The Old Rio, 1914
This transition from a meanly built and unhealthy, although large and picturesque Portuguese colonial city, to the modern Rio de Janeiro has had perhaps no equal anywhere in point of…
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“The Old Rio” from The Beautiful Rio de Janeiro by Alured Gray Bell, 1914
This transition from a meanly built and unhealthy, although large and picturesque Portuguese colonial city, to the modern Rio de Janeiro has had perhaps no equal anywhere in point of rapidity of execution. The whole work was only initiated in 1903. The two loans, amounting to £12,000,000, raised for the purpose, do not in any way represent the money spent on the improvements; private efforts, whether of companies or individuals, have greatly assisted in the embellishment of the city.
According to the account of foreign visitors, and even of the Brazilians themselves, the Old Rio had little to recommend it but its picturesqueness. On landing at the Caes Pharoux one found oneself immediately in a labyrinth of extraordinarily narrow streets, some of them not more than seven yards wide. Here and there occurred a small square or praça; and writers were wont to make serious efforts to glorify the one wider street, Primeiro de Março, which, while fairly broad, is even to-day wholly unimposing. And as an able Frenchman, Elisee Reclus, expressed it in 1893, the first thing to do was "Not to widen the streets but to clean them."
"There is no original architecture in Rio," added Reclus, "merely copies of copies." The dock or port district of the city lying a few hundred yards north of the landing stage was described even by Brazilian authors as "horrible." It has been wholly transformed in the last few years. West and north of this busy but squalid district the city was struggling to contend with marsh and swamp—the low-lying foreshore and plain apparently permitted to exist by the imperious hills and mountains overlooking it. Here, where the poorer inhabitants congregated, was a happy hunting-ground for the yellow fever scourge. This district too has been wholly altered by various other improvements, some still unfinished. And yet the old Rio, with its 700,000 population, extended even then some six or seven miles from its original nucleus out to the southern ocean front, and even further to the north-west and west, gathering beauty and picturesqueness as it meandered around the intrusive hills, loth to go far from its beautiful bay.
If the public buildings of the old Rio were mostly poor and shoddy, the business and the social quarters were equally undistinguished by fine structures. The shops in the narrow streets were naturally dark, and even in the famous and ancient Rua Ouvidor (Auditor Street), where fashion, politics and business daily mixed and still mix, the ground-floor shops, cafes and booths were notorious for their sombre, sunless interiors. Nor, although two to three centuries old, had these narrow central streets the merit of extreme antiquity and quaintness such as we associate with Magna Grecia cities like Taranto and Rhodes.
To-day those that remain have certainly a quaint aspect, but this is principally accorded to them by the general modern glamour of the recent Improvements. Then again, the villas and residences of the old Rio, while often picturesque by reason of Nature’s gorgeous setting, were generally bald in design and frequently ridiculously overcharged with meaningless outer decorations. The old Rio, however, had its widely ramified tram-services since greatly improved because electricized.
These provide to-day a diversity of track and scenery surely unequalled by any city in the world.
Bell, Alured Gray. The Beautiful Rio de Janeiro. William Heinemann, 1914.
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