your destination is anywhere within the congested business section you can walk to it and finish your errand by the time the inexorable street-car would have set you down there.
I lost no time in exploring the luxuries of Buenos Aires’ new subway. Only the year before the proud Avenida de Mayo had been disrupted by the upheavals throughout its entire length, and already the “Subterraneo” operated from the Plaza de Mayo behind the Pink House to the Plaza Once, two miles inland and nearly a fifth of the way across the city. Like the surface lines it belongs to the Tranvías Anglo-Argentina, a British corporation, the concession requiring the company to pay the city six per cent. of its gross receipts for fifty years, at the end of which time the subway becomes automatically the property of the municipality. The argentino is fully awake to the advantage and possibility of driving good bargains in the exploitation of public utilities and resources.