Buenos Aires by James Gardner

Author:James Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

Paseo de Julio (now Avenida Leandro N. Alem), c. 1880, with the Estación Central on the right. (Archivo General de la Nación)

Trains, of course, were introduced for travel not within the city but away from it. In answer to the former need, the first tramways appeared in 1870. Within three years, six different companies were operating in Buenos Aires, the two most successful being those of Federico Lacroze and Mariano Billinghurst, each of whom has an important street named in his honor. By 1887 over 100 miles of tramway tracks crisscrossed the city. These trams changed the city even more than the trains had done. For the first time workers could live farther from their places of employment than they could conveniently walk. Tramways also made it possible to consolidate the far-flung towns of Belgrano, Flores and Barracas into the vastly expanded Buenos Aires that came into being after 1887. And it was the tramway that, in due course, filled out the interstitial spaces between those towns, giving rise to such entirely new communities as Villa Urquiza, Parque Patricios and Almagro. Originally trams were horse-drawn and relatively expensive. It was only when they began to run on electricity in 1905 that they became cheap enough for the common laborer. And it was then that the settlement of the more distant areas of the city began in earnest.

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