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It is a reasonable proposition that there are at least as many ways of studying a strange town as Mr. Kipling allows in the writing of tribal lays—“and every single one of them is right.” I claim no more than that for my own particular way.

My first concern is to gain a general impression, by wandering the streets and letting the spirit of the place “soak” into me, almost unconsciously. Later, I assume an attitude of mind more critical and less subjective, becoming an active observer, open-eyed for everything that is strange or unusual; finally I compare all that has especially appealed to my mind with impressions long since etched thereon by visits to other cities.

In this way I should probably describe the same town somewhat differently in the varying stages of my observation, and each would be a true description so far as I was able to convey any notion at all. But after passing from the impressionary stage to the critical and eventually to that of the comparative observer, it is difficult to recover the first impressions once these have been overlaid, like some palimpsest of the memory, with later records. In the preceding chapter I have made some slight attempt at this, simply because it seemed to me worth trying and the progress of my narrative suggested it. A book of first impressions, however, would be of small value, no matter how interesting it might prove, and I deliberately refrained throughout my stay of twelve months in the cities of the River Plate from keeping a diary, even from making notes, except on two subjects, to wit: the price of commodities, and cruelty to animals, which I shall discuss in special chapters. In what I now proceed to describe, I shall be guided by my last and abiding impressions of all that I saw or experienced, and for this purpose a continuous narrative is no longer feasible.

My way, then, in studying a foreign city is first to observe the panorama of its street-life so closely that I can ever after recall it in minute detail; then to store away finished pictures of its characteristic buildings in my memory; next to watch narrowly the ways of the people, as expressed in all forms of their social life and business activities, gleaning on every hand from others and exchanging opinions even with persons with whom I should hate to agree. In such wise, or as nearly as may be, I shall now continue.

Buenos Ayres in its planning is essentially North American. That is simplicity itself, but out of simplicity has come confusion. The buildings are in “blocks,” or cuadras (squares), as they call them in South America. These squares measure 150 yards each way. Thus a plan of the city looks like a monstrous checker board, with here and there a larger square, where two or more cuadras have been thrown into one to admit a little more air into the congested mass. For the streets are narrow beyond belief. The average width allows three coaches to stand abreast, with a clearance of some twelve inches between them. A walking stick and a half gives you the measure of the pavements. These are the standards for nearly all the thoroughfares in the older part of the town, and were the ample ideals of the Spanish colonisers, who required no more than single-story houses and a track between for their horses or their bullock wagons. Thus, in great measure, Buenos Ayres is an anachronism, and such it will long remain, as the abnormal development of the country and its capital city—the world’s most prodigious mushroom—has made this central part a veritable Eldorado of the landowner.

What served a century ago is to-day a legacy of evil, and these narrow colonial streets have made of central Buenos Ayres an inferno of human strife such as I hope exists nowhere else on our globe. For within these myriad squares of 150 yards there is no entrance or exit for wheeled traffic, and it is a pathetic sight to witness the unloading of goods on the narrow sidewalks in the early morning. Let the North American reader conceive a great department store, situated in a street no wider than Wall Street, utterly devoid of any back way for the entrance of a cart, with a pavement in front that measures a walking-stick and a half; and let him picture what it means to stock that great building with all sorts of goods, from massive suites of furniture to tons of shoes and neckties! If his imagination will stand the strain, let him further imagine what would happen if a trolley line were laid within two feet of the sidewalk in front of the door, and an endless stream of cars were passing, the bodies of them flush with the curbstone! Yet the Wanamakers and the Marshall Fields of Buenos Ayres have to stock their premises under these conditions. In this city of miracles, there is none more extraordinary than the task of moving goods from the street into the shop and it is small wonder that a large part of what one pays for any article in Buenos Ayres has been incurred in getting it into the place where it is bought. It is infinitely easier and cheaper to carry a piano from London to the port of Buenos Ayres than to take it from the ship a mile away to the shop where it will be sold!

Often have I marvelled at the patience and energy of the Italian peones, struggling with enormous cases of merchandise in the middle of the street, dodging them across the trolley lines, while a dozen drivers were clanging their bells for them to clear the way. And it is a daily incident to see wardrobes, suites of furniture, desks, sofas, mingled in the gutters with the fretting traffic, in front of the warehouse doors.

In almost every street there is a trolley line on one side, and all the traffic has perforce to move in one direction,—down this street, up the next,—for which purpose an arrow on the walls indicates the direction. To walk at ease along any one of these streets in the business hours is impossible, and progress afoot is only to the strong.

In such streets motor traffic is a folly, yet motor cars abound. It is a safe assertion that nine out of ten of them are used for no purpose other than ostentation. And your Argentine nouveau riche will have none of your modest 15-20 horse-power affairs. His mark is 40 horse-power, and the biggest, bulkiest, most cumbersome body money can buy. Thus, at certain hours of the day when the ladies go a-shopping, many of the streets are stuffed with monstrous cars, which have brought their owners a good mile or perhaps two, and while the ladies are about their diversion in the shops, the chauffeurs sit making filthy remarks about every woman who passes, and ogling the girls. These motor men, uniformed expensively, are one of the most offensive elements in the life of the city. Lazy, pampered loafers most of them; they deliberately place themselves in the near front seat of the car while waiting for their owners, the better to “amuse” themselves.

With a cautious municipal authority, the motor-car would be prohibited in the centre of Buenos Ayres. It is a century or so ahead of the town. In streets so narrow the horse carriage should suffice, and as a matter of fact the horse-driven traffic can move as quickly as the motor-driven, owing to the innumerable stops that have to be made in even the shortest journey. In the whole vast country of the Argentine there are not more than a hundred miles of really good motoring roads and automobile owners in Buenos Ayres seldom venture farther afield than the Tigre, an excursion of some sixteen miles. The road thither is the best in the country. It would rank as “bad” in the guidebook of any American or European touring club and it is the ruin of many a car. Yet vulgar ostentation insists upon the automobile, and almost every notable firm of motor-car makers in Europe or the United States is catering for the craze with branch establishments in or around the Calle Florida.

The papers abound in accounts of motor accidents and one seldom passes a car that does not bear some trace of a collision, many of the drivers being as reckless as they are unskilled. The motor-car is indeed one of the city’s problems and no effort is being made to solve it.

If the streets were only narrow, matters might not be so bad. But they are also villainously paved and continually out of repair. The pavements chiefly consist of slabs of rough-hewn stone, so badly laid that one is constantly tripping over their inequalities. Moreover, holes are merely covered by a piece of sheet iron laid loose over them, and in Florida alone (it is the universal custom in South America merely to give the name of a street, without adding the word calle) I have noted about a dozen old gas pipes left protruding some six inches above the pavement, a menace to all who do not walk with their eyes to the ground. As a New York lady visitor said to me: “If you don’t watch where you’re putting your feet, you’ll fall into a hole, or trip yourself, and if you do look out for your feet, you’ll get run over!”

The streets are laid variously with asphalt, wood, and cobbles. But no matter what material is used, the result is equally deplorable. Thanks to the excessively heavy traffic, borne in wagons with immense narrow wheels, an asphalted street is cut up into ruts in a few days after it is laid, wooden blocks are destroyed with amazing rapidity, and cobbles are daily dislodged in hundreds. Thus stones innumerable are lying in the cobbled streets, to the danger of all sorts of traffic; in the wood-paved thoroughfares there are ruts several inches deep alongside the tram lines, and the asphalt roads are cracked and broken as though some wandering earthquake had passed through them on its way from Chili. A paseo in a motor-car is an agony—there is no “rule of the road,” it is merely “devil take the hindmost”—a drive in a coach is little better, as the motor-cars make the progress of the horse vehicle a hazard of terrors.

In such narrow and congested thoroughfares, building operations are carried on with great difficulty. To me it was a source of constant interest and admiration to watch those in progress. And as there is no street where the builders are not busy, I had ample opportunity. In Florida, where a huge arcaded building was being constructed through to the next street, San Martín, the work of digging out the foundations went on all day, and all night long the dirt was removed when the street was quiet. The scaffolding fashioned for the purpose was the most ingenious and complicated I have ever seen. To the narrow street there was a barricade of corrugated iron (wood is too expensive to use for that purpose) and above towered a weird framework of timber, with “tips” or “chutes” projecting into the street. Seen from behind the corrugated iron, it was a magnificent spectacle of industry. Hundreds of labourers were digging down into the loamy earth some thirty or forty feet, and the material taken out was hoisted up by a lift and dumped near the tips, so that through the night great-wheeled wagons came along in fashionable Florida and were loaded up, leaving the street strewn with spilled earth next morning. I recall the night when some of this scaffolding collapsed and precipitated over thirty labourers into the excavations fifty or sixty feet below. Such accidents are very common, there being no intelligent supervision of building operations, and many labourers are sacrificed every year to the carelessness of their employers and their own ignorance.

Exterior and Interior of the “Casa Rosada.”

The upper illustration shows the façade of the Government House towards the gardens of the Paseo Colón; the lower, the vestibule entering from the main door in the Plaza de Mayo.

But, on the whole, it would be impossible to find more inspiring examples of human energy and ingenuity in the face of extraordinary difficulties than in the erection of these great buildings. To watch the low colonial house fall to the pick and shovel in a few days, the crazy scaffolding quickly reared for mining out the earth, the mighty steel uprights and girders arriving on huge wagons, each drawn by three or four sweating horses, the labourers swinging them into position, the frame of the ten- or twelve-story building presently disengaging itself where so recently stood the shanty, the bricklayers clothing it with their handiwork, the plasterers finishing its exterior with graceful decorative touches,—all this was to me a source of endless interest.

There is no evidence of an elementary regard for human life in the streaming streets of riotous traffic. Often have I seen buildings in course of demolition with no better guard against falling bricks and blocks of cement than some rough pack-sheet stretched in front. Sometimes not even that dubious courtesy is shown to the passer-by, and the demolishers stand aloft knocking down the walls inwards without the slightest protection against the fragments that rebound and land in the middle of the street. On several occasions I have escaped by half a yard or so a falling brick that might well have closed my account. Even when blasting with dynamite old foundation walls of brick and mortar, a few yards from the pavement, nothing will be done for the safety of the passer-by. The casualty columns of the daily papers are eloquent evidence of the risks the ignorant labourers run who are employed in this work of demolition.

In effecting repairs to the exteriors, painting, and the like, the workers are confronted with many difficulties, for the simple expedient of erecting ladders as in our cities is denied to them. A ladder would block the whole pavement. So they have to reverse the old order, and instead of placing the ladder firmly on the ground and leaning it against the wall, they plant the foot of it in the angle of the pavement and the wall and lean it away from the building, securing the upper and projecting end by ropes to a window. The worker on the ladder is thus between the ladder and the wall. And from this coign of vantage he drops paint or wet plaster on the passers-by with a cheerfulness and impartiality which must be seen to be duly appreciated.

Naturally the beautiful detail and the imposing appearance of many of the finest buildings in the city are completely lost for lack of space to see them. Hundreds of thousands of pounds may be said to be wasted in this way; for there is widespread effort to render the façades of the buildings artistic, the cement or plaster with which they are covered lending itself to all sorts of decorative treatment. But anything over two stories in height is above the line of sight in the narrow streets, and there are prodigalities of decoration, in the third and fourth and higher reaches of the new buildings which have never been noticed by anybody since the day they were uncovered. A barn-like structure would have served the purpose equally and given as good an effect—except in a photograph, taken from one of the upper stories on the opposite side of the street. Thus one has a curious feeling of disappointment on beholding many of the more notable buildings which he has first seen in photographs. The famous Jockey Club, for example. You are conscious that if you could get a hundred yards away from the front of it, you might find it a very handsome edifice. But the actual effect is that of a full-length photograph out of focus, in which the boots and the lower part of the legs dwarf all the rest.

I recall very vividly the impression of my first walks in those strange streets. The scarcity of women was very noticeable in the earlier part of the day. Such streets as Bartolomé Mitre, Cangallo, Sarmiento, Maipú, and San Martín, where the tide of business flows strongest, were crowded with men; the odd women who passed seemed out of place. But later in the day women and children may be seen in considerable numbers in Florida and the vicinity, though at no time are they ever relatively so numerous as in the streets of New York. And what never ceased to irritate me was the rudeness with which the passers-by stared at me and at each other. I was prepared for them feasting their eyes on the odd women, but man scrutinising man was new to me. They inspect your necktie, study the style of your hat, stare at your boots! They gape at you, so that you wonder if you have forgotten your collar or if your suspenders are hanging down! You are reassured, however, by their gaping at each other for no obvious reason. It is merely a vulgar habit, probably acquired by the gapers when first they arrived from the hill villages of Italy or the desert towns of Spain, when any person decently clothed was a novelty to them.

Some of the half-breed policemen at the street corners, trying to “control” the traffic, are a source of infinite joy. Armed with white batons, they wave these about in a way so bewildering that it is a puzzle to know whether they mean to hold up one of the streams of cross traffic or invite the two opposing processions to mutual destruction. On the whole, although some of these policemen, shamefully underpaid, indulge in a little robbery to keep the pot boiling—one, whom I had rather grown to like, mounted guard one Sunday while a gang of thieves, with carts and motor cars, plundered the newly-opened branch of Harrods’ London Stores in Florida!—I came to form a very favourable opinion of them, and many showed real courtesy and good sense in controlling the traffic, under the most trying circumstances, as every cochero and chauffeur looks upon them with contempt and pays a minimum of respect to their authority.

I have been told by old English residents of Buenos Ayres, who are prepared to perjure their souls on behalf of the city that has given them the opportunity to grow richer than they were ever likely to become at home, that “there are no poor and there are no beggars in Buenos Ayres.” Both statements are untrue. There are lots of poor, and there are some beggars. (Time was when the beggars went about on horseback, to the confusion of the old proverb.) It could not be otherwise in a vast metropolis, abnormally larger than the country behind it will warrant for many years to come, to which the poor of the poorest countries in Europe, Spain and Italy, are flocking in daily ship-loads. No poor in Buenos Ayres, forsooth! Thousands of poor are dumped down at the docks every month, and poor many of them remain forever—poor and criminal—though many more, with energy and application, escape from the ranks of poverty, and not a few grow rich.

Poor there are in abundance, and very much in evidence. Take a walk along the Paseo de Julio and you will see as many of the tattered army of Poverty as you will encounter in London, and in London you should see exactly five times as many, to maintain a proportion relative to the size of the cities. Beggars are less noticeable, chiefly, I fancy, because there is no room for them in the streets; yet I have often been asked for alms in Florida, while looking at a shop window—the only chance the beggar has of practising his (more often her) profession, as to stand in the gutter for more than a minute would be to invite a violent death. To Britishers, a saddening sight is presented by the gin-sodden Irishmen and abandoned Englishmen who pester their fellow-countrymen in Florida and San Martín, with the old familiar yarn about losing their job as ship’s carpenter and the certainty of getting a new start if they can only raise the money for a suit of clothes. Scores of times have I had to turn these British rascals away, and some of them became as familiar in my daily walks as old friends. If ever one saw a face that had been made repulsive by drink, a nose that was reddening with malt, it was invariably the guilty possession of a Britisher.

Mention of familiar faces reminds me of one of the most disagreeable features of the Buenos Ayres streets. In this matter I am a thoroughly prejudiced witness, so I must explain my attitude. To me, one of the abiding charms of London is that I can walk its dear familiar streets with their ever changing throngs, without having momently to raise my hat, or to stop every few yards to endure the idle chatter of some acquaintance. I love London for itself and I know where to find my friends when I want them. To have them bumping up against me at every corner would come between me and my London. It would destroy completely that feeling of immensity, that sobering sense of the greatness of humanity, which London imposes on the reflective mind. But in Buenos Ayres, if you have noticed a man in a railway train, if you have spoken to a passenger on the river boat, if you have been introduced to somebody at a Belgrano dinner-party, you will surely see them all in Florida next day. This parochial condition is the result of the central part of the town being confined to a few narrow streets. In all Latin countries there is also a sheep-like flocking to certain beaten tracks, as in Paris every boulevardier and almost any visitor is sure to be “spotted” if you but sit long enough at the Café de la Paix. Although the admirably planned and imposing Avenida de Mayo was opened some twenty years ago to give Buenos Ayres a new heart, it is still comparatively unpopular, while the congested Calle Florida is more congested than ever.

Other faces that grow familiar to one in the streets are those of the porters or changadores. Brawny Italians or Gallegos usually, these lazy and exigent vendors of unskilled labour stand in braces at the corners of many of the central streets, a nuisance to passers-by. They are armed with a rope or with a large piece of packing cloth folded and laid across their left shoulder. This is at once their instrument and their insignia. If you want anything removed, you send out for one of these gentry, and if he is feeling strong enough he may condescend to oblige you for a fee which would command a visit from a skilled medical man in New York. They will fuss and blow over a little job which should be no more than a mere incident in the day’s work. Once I was so fortunate as to get one to carry a box of books for me up three flights of stairs, for a trifle—five pesos, or two dollars—which he pocketed without a word of thanks. They must be prosperous villains these street porters and the malorganisation of labour gives them their opportunity, as nobody sending you any moderately heavy article will undertake to do more than leave it at the foot of the stairs. If you happen to require it three stairs up that is entirely your affair.

Turning from the people in the streets to the shops, one is struck by the extraordinary preponderance of chemists and druggists. Almost every other cornershop is a farmacia. And it is pretty certain to be a farmacia inglésa or francesa, or alemana, or italiana—rarely española! But all the same the “English chemist” may be an enterprising Argentine who knows no more than “zank you ver’ mooch,” which he will utter with a self-satisfied smile after you have conducted all your business in his own language. And he ought to “zank you” in half a dozen languages at once for what you have to give him in exchange for what you get. The farmacia is to Buenos Ayres, and indeed to the whole of the Argentine and Uruguay, what the public-house is to England—the “corner shop.” In the country towns it actually takes the place of the village inn and is the rendezvous of the local gossips. Magnificent establishments are these farmacias. New York has nothing to show in the line of artistic shops that will excel the best of them. Indeed, in no other great city have I seen drug-stores to be compared with certain of these in respect to the grandeur of their carved wood adornments and the completeness of their equipment. Their numerous assistants usually wear long white linen coats, after the style of hospital doctors, which give them a pleasant air of cleanliness they might otherwise lack.

With a drugshop at every corner, buzzing with customers, the unconscious liar who can speak no ill of Buenos Ayres will blandly tell you it is “the healthiest city in the world.” As a matter of undiluted fact, it is a paradise of the doctor and the patent-pill-man, largely due to its curiously trying climate. One often comments on the abundant evidence of the patent medicine seller in the United States—in the advertising columns of the newspapers, on the hoardings in the streets—but nothing we have amongst us in that respect equals the insistence with which you are reminded of your aching stomach at every turn in Buenos Ayres—if, by lucky chance, your stomach itself has forgotten for a moment to remind you of its troubles.

Statute of San Martín in the Plaza named after that Hero of the Republic.

On the left, the domes of the Art Gallery are to be seen, and on the right a portion of the Plaza Hotel.

Next in proportion to those offering the Argentino a myriad cures for his estómago, come the shops that are dedicated to cleaning his boots. Indeed, one might reasonably suppose this to be the national industry. The abundant energy devoted to this lowly calling if turned to other channels might go far to fortify the republic. Even in the Calle Florida, where land values and shop-rents rival the highest known on Fifth Avenue, one finds certain enviable positions occupied by nothing better than salones de lustrar, and in all the central streets such establishments—often employing upwards of a dozen men—abound. Nay, go where you will, even to the outer suburbs, you will never fail to find a druggist’s or a bootblack’s shop.

A real Argentine citizen must have his boots polished several times a day, else these multitudinous slaves of the blacking brush could not be kept so busy. The saloons are sometimes fitted up in quite a luxurious manner, with long platforms on which are raised padded chairs with high foot rests in front, and while you sit in this elevated position the polisher performs the most elaborate operation on your shoes, using a bewildering variety of pastes, brushes, and cloths. When you think he has done, he begins all over again and not until he has completed what must be the tenth or eleventh stage of the operation, which consists in taking a piece of silk from his trouser pocket, where it has been lodged to absorb the warmth of his body, and working it with furious friction over your shoes, are you free to step down. Meanwhile you have been listening to Caruso and Tetrazzini on the gramophone,—I have even heard a customer insist on a tune being stopped and his favourite substituted!—so that when you step out with shining feet you feel the threepence or fourpence you have paid has been well-earned. But you won’t have gone twenty paces along the street until a bawling door-man, shouting “Se lustra! se lustra!” will point to your feet and invite you into his shop, with “Shine, sir?”

Many of these boot-blacks run their prosperous business in conjunction with an agency for lottery tickets and most of them sell cigars and cigarettes as “sidelines.” The shops dedicated to the sale of lottery tickets present at first a very unusual sight to the visitor. Their name is legion. All the numerous money-changers deal in these tickets, which are spread out in their windows so that the passer-by may scrutinise the numbers and see if his lucky combination is among them. Many tobacconists also sell them, and there are numerous street-hawkers to offer you the chance of scores of thousands of dollars for fifty cents or so—a thirty-thousand-to-one chance. It is a study in Hope to watch a poor workman outside the window of one of these lottery-ticket vendor’s pointing out the particular ticket which he trusts may bring him a sudden fortune and take him home to Italy or Spain by the next steamer—the ultimate hope that flickers in all their breasts.

There is much parade of luxury in the barbers’ shops, which form a good third, in point of number, to the druggists and boot-blacks. Mirrors gleam along the walls and the basins and pipes for performing the mysteries of an Argentine’s “shave and haircut” are many and glittering. The assistants seem almost as numerous as the customers at any hour of the day and all wear the white jackets that cover a multitude of sins. A simple haircut in an establishment of just middling style—regular, no mas—costs you eighty centavos, leaving twenty out of the peso for the artist who has treated you. Forty-two cents for a mere haircut is moderately “stiff”; but have a shampoo, a singe and a shave at the same time, and you will find that, like Sampson, your strength has oozed away with your hair, when the barber names his price!