Yesterday I spent a good part of my day under the Autopista de 25 de Mayo -- a major highway that goes from the harbor westward. One of the artists I have befriended -- Carolina Andreeti -- did a fascinating project to uncover and critique the effect of this highway, built by the dictatorship in the 1970s. She herself lives a block from the highway in San Cristobal but by chance and determination she found members of a family who lived in a house that was demolished to make way for the highway. She interviewed them, looked at their photographs, learned everything about their home and then identified the actual spot beneath the highway where the house stood. Using a more durable form of chalk, she drew the plan of the house. At a nearby community center, she had an installation with images of the house, plans for the highway, and recordings of interviews with the family. It reminded me of my colleague Gretchen Schneider, who together with a group of high school students, outlined the neighborhood that once stood where the spaceship otherwise known as Boston City Hall and its landing pad (the red brick expanse surrounding it) now lives a precarious existence. Both projects were a temporary way -- and they were both intended to be temporary -- of reminding us of the violent effects of what Jane Jacobs liked to called "cataclysmic" planning.
Carolina and I hopped on a bus that paralleled the autopista and ended up in San Telmo, very near where we met Tatiana Kaler on one of our first days here. We walked back under the autopista this time to see what looks like an ancient pyramid reaching almost up to the underside of the highway, about a hundred feet up. Closer up, you realize the site also goes down below the grade of the street, and that it really is an archaeological site. What strange ancient Mayan site is this? It turns out to be much more recent -- these are the remains of "El Atletico," one of about 600 illegal "detention centers" set up during the dictatorship, where kidnapped people were brought to be tortured and, as often as not, drugged and then dropped out of planes into the Rio. El Atletico only operated for about a year, but it has gotten a lot of attention due its relatively recent discovery there beneath the autopista. We weren't able to get in because there is little space to walk around and a school group was there. But I will return to get a closer look.
After this dark excursion, I headed to hell...and purgartory...and paradise. Palacio Barolo, the Woolworth Building of its day (tallest building in Latin America from 1923 to 1935, grandest speculative office tower), is a monument to Dante (who has a strong hold in the cultural history of this city of Italian immigrants). The textile king, Luis Barolo, commissioned a building that would embody Dante's Divine Comedy. He divided the building into three parts for the three parts of the Divine Comedy, and planned an elaborate mosaic at the very center of floor of great entry hall to hold -- I kid you not -- Dante's remains. He pleaded with the Italian government but to no avail. The rest of the building is organized around Dante's work -- 100 meter high (for the hundred cantos); with the correct number of offices per floor to match the number of verses in that particular canto; the main hall has nine arches for the nine circles of hell, etc. The best part is the view from the top (which housed a lighthouse that was designed to be seen by Barolo's sister building in Montevideo; alas, he miscalculated the curvature of the earth and the two lighthouses shine in vain). I made it safely down from Paradise (in a lovely 1920s devil-red elevator -- Dante certainly didn't travel as elegantly or as easily between realms) back to the earthly mess and made my way back home.
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