Buenos Ayres in its planning is essentially North American. That is simplicity itself, but out of simplicity has come confusion. The buildings are in “blocks,” or cuadras (squares), as they call them in South America. These squares measure 150 yards each way. Thus a plan of the city looks like a monstrous checker board, with here and there a larger square, where two or more cuadras have been thrown into one to admit a little more air into the congested mass. For the streets are narrow beyond belief. The average width allows three coaches to stand abreast, with a clearance of some twelve inches between them. A walking stick and a half gives you the measure of the pavements. These are the standards for nearly all the thoroughfares in the older part of the town, and were the ample ideals of the Spanish colonisers, who required no more than single-story houses and a track between for their horses or their bullock wagons. Thus, in great measure, Buenos Ayres is an anachronism, and such it will long remain, as the abnormal development of the country and its capital city—the world’s most prodigious mushroom—has made this central part a veritable Eldorado of the landowner.
What served a century ago is to-day a legacy of evil, and these narrow colonial streets have made of central Buenos Ayres an inferno of human strife such as I hope exists nowhere else on our globe. For within these myriad squares of 150 yards there is no entrance or exit for wheeled traffic, and it is a pathetic sight to witness the unloading of goods on the narrow sidewalks in the early morning. Let the North American reader conceive a great department store, situated in a street no wider than Wall Street, utterly devoid of any back way for the entrance of a cart, with a pavement in front that measures a walking-stick and a half; and let him picture what it means to stock that great building with all sorts of goods, from massive suites of furniture to tons of shoes and neckties! If his imagination will stand the strain, let him further imagine what would happen if a trolley line were laid within two feet of the sidewalk in front of the door, and an endless stream of cars were passing, the bodies of them flush with the curbstone! Yet the Wanamakers and the Marshall Fields of Buenos Ayres have to stock their premises under these conditions. In this city of miracles, there is none more extraordinary than the task of moving goods from the street into the shop and it is small wonder that a large part of what one pays for any article in Buenos Ayres has been incurred in getting it into the place where it is bought. It is infinitely easier and cheaper to carry a piano from London to the port of Buenos Ayres than to take it from the ship a mile away to the shop where it will be sold!
Often have I marvelled at the patience and energy of the Italian peones, struggling with enormous cases of merchandise in the middle of the street, dodging them across the trolley lines, while a dozen drivers were clanging their bells for them to clear the way. And it is a daily incident to see wardrobes, suites of furniture, desks, sofas, mingled in the gutters with the fretting traffic, in front of the warehouse doors.
In almost every street there is a trolley line on one side, and all the traffic has perforce to move in one direction,—down this street, up the next,—for which purpose an arrow on the walls indicates the direction. To walk at ease along any one of these streets in the business hours is impossible, and progress afoot is only to the strong.
In such streets motor traffic is a folly, yet motor cars abound. It is a safe assertion that nine out of ten of them are used for no purpose other than ostentation. And your Argentine nouveau riche will have none of your modest 15-20 horse-power affairs. His mark is 40 horse-power, and the biggest, bulkiest, most cumbersome body money can buy. Thus, at certain hours of the day when the ladies go a-shopping, many of the streets are stuffed with monstrous cars, which have brought their owners a good mile or perhaps two, and while the ladies are about their diversion in the shops, the chauffeurs sit making filthy remarks about every woman who passes, and ogling the girls. These motor men, uniformed expensively, are one of the most offensive elements in the life of the city. Lazy, pampered loafers most of them; they deliberately place themselves in the near front seat of the car while waiting for their owners, the better to “amuse” themselves.
With a cautious municipal authority, the motor-car would be prohibited in the centre of Buenos Ayres. It is a century or so ahead of the town. In streets so narrow the horse carriage should suffice, and as a matter of fact the horse-driven traffic can move as quickly as the motor-driven, owing to the innumerable stops that have to be made in even the shortest journey. In the whole vast country of the Argentine there are not more than a hundred miles of really good motoring roads and automobile owners in Buenos Ayres seldom venture farther afield than the Tigre, an excursion of some sixteen miles. The road thither is the best in the country. It would rank as “bad” in the guidebook of any American or European touring club and it is the ruin of many a car. Yet vulgar ostentation insists upon the automobile, and almost every notable firm of motor-car makers in Europe or the United States is catering for the craze with branch establishments in or around the Calle Florida.
The papers abound in accounts of motor accidents and one seldom passes a car that does not bear some trace of a collision, many of the drivers being as reckless as they are unskilled. The motor-car is indeed one of the city’s problems and no effort is being made to solve it.
If the streets were only narrow, matters might not be so bad. But they are also villainously paved and continually out of repair. The pavements chiefly consist of slabs of rough-hewn stone, so badly laid that one is constantly tripping over their inequalities. Moreover, holes are merely covered by a piece of sheet iron laid loose over them, and in Florida alone (it is the universal custom in South America merely to give the name of a street, without adding the word calle) I have noted about a dozen old gas pipes left protruding some six inches above the pavement, a menace to all who do not walk with their eyes to the ground. As a New York lady visitor said to me: “If you don’t watch where you’re putting your feet, you’ll fall into a hole, or trip yourself, and if you do look out for your feet, you’ll get run over!”
The streets are laid variously with asphalt, wood, and cobbles. But no matter what material is used, the result is equally deplorable. Thanks to the excessively heavy traffic, borne in wagons with immense narrow wheels, an asphalted street is cut up into ruts in a few days after it is laid, wooden blocks are destroyed with amazing rapidity, and cobbles are daily dislodged in hundreds. Thus stones innumerable are lying in the cobbled streets, to the danger of all sorts of traffic; in the wood-paved thoroughfares there are ruts several inches deep alongside the tram lines, and the asphalt roads are cracked and broken as though some wandering earthquake had passed through them on its way from Chili. A paseo in a motor-car is an agony—there is no “rule of the road,” it is merely “devil take the hindmost”—a drive in a coach is little better, as the motor-cars make the progress of the horse vehicle a hazard of terrors.
In such narrow and congested thoroughfares, building operations are carried on with great difficulty. To me it was a source of constant interest and admiration to watch those in progress. And as there is no street where the builders are not busy, I had ample opportunity. In Florida, where a huge arcaded building was being constructed through to the next street, San Martín, the work of digging out the foundations went on all day, and all night long the dirt was removed when the street was quiet. The scaffolding fashioned for the purpose was the most ingenious and complicated I have ever seen. To the narrow street there was a barricade of corrugated iron (wood is too expensive to use for that purpose) and above towered a weird framework of timber, with “tips” or “chutes” projecting into the street. Seen from behind the corrugated iron, it was a magnificent spectacle of industry. Hundreds of labourers were digging down into the loamy earth some thirty or forty feet, and the material taken out was hoisted up by a lift and dumped near the tips, so that through the night great-wheeled wagons came along in fashionable Florida and were loaded up, leaving the street strewn with spilled earth next morning. I recall the night when some of this scaffolding collapsed and precipitated over thirty labourers into the excavations fifty or sixty feet below. Such accidents are very common, there being no intelligent supervision of building operations, and many labourers are sacrificed every year to the carelessness of their employers and their own ignorance.