Port of Recall

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I’ve spent the day exploring Palermo Viejo, about 10 square blocks of colourful storefronts and bohemian hangouts, reminding me what SoHo in New York was like well over a decade ago. In the morning, shopgirls and an elderly gentleman sweep sidewalks and hose down stoops. Children, looking like mini-Doogie Howsers in their white or pale blue primary-school smocks, solemnly commute to school. Close to several green spaces, built to quaint low-rise scale and laid out on a tidy grid, it seems like the perfect quarter.

At noon, I meet a local journalist named Alejandra (who lives in the equally idyllic nearby enclave of Las Cañitas) at the popular Bar Uriarte, a loftlike space with a small gallery upstairs. Over mushroom risotto and salad, she tells me about a new generation of cafés like Notorious, featuring live music and poetry readings for the sophisticated bohemians that favour this area; and about new-school tango milongas, where young dancers and “techno tango” music, like that playing in the background, hold the floor. We chat for over two hours, and it’s not until we’re leaving that the restaurant begins to fill up with neighbourhood denizens taking a typical late lunch. It’s past 11 that night when I finally sit down to a dinner of pork-stuffed rabbit, arugula salad with speck and a mascarpone mousse ironically dusted with Oreo powder in the restaurant of Palermo boutique hotel Bo Bo – and that’s an early evening, another local companion assures me.

One bright day I head to the leafy, elegant Recoleta area. My first stop is the famous cemetery where, down an obscure alley of elaborate above-ground stone and marble monuments, rests the relatively humble crypt of the Duarte family, bearing the small bronze gravestone of Eva Perón. The experience is sullied by the stunning amounts of dog poop I have to step through on the sidewalk surrounding the Cementerio, ironic in this genteel neighbourhood of immaculately coiffed white-haired ladies and their tiny dogs. But then, Recoleta seems like the most European-influenced of the city’s 47 districts.

I pick out a funky Mishal Katz vintage-fabric handbag in a nearby design store packed with contemporary Argentinian work. A Park Hyatt hotel, the most luxurious hotel in the city, will soon open in an old Recoleta palace, while chic cafés like Rodrigo Toso and boutiques like the menswear store Etiqueta Negra already cater to a new hipster class. “This is a wonderful time for Buenos Aires,” Christophe Lorvo, the graceful French general manager of the Hyatt tells me. “A real return to the belle époque.” In this neighbourhood, it’s easy to believe.

What a difference from the Microcentro, or downtown business district, where overhead wires criss-cross in an urban game of cat’s cradle and most of the impressive public buildings look, up close, like they could use some serious patching and scrubbing. I’m surprised to see that the presidential palace, on whose balcony Eva Perón so famously perched, is painted pink. Even the grand French-Italianate decor of the renowned Teatro Colón, famous for its near-perfect acoustics, has a faded quality.

Yet shoppers swarm international chains like Zara on the Calle Florida pedestrian mall with the fever of new prosperity. “Slowly, the economy is getting better,” one local says in a careful reference to the economic crisis of 2001. “People are starting to make plans again, to buy things.” After work, young suits doff their jackets at hot spots like Gran Bar Danzon, where I quaff well-priced glasses of a dry white Crios Torrontes. Many hours and Fernet and colas (an inexplicably popular cocktail) later outside the fabulously louche bar Milion, my night-crawler friend (who came to Argentina on a film crew last year and never left) pours me into a taxi. Walking is out of the question; we’re not in the Universe anymore.

Different still is the cozy residential neighbourhood of Abasto, where I meet CBC journalist Dawn Makinson near her family’s spacious flat. Because tourists rarely make it this far into the heart of the city, she calls it Buenos Aires’ best-kept secret, and I think she might be right. Surrounding what was once the city’s main mercado (market), spacious neighbourhood buildings are now storefronts for local theatre groups and commodious root cellars have become artists’ ateliers. We drink small cups of strong coffee in the 1929 café/bar El Banderín and walk by shops where the vendors all recognize her, past a store window with delicate custom-made tango shoes and pawn shops with vintage tidbits more intriguing than the overpriced, touristy antique strip in better-known San Telmo. Finally, I feel like I’m in the real city.

After a week of this kind of commando urban tourism – dipping in and out of areas so wildly diverse, they appear to not be part of the same city – I find a funny thing happening. I crave the retreat back to Puerto Madero each evening, to my exotically scented Universe with its quietly efficient experience management and its delicious poolside cheeseburgers. But then at the same time, I feel like it’s wrong to like it so much – this enclave that’s so different from the rich banquet of the real exhausting, hot, noisy, late-night Buenos Aires.

I saw something that week that puzzled me at the time. I ate a salad of plump shrimp and palm hearts in an old-fashioned European-style café where the waiter was rude and all the other customers were grey-haired men sipping espresso. I walked back across the Plaza de Mayo, the square known for its demonstrations and soapbox ranters of every description. There I saw a bespectacled bearded guy teaching algebra to two dozen teenagers from a portable blackboard he had evidently wheeled into the square. What kind of demonstration was this? Who protests by doing math? But now I think I get it. These concerned citizens of Buenos Aires were making a radical intellectual statement; they were taking a stand against the gradual dumbing down of the modern urban experience. 

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