History
First laid out in colonial Buenos Aires as San Gregorio Street in 1774, it was at the time the northern limit of the growing port city. Following the British invasions of the Río de la Plata in 1806, it was renamed for one of the popular heores of the invasion's defeat, Pío Rodríguez. The declaration of autonomy from the Spanish Empire in 1810 led city officials to rename it Calle Estrecha (the "Narrow Street"). The progressive Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Martín Rodríguez, had the narrow street widened in 1822, following which Bernardino Rivadavia, the first President of Argentina, renamed it Santa Fe Avenue. Mayor Torcuato de Alvear, inspired by the urban redevelopment works in Paris at the hand of Baron Haussmann, drew up master plans for major boulevards, running east to west, every six blocks and in the 1880s, the avenue was included in the plan and widened. A 1967 ordinance made the avenue a one-way thoroughfare, west to east.
Read more about this topic: Avenida Santa Fe
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)