Their great opera house, the Colón, that cost $10,000,000 and occupies a whole square, is one of the most beautiful in the world. There is none in New York or Chicago, or any of our cities, to compare with it. It is of French design and built of stone, and the interior is finished in white marble, gold-bronze ornamentations and rich red drapery and upholstery. It is not quite as large as the Metropolitan in New York, but, as in the Metropolitan, the two lower tiers of boxes are occupied by the families of the “Four Hundred,” for their grand opera down there is just as much of a social function with them as it is with the smart set in our greatest city; and, as their season is in July and August—winter months with them—not a few of the singers that are heard at the Metropolitan later on are heard there in their season. Above the boxes are two balconies and a gallery where the gods congregate and howl for encores for all the world like our own. It appears that they are not very fond of Wagner and the German music, these Bonarenses, but are keen for the Italian and French; so, aside from the opera, competent French and Italian companies are brought over every year for long engagements at other theaters. Also there are French opera comique, Italian farce, and English musical comedy companies, French café chantant, English music hall and our own vaudeville entertainers without end, and dramas, even Shakespearean occasionally, and the other classes of performances, following each other at the many theaters continually.
Club life is one of the most attractive features. The Britishers (the heaviest investors of foreign capital), of course, have their inevitable cricket, polo, and races—at Hurlingham, near the city—and have erected a substantial country clubhouse, devoted largely to the ritualistic five o’clock tea. The scene on the broad verandas and well-kept lawns is brilliant in the afternoon, with the white lace gowns of the women and the white flannel and broadside panamas of the men. As the guest looks on at the leisurely game of cricket and tea—for these rites are solemnized together by the comfortable Briton—he can easily imagine himself at Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, or Cape Town, where the same function is taking place at the same hour of the day, on club grounds almost identically the same, and to the accompaniment of the same elaborate conversation: “Well played, old chap.” The Germans, Italians, and Spanish also have luxurious clubhouses, and for the transient visitor the Club de Residentes Estranjeros affords a delightful retreat. There is even a big, handsome building for the Y.M.C.A.
Among the fifty or more social organizations in Buenos Aires, the Jockey Club is the Argentine cercle par excellence. Its home on Calle Florida is of a splendor unsurpassed in clubdom. The guest who is fortunate enough to enjoy its courtesies will be impressed by the perfect taste and sumptuousness of its appointments; the superb marble stairway, the banquet hall, and the famous pictures and sculptures are equaled in but few of the palaces of Europe. Its wealth, derived from an initiation fee of $4000 and annual dues of $1500 for each member, and a “rake-off” of ten per cent. of the amounts wagered at its racetrack, together with gate receipts, accumulate so rapidly that it is a source of genuine embarrassment to the governing board.
A short time ago the club voted to devote its surplus to the purchase of a dozen blocks in the heart of the city, the idea being to transform the tract into a beautiful boulevard. It would have cost nearly $14,000,000 in our money. The project was abandoned, not because of the cost, but on the ground of impracticability. During the racing season, held under the auspices of the Club at Palermo Park, the Porteño is seen at his best. Paris gowns and picture hats are displayed in profusion in the grandstand, lawns, and luxurious victorias and automobiles that line the course, and with the correct dress and animation of the men, and the prodigality everywhere in evidence (last season $25,000,000 was placed on the horses), the scene takes on an aspect truly Parisian.
As might be expected in such a vigorously modern city, the severest of the restrictions on social intercourse familiar in Latin capitals are here impatiently thrust aside. In the five o’clock parade of the fashionables that wends its way toward the beautiful Palermo Park on Sundays, there are no closed carriages or dark mantillas to conceal the allurements of the señoritas, although many may still huddle demurely at the sides of their dueñas while they distribute the most decorous of smiles among their eager acquaintances of the opposite sex. Here palm-bordered Sarmiento Avenue is crowded with carriages and motor cars six, often eight, rows deep, two stationary in the center and two moving on either side, in which ride as smartly gowned women as may be seen anywhere in America. In the same throng glimpses may be caught of reigning music-hall favorites, at whose sides are usually to be found care-free horsemen just in from the Camp, mounted on superb stallions heavy with silver trappings, and generally with an air of somewhat less sophisticated enjoyment of the event.
JOCKEY CLUB’S GRANDSTAND AT THE RACE TRACK.
There is a prodigality about the Porteño in his pleasures that staggers the visitor from the North. Backed by an almost limitless wealth from cattle ranch or plantation, he scatters his pesos with a princely hand. And, of course, there is the obverse of the picture. There is the under world here, peopled largely by immigration from the centers of European unrest, in which there is to be found an extreme of destitution. This is the breeding place of anarchistic ideas, that frequently find expression in violence and that are surely becoming one of the city’s most serious problems.
The zest for amusement among all classes finds many outlets. Strolling along the Calle Florida, or the Calles Cangallo, Esmeralda, Cuyo, Maipó, and other well-paved, brilliantly illuminated streets of the theater district, after the fever of the business day has subsided, one drops in at the “English Bar,” the “Bierhalle,” “Confiteria,” or “Café Parisien,” and is sure to find a compatriot to join him in the refreshment of his predilection. Or, for the more solid enjoyment of dinner, the visitor, whether French, North American, Briton, or Turk, can find his favorite national dishes excellently served—at the Restaurant Charpentier, where an orchestra, really good, will for the moment take the homesick Parisian back to his native boulevards; or at the “Sportsman,” where the North American is beguiled from his nostalgia by Sousa’s marches, perhaps, or by biograph pictures of steeple-chasers and Oriental dancers; or at Monsch’s Restaurant, which specializes in the Briton’s needs—where, with a look of acute understanding, the head waiter will permit the guest to select his own English mutton chop or steak from the glass-doored ice chest.
The outdoor café life is not as well known, so narrow are the streets; even Calle Florida, which is the essentially fashionable shopping street of the central town, is lamentably narrow. With the exception of the Avenida de Mayo, which runs from the plaza containing the Cathedral and President’s palace to the new chambers of Congress, and divides the city into its northern and southern sections, and the Avenida Alvear, which leads from the main part of the city to Palermo Park, flanked with costly homes and interspersed with gardens and plazas that lend a wealth of verdure and flowers to the broad avenue, the streets are so narrow that in the business section vehicles are required by city ordinances to move in the same direction, down one street and up the next. But in this splendid, stately Avenida de Mayo of hers, which, except in appearance, has the characteristics of the business part of New York’s Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to the Park, Buenos Aires has a thoroughfare that rivals Rio’s Avenida Central in beauty, and, with its finer hotels and cafés and French architecture, possesses even more of the attractions of a Parisian boulevard.