SANTA ANA PLAZA
The fence is now removed. During the French days this Plaza was the scene of much gaiety and still shows French influence
The entrance by railway to Panama is not prepossessing, but for that matter I know of few cities in which it is. Rome and Genoa perhaps excel in offering a fine front to the visitor. But in Panama when you emerge from the station after a journey clear across the continent, which has taken you about three hours, you are confronted by a sort of ragged triangular plaza. In the distance on a hill to your right is set the Tivoli Hotel looking cool and inviting with its broad piazzas and dress of green and white. To your left is a new native hotel, the International, as different from the Tivoli as imaginable, built of rubble masonry covered with concrete stucco, with rooms twice as high as those of the usual American building. It looks cool too, in a way, and its most striking feature is a pleasingly commodious bar, with wide open unscreened doors on the level of the sidewalk. The Tivoli Hotel, being owned and managed by the United States government, has no bar. This statement is made in no spirit of invidious comparison, but merely as a matter of helpful information to the arriving traveler undecided which hotel to choose.
Photo by Underwood & Underwood
PANAMA FROM THE SEA WALL; CATHEDRAL TOWERS IN DISTANCE
The plaza is filled with Panama cabs—small open victorias, drawn by stunted wiry horses like our cow ponies and driven by Panama negroes who either do not speak English, or, in many cases, pretend not to in order to save themselves the trouble of explaining any of the sights to their fares. There is none of the bustle that attends the arrival of a train in an American city. No raucous cries of “Keb, sir? Keb”! no ingratiating eagerness to seize upon your baggage, no ready proffer of willingness to take you anywhere. If the Panama cabby shows any interest at all in getting a fare out of an arriving crowd it seems to be in evading the one who beckons him, and trying to capture someone else. One reason perhaps for the lethargy of these sable jehus is that the government has robbed their calling of its sporting feature by fixing their fare at ten cents to any place in town. Opportunity to rob a fare is almost wholly denied them, hence their dejected air as compared with the alert piratical demeanor of the buccaneers who kidnap passengers at the railway stations of our own enlightened land. The only way the Panama driver can get the best of the passenger is by construing each stop as the end of a trip, and the order to drive on as constituting a new engagement involving an additional dime. Tourists who jovially drew up to the curbstone to greet acquaintances met en route several times in a half-hour’s ride are said to have been mulcted of a surprising number of dimes, but in justice to the Panama hackman—who really doesn’t have the air of rioting in ill-gotten wealth—I must say that I never encountered an instance of this overcharge.
Your first introduction to the beauty of Panama architecture comes from a building that fronts you as you leave your train. Three stories high it has the massive strength of a confectioner’s creations, and is tastefully colored a sickly green, relieved by stripes of salmon pink, with occasional interludes of garnet and old gold. The fact that it houses a saloon, the proportions of which would be generous on the Bowery or South Clark Street, does not explain this brilliant color scheme. It is merely the expression of the local color sense, and is quite likely to be employed to lend distinction to a convent school or a fashionable club indiscriminately.
From the Railway Plaza—originality has not yet furnished a more attractive name—the Avenida Centrale stretches away in a generally southerly direction to the seawall at the city’s end. What Broadway is to New York, the Corso to Rome, or Main Street to Podunk, this street is to Panama. It is narrow and in time will be exceedingly crowded, for the rails of a trolley line are laid on one side, and some time in the leisurely Panamanian future the cars will run through the old town and so on out to Balboa where the Americans are building the great docks at the entrance to the Canal. Just now however it is chiefly crowded with the light open carriages which toward eventide carry up and down the thoroughfare olive-complexioned gentlemen who look smilingly at the balconies on either side whence fair ones—of varying degrees of fairness with a tendency toward the rich shade of mahogany—look down approvingly.
THE BULL RING; BULL FIGHTS ARE NOW PROHIBITED