Rio is no longer Brazil's federal capital and the city has
gone to seed. The gay, painted Parisian ladies of the center
have turned into dowdy old senhoras, shedding plaster molding
like a mangy dog sheds hair. Everything will crumble away
because it was never real in the first place.

Thaddeus Blanchette

Lapa, the once and future Montmartre of Rio de Janeiro, is filled with beautiful wrecks. Elaborately constructed belle époque grand dames, built in the first decades of the 20th century, silently decay along the neighborhood's narrow streets and ample boulevards. The buildings are mute testimony of a future that never came, a vision of Rio de Janeiro that sprung from the fevered brows of the Republican municipal planners.

Men like Mayor Pereira Passos, inflamed with the virus of modernity, wanted to sweep the old, pestilential slums of the center into Guanabara Bay as landfill, doing away with the colonial past and rebuilding the city in the most cutting edge (for 1910) Parisian styles. They wanted to make Brazil's federal capital a fitting showplace for a nation on the move, a rival to much detested (but secretly admired) Buenos Aires. With the nation's tax receipts in their pocket, they did exactly that.

Three and a half centuries of carioca architecture went into the dumpster, practically overnight. An earthquake or firestorm couldn't have done more damage. With a sweep of the administrative hand, a wide central avenue was drilled through city center, knocking over houses and churches that had withstood the predations of French pirates in the 18th century. Castle Hill, the nucleus of the primordial Portuguese colony, with its dignified Jesuit College, was whittled down to sea level and dumped into the bay. Likewise, Saint Anthony Hill went into the drink. The charming, rock lined back bays of Gamboa and Glória were filled in, making space for a new port with all the modern facilities and, later, an airport.

Today, one can wander down Rua da Glória and gaze upon the old sea wall to one's left, looking forlorn a half kilometer away from the shore. Cruise ships unload their cargos of tourists upon the dust of 17 generations of Jesuit fathers and the charming old English Cemetery, once set overlooking a placid cove, now huddles forgotten in a back lot at the foot of the city's oldest favela, stage for furtive drug deals and the odd rape or murder.

Say what you like about Brazilians, we do like our order and progress.

With the mass destruction of the last affordable housing in the city center came a mass exodus of the poor and working class, most of whom were pushed out of downtown proper during and after the public vaccination riots. Some of the huddled masses moved to the urban frontier north of town, settling along newly opened trolley and rail lines and founding the roots of what is today the sprawling North Zone and Baixada Fluminense.

Others, however, needing to remain physically close to their work, went up hill, squatting the only unclaimed land in the center of Rio: the mountain tops. These people, together with decommissioned soldiers back from quashing the Canudos Rebellion (1897) and an ever increasing flow of refugees from the Brazilian Northeast fleeing drought and poverty, built the city's first favelas.

(The very name "favela" comes from the campaign to destroy the rebellious religious utopia of Canudos in the northeastern backlands. Favela Hill was the center of the Army's position during the siege of the town, the place where the Fed's had set up their heavy artillery to bombard the land below. Perhaps the decommissioned veterans of the campaign were trying to say something when they gave that name to the hill they had occupied above the Army Ministry while waiting for the payment of their overdue demobilization bonuses. Perhaps they were just homesick for the brief time when they had been looked upon by the nation as the saviors of the Republic. In any case, Rio's hill top shanty towns have been known as favelas ever since.)

In place of the stately (but dingy and ill-maintained) colonial residences, the city of Rio erected a faux Paris. From 1900 to 1925, fake-o belle époque buildings spread across the center of town like mushrooms over cow shit.

Ironically enough, as is so often the case in Brazil, the "latest, most modern" architectural style was going out of fashion in Europe by the time it hit these shores.

That didn't stop the city fathers from inviting King Albert of Belgium, the war hero, to inaugurate the new "Paris of the tropics" in 1921. It didn't matter what the Europeans may have thought about the shake-and-bake architecture: the Carioca elite was convinced that modernity had finally arrived, that a glorious morn was dawning on the horizon and that was what was important.

Dead Dreams

Now, a century later, all the old dreams have turned to dust. Rio is no longer the federal capital and without the increased tax base of an empire behind it, the city has gone to seed. The gay, painted Parisian ladies of the center have turned into dowdy old senhoras, shedding plaster molding like a mangy dog sheds hair. Their once elegant interiors are full to bursting with a new generation of urban poor who thud up and down the creaking steps and across the rotting floorboards, too involved in the mechanics of daily survival and the thousand and one petty dramas of the working poor to care much about their homes' upkeep.

The corridors smell of cat urine and echo to the sounds of blaring TV sets, domestic arguments and wailing children. When a building becomes too precarious for living in (i.e. practically falling down), the city government labels it a historical monument and its left to die in peace, waiting (usually futilely) for someone to come along to dump a half million or so dollars into it to restore it to its days of glory.

As I write this, I'm parked in Lapa next to the Museu da Imagem e do Som waiting for a choro and jongo show to begin. These musical forms kept the town hopping in the twenties and are now enjoying a belated rebirth, along with the neighborhood itself. The heavy rhythm of jongo echoes across the ruins, semi-ruins and restored façades lining the boulevard.

In front of me are the ruins of a three-story belle époque monstrosity, leering like the toothless ghost of some ancient, pox-ridden prostitute. Abandoned long ago, the building has been reduced to its façade. Still, the balconies are there, along with most of the ornate plasterwork. A fan of concrete feathers spreads out over the three-meter-tall doorway. On the second floor, two life-sized plaster cast nymphs, raising laurels over the entranceway, overarch a balcony. One door hangs loosely in the frame, its glass half broken. Through it, I can see the blue sky, dotted with white and orange cotton puff clouds as afternoon drifts inexorably towards evening.

The nymphs still have traces of paint attached to them: green for their clothes and brown for their arms. It looks like the kind of balcony some rich daddy would design for his princezinha's boudoir. Or maybe a bordello... I wonder how many young girls—now haggard old dames or dust—have stood in triumph beneath those laurels, listening to Zé Pereira at Carnaval, or perhaps watching President Getúlio Vargas drive by on important affairs of state (his palace was just down the road, after all). Perhaps four generations of women grew up here, met their lovers and future husbands, squeezed out kids and died before the building's glory days properly ended and it turned into just another tenement, then an empty shell housing a lean-to warehouse.

I often hear tourists remark upon Lapa's ruined glory, "Oh, such beautiful buildings! If only they'd have maintained them..." They don't realize that, like much else in Rio, the whole set up was as authentic as a three dollar bill from the get go. It was built to be gaudy, poorly made, imitative trash and now it's ending its life cycle, going down in the same way as once fashionable whores do—in peeling paint and dust.

A few buildings will be saved, of course. The city's even giving tax breaks for renovation down here. But the real colonial and imperial Rio of yesteryear was swept away to make room for this cheap crap. Now it is gone forever and this, too, shall pass, like a bawdy and saudoso choro. No matter how hard we try to hang onto it, it will crumble away because it was never real in the first place: only the people who lived in it were—both rich and poor—and they are long since gone.

I must admit, however, that I get a chuckle when I think about how, a century from now, tourists will be clucking in awe and dismay over the ruined apartment boxes of Barra da Tijuca. "Have you ever seen such stunning 1970s architecture?" they'll exclaim, looking up at the broken aluminum railings and crumbling marble facades. "Why, it's almost as if we were in Miami! Pity they couldn't keep it up, though...."

On moonlight nights from the hills of Santa Teresa, with the right kind of eyes, you can still peer through the gloom and see Castle Hill. You can imagine the tall ships in the bay and the proud colonial houses in the valley below. But when the sun comes up again, you have to face the reality that Rio chose, long ago, to raze its heritage to make way for a pipe dream. Unfortunately, the city shows every sign of not having learned its lesson.

Thaddeus Blanchette is a 35 year old immigrant to Brazil who has been living in and studying the country most of his adult life. He can be reached at poboxthad@yahoo.com.br

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