more bits of BA

He gets everywhere ... glad to encounter his bearded face on my walk south from the hotel this morning, down Gascon, to the amazing Basilica Maria Auxiliadora y San Carlos (I might not have known about this if Véronique hadn't posted some photos of it earlier this year - why don't guidebooks make more of it?  But many thanks to her!!).  Pope Francis was baptized here.  And it wasn't just beautiful - it was packed and cheerful; and having a very energetic service for children and their families (which of course provided the opportunity to sit and immerse oneself).  The blue ceiling with gold stars is like the wallpaper on my room when I was little - when I stood in my cot and pulled a little bit that was loose, and pulled, and pulled some more.  The Basilica was built between 1900-1910, by an Italian architect José Vespignani - this was very much at the instigation of a bunch of immigrants from Genova.

How to follow that?  Luckily, Argentinian café culture is strong, and no one seems to mind if one sits with a large cup of coffee and hops onto a Zoom meeting for an hour.

Then to the Ecoparque, a totally surreal place.  To be sure, there was lots of eco information, and I absorbed a lot about Argentinian bees.

There were little lakes, and turtles, and ducks.

But there were also abandoned, decaying structures everywhere, for this had been the city's zoo since the end of the nineteenth century, and there are 40-odd structures scattered through it, from Greek temples to a Russian Orthodox church to rustic cottages to a fortress ... it's like visiting a Worlds Fair site.  And it's also overgrown - and many of the enclosures and cages have creeper growing through them.  The animals who were fit to travel were moved out and into somewhere bigger and kinder by 2016, and only a few are left ...

apart from the mara, who are everywhere,  These are the strangest animals - I've met them somewhere (but where??) before: technically rodents, they're like goats crossed with rabbits, and about the size of a pygmy goat, and usually hang out in Patagonia.

These giraffes din't look elderly (I couldn't tell with the hippo, who was 7/8 submerged), and were happily having tea.

And then, wondrously, a puma/mountain lion, sunbathing.  P-22's Argentinian cousin!

She was incredibly beautiful, self-contained, and had a very good sized enclosure - and then there was a notice explaining that she's been rescued from being a pet - too imprinted on humans to be released - and she is a warning about how Wild Animals are emphatically not pets.

The whole ecoparque is educational, in a quiet way; useful (there's a hospital for injured wildlife); and includes dinosaur models - very Crystal Palace, but bringing home to the young that extinction can happen, and shouldn't ever be allowed to.  And yes, that is a very far from extinct mara just trotting round the corner ...

 

architectural

This is so wonderful.  It's the Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes, a truly romantic name that used to house ... a water pumping and purification station (cholera was really bad in the 1860s). The engineering work was English; the architect was Norwegian (Olaf Boye) and the engineering design was by the Swiss civil engineer Carlos Nyströmer.  The outside boasts 300,000 glazed terracotta tiles made in ... Leeds.  It must have been an amazing building in the city when it was built: 1887.  Here are some early postcards and photos that show this...   Anyway, I've been obsessed with seeing it for a while ...

But first, I had to walk there, past some other small architectural gems;

and attempts to brighten the ugliness of the main (civic) hospital.

and then, the magnificent Palacio itself.  I found out yesterday that its museum has been closed for restoration since ... last Monday, but since it still is full of offices where people do things like going and paying their water bills, I was hoping at least to step inside.  No.  It was closed for Sanitation Workers Day (and there were lots of cross people who couldn't get to pay their bills, too).  But maybe the outside is the main thing?  There are many, many more photos where these came from: I've restrained myself ...

And then I carried on walking.  And yes, I was grateful to AI.  I had a list of buildings I wanted to see, and I asked it to construct a walking route that joined them all together, and that was a godsend.

So next, a fine piece of Art Nouveau architecture, whose first plans were drawn up in 1905: the Confitería del Molino has been empty since 1997, but it's been being restored since 2019 ...

The 22 floor Palacio Barolo is quite extraordinary: built by a cotton baron in the early 1920s, with one floor for each of Dante's cantos; some monster on the ground floor (which is Hell, of course), and a lighthouse on top.  He wanted to move Dante's ashes here, because he thought Europe was disintegrating and they wouldn't be safe in Italy.

A necessary stop for some excellent coffee in the Gran Cafe Tortoni - the oldest cafe in BA, which has been here since 1858 and is very - well, the guidebooks all say French, and yes, but it seemed much more like an old Italian cafe to me: a long ago haunt of writers, artists etc, in any case,

The former Banco de Boston, now offices, built in 1924.

Next, the Galerias Pacifico - with a rich and complex history: the original idea, in the 1880s, was to create an Argentinian version of Au Bon Marché (the Paris department store), with the architectural influence of the Galeria Vittorio Emanuale in Milan playing a part, too.  But - despite adding a hotel, and some very early escalators, and indoor central heating, it was ... rather large for a department store at the time, and, I suspect, wildly unprofitable.  The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes moved here in the 1890s; the department store didn't make it past 1905; in 1908 it was taken over by a railroad company; then in the late 40s another stab at a department store was made; then offices again; then decay ... but it was resuscitated in the 1990s, and now holds a whole lot of upmarket stores.

Eat your heart out, Rick Caruso - the Americana and The Grove will never have this real department store heritage - with frescos (from the late 1940s).

Not all department store ventures succeed, however ... this was the only overseas branch of Harrods: it opened in 1914, and was a - I can't better the city's description on its own website - "Edificio de estilo Eduardiano -fue popular en el Imperio Británico durante la era eduardiana de 1901 a 1910 y se caracteriza por su escasa ornamentación."  It closed in 1998, and has been empty since then, and is a rather sad sight.

and finally, and very autumnally, back at the street corner before my hotel.  I should say that all this walking wouldn't be nearly so doable if it was high summer - with temperatures ranging between the low 40s (I wore a hat this morning) and the mid 60s, it's really pleasant weather for city exploration.

 

Sunday in BA

Is this the best possible doorway in Buenos Aires?  How could it not be?

Went, it being a Sunday, to the San Telmo market, which was - well, like many markets, although with a lot of ok artisan stuff if I'd wanted a knitted llama or a leather belt or some bracelets or a macramé plant pot holder or a mug or or.

I was, though, intrigued by the stall selling hundreds and hundreds of lapel pins/buttons (there's a great deal of social histpry for the unpacking here, I'm sure).

On the whole, though, I was more interested in the street art,

and in looking up at the pretty, old buildings;

nd up inside the covered market.

Everything became more interesting once I arrived at the antiques part, though.  Of course I wanted a vintage colored glass soda siphon, but that did not look like a practical thing to be carrying around Argentina.

And I think it's true that I can't really look at any stall of bric-a-brac without having flash backs and shudders to clearing out 20 Hillside: UK charity shops have that effect on me, too.

On to the Museum of Modern Art, where the man at the ticket desk took one look at me and gave me a free ticket as a "docente" - is it that obvious?  Spent a couple of hours very, very dutifully looking at a couple of rather boring exhibits of eco art, 

and then fled, to the real eco stuff: the city has done a great job in reclaiming a lot of swampy land and turning it into an eco-park - lots of grasses, and I walked to the River Plate, which was huge and brown.

(there'd be a couple of other pictures here if the bluetooth transmission on my camera wasn't playing up, and I haven't brought a card reader ...)

... but as an extra, slightly blurred bonus, here's a bodega cat on the way back from dinner.  A very large if good dinner, and without asking they boxed up what I couldn't eat to take home ... I don't have a fridge ... so I was very happy to come upon an elderly unhoused woman bedding down in a doorway for the night, and asked her if she'd like some chicken, and she was very grateful indeed.

 

a strangely transnational day

The morning view - before it clouded over - from the rooftop terrace opposite my room: very fine Virginia Creeper.

I then Zoomed in to the memorial service for John Carey - I'd have been there in person if this trip wasn't already very planned by the time the date was announced.  It was beautiful, and I trust he'd have appreciated its combination of beauty and straightforwardness.  But so poignant not to be there; to see and hear dear friends speaking and reading; and to catch tantalizing little glimpses of others.  And it was very English.

 

Then off for a two mile walk to the Museo de las Bellas Artes (I like getting to know cities through walking, even when it's drizzling).  I hadn't realized it had such a stunning collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and some other French nineteenth century art (the Museo has a very good web site, if you want to check it out).  Here, to reprise my longstanding habit of posting feet, are some by Bougereau;

and some, stepping out of water and out of the frame, by Franz von Stuck (ok, not French)

- and here's back to full Salon pomposity: Diana sorprendida by Jules Joseph Lefebre.

But the highlight for me was the late nineteenth century Argentinian paintings that were by Italian immigrants, or by those who were born to Italian immigrants and then went to study in Italy, like this crazy La vuelta del malón [how do you translate that?  "The return of the raiding party"??] by Ángel della Valle, which was send to the Chicago World's Fair and exhibited in Argentina's manufacturing and products section, amid all the agriculture (they didn't have enough paintings to make a separate show);

- the wild looking Indigenous men have captured not just a white woman but all kinds of religious objects from a church they've presumably sacked.  And then this wonderful Ernesto de la Cárcova Sin pan y sin trabajo - "Without bread and without work," which could have come straight from my MA dissertation on social realism and late nineteenth century Italian art ...

I was just seeing some more works from the early twentieth century - evidence of the influence of Boccioni! of Carrà - when That Noise that everyone in LA knows all too well of Watch Duty - that app that alerts us to fires - sounded very faintly, and my Apple Watch buzzed, and I looked and a fire had broken out in Griffith Park about three quarters of a mile behind us - so I called Alice to make sure she was aware, and had gathered the cats up somewhere, and knew where my naturalization certificate is, and and ... well, you try and have a calm conversation of this kind in the middle of early C20th Argentinian art ... Luckily, it was out very quickly, so I went off to La Recolta cemetery to calm down.  It was a very depressing cemetery - usually I love them, but this was gloomy (might have been the weather).  All the same, Eva Perón quite properly had red carnations on her family tomb,

and there were some other good sightings.

Wall art, on my walk back;

and on a chilly dank autumn evening, may I recommend a bowl of lentil stew?