When yellow fever hit the young city, the wealthy fled, leapfrogging the train station district in Retiro and carved the fancy neighbourhood of Recoleta out of the countryside.
Its neighbour to the north is Palermo, subdivided into trendy zones called Palermo Soho, Palermo Hollywood and Palermo Viejo. Today the once-bohemian hangouts around Plaza Serreno are avant-guard clothing shops selling expensive t-shirts and ‘bermudas’, overflowing restaurants serving big slabs of meat, and ‘too cool’ bars where locals and tourists vie for spots at the sidewalk tables.
Just beyond Palermo is my neighbourhood – the elegant, residential Belgrano. It is a huge grid of leafy residential streets that once boasted the elegant, architect-designed home of the upper middle class. “Revival styles” appear to have been popular – Beaux Arts, Classic, Gothic, Romanesque, even Tudor.Today, elegant renovations of these compact mansions sit shoulder-to-shoulder with tall, narrow mid-century apartment towers, built on the footprints of demolished homes.
Here are a collection of some of the lovely old homes I walk by every day…
