Florida Street - History

History

The beginnings of Florida Street date back to the founding of Buenos Aires in 1580, when it was hewn as a primitive path uphill from the banks of the Río de la Plata. Its first official name was "San José," enacted by Governor Miguel de Salcedo in 1734. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the street was known popularly as Calle del Correo (Post Street) in reference to the post office located on what later became Perú Street (the southern continuation of Florida Street). It was also later known as Empedrado (Cobbled Street). Improved with boulders brought from Montevideo beginning in 1789, it became the first paved street in the city (a section of the original cobblestone pavement is displayed behind the entrance to the Cathedral Station on Diagonal Norte Avenue). Following the British invasions of the Río de la Plata in 1808, the street was called Baltasar Unquera, in homage to an aide-de-camp to Viceroy Santiago de Liniers, fallen in the fight against Admiral William Carr Beresford. The street was first named "Florida" in 1821. The name was designated in honor of the battle fought in 1814 in Upper Peru against the royalists during the Argentine War of Independence. Governor Juan Manuel de Rosas renamed the street "Perú" in 1837, and in 1857, the name was returned to the present one.

The Argentine National Anthem was first performed in 1813 at the Florida Street home of Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson, one of the city's most prominent citizens. Argentine elites began to leave the central and southern wards of the city mainly due to epidemics, especially the 1871 yellow fever outbreak. They decided to move to higher ground in the city and chose the area known as Retiro. Florida Street, whose northern half is in the Retiro ward, became a shopping street in 1872, and would soon welcome pharmacies, furniture retailers, jewelers, and haberdasheries that offered the latest in European fashion. Numerous private mansions were also built along Florida Street in the 1880s and 1890s. The Parisian-inspired Bon Marché became the street's first large-scale shopping arcade in 1889, and the Argentine Jockey Club, the nation's most prestigious gentlemen's club and horse racing society, was inaugurated in 1897.

The Civic Youth Union, was organized in 1889 at the intersection with the Avenida Córdoba. This organization would foment the Revolution of the Park in 1890, and from its ranks the Radical Civic Union (to whom six presidents would later belong during the twentieth century) would be established in 1891.

A tram was installed along Florida Street in the 1890s, and it soon became a leading commercial artery in Buenos Aires. Vehicular traffic was barred during business hours in 1911 by request of the growing number of shop owners along Florida, and in 1913 the tram was dismantled to pedestrianize a section of the street. The 1914 inaugural of the Gath & Chaves department store coincided with the inaugural of Harrods Buenos Aires, the only overseas branch of Harrods, and the illuminated spire topped Galería Güemes. The merger of Gath & Chaves and Harrods in 1922 created two of the most ornate institutions of their kind in the Americas. Florida Street also became the address for a number of important corporate headquarters during the 1920s, including BankBoston Argentina and La Nación, the nation's leading news daily at the time. Lavalle Street, which intersects Florida, became a focal point of local cinema houses beginning in the 1930s.

The city's middle and upper classes would later relocate further north, to Recoleta, Palermo, and Belgrano, however. This trend was reinforced by the 1953 arson of the grand Jockey Club building by a Peronist mob. Its decline, however, was slowed by both an era of relative prosperity in Argentina, as well as milestones such as the inaugural of the Hotel Claridge in 1946, the Torcuato di Tella Institute's Florida Street center in 1963 (which became a hub of Buenos Aires' avant-garde and pop art scene during the 1960s), and the 1971 conversion of the street into a promenade. Writer Jorge Luis Borges lived near the northern end, and was fond of taking walks through the semi-deserted street in the pre-dawn hours. Borges was an outspoken critic of the renovation work done on the street in 1970; he was blind, and the new arrangement of trash cans, planters, flower pots, and magazine stands was a serious accessibility risk for him. He was also influenced by his esthetic-minded friends, who saw the new scheme as a break with tradition.

The economic crisis of the 1980s precluded any recovery, however. Nor did the street benefit from a consumer boom during the 1990s, as this was largely diverted toward a series of new shopping malls opened in the city's north side. Galerías Pacífico was renovated and reopened in 1991, though Harrods Buenos Aires, which by then operated only on the ground floor, would close in 1998. Mayor Fernando de la Rúa had the textured concrete pavers along Florida replaced in 1999 with granite tiles laid in a decorative black-and-white pattern.

Commerce along the street was afflicted in the ensuing years by proliferating street vendors, a result of a legal loophole in the municipal ordinance that otherwise prohibits the practice; Mayor Mauricio Macri succeeded in having these vendors removed in January 2012. Florida Street continues to command among the highest commercial rents in the city, and has become a favorite attraction among the city's growing number of foreign tourists.