Augusto Ivan de Freitas Pinheiro and Eliane Canedo
Research and contributions: Cristiane Titoneli
New port for a new century
The main emblem of Brazil was the new Rio de Janeiro, flaunting its long and majestic central thoroughfare: Avenida Central. However, the most ambitious proposal was the construction of its new Port, implemented during the wave of modernization and renewal that swept through the city. Implemented at the initiative of the administration headed by President Rodrigues Alves (1902-1906), this project ranked as the world’s largest port intervention at that time. Rivalling Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, it demolished old jetties, carved canals through the mangrove swamp (leading to the disappearance of São Cristóvão and Formosa beaches, together with two islands: Melões and Moças); linking the Santo Cristo and São Cristóvão districts, it created some 5,000,000 m² of new urban land through landfills that also covered the Saúde and Gamboa coves, where a quay was built.
Split into large lots, the area gradually filled up with warehouses. Many of them still remain there today, particularly eighteen of them lining the dock. Some five kilometers long, this new stonework wharf ran as far as Prainha (today the Praça Mauá plaza) and the mouth of the newly-built Canal do Mangue, the canal that today runs down the center of Avenida Francisco Bicalho. Most of the landfill consisted of earth from the flattened Morro do Senado hill nearby. Excavating hills and filling wetlands with the resulting soil were activities very familiar to the people of Rio, since the earliest days of its colonization.
The new system for shipping goods in and out of the Port was handled by cranes, replacing labor-dependent canoes and sloops shuttling between ships and shore.
Headed by the Ministry of Roads, Transport and Public Works, under engineer Lauro Muller, with help from his technical adviser Francisco Bicalho, the entire Docklands – not just the Port, but also the Saúde, Gamboa and Santo Cristo districts – began to operate under a new integration logic. In 1903, a flurry of decrees steered the implementation of the construction work, allowing British capital to enter this venture (...) Due to the sheer size of this intervention, only the first part of the project was completed under the Rodrigues Alves administration in 1906, concluded only in 1911.34
Exclusive railroads were laid just to convey goods between the outer warehouses and the wharf; a new tunnel was dug under the Morro da Providência hill that connected the lines running from the Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil rail station to the Gamboa Marine terminal. Although the three Docklands neighborhoods were still tight-knit, they began to connect with the rest of the city. Only the eighteen bonded warehouses lining the new Gamboa wharf were fenced off, with the rest of the area open for interaction with all sorts of urban functions: factories, shops, storage facilities, and transportation terminals. Even housing was included (including the Vila Operária da Gamboa complex), with rows of homes built for members of cooperatives engaged in activities related to the port.
Built between 1930 and 1933 at Rua Barão da Gamboa 150 – 160, the staggered row of worker homes known as the Vila Operária da Gamboa was designed by two architects: Lucio Costa (then heading up Brazil’s Modern Architecture movement) and Gregori Warchavchik, a Russian emigrant to São Paulo viewed as the pioneer of Modern Architecture in Latin America. This low-income multi-family housing project is one of the earliest examples of the Modern movement in Brazil, which was why it was listed by City Hall as a heritage site in 1986.
Celebrated as a new symbol of Brazil’s progress, in 1910 the Port of Rio joined other images of this modernized city: Avenida Rodrigues Alves, a manufacturing hub; Avenida Central, lined with shops; and Avenida Beira-Mar, an extension of the affluent homes in southern neighborhoods. Emblematic of those times were the charming double-decker buses that resembled their British counterparts, soon nicknamed Chopp Duplo by the cariocas of Rio, after their favorite double draft lager. A great success during the 1920s and 1930s, they drove through the streets of Rio de Janeiro on two lines: Clube Naval to Leme and Copacabana to Praça Mauá.
The modernization of the Port attracted a wave of investments to this region. The old Praça da Prainha plaza was updated with landscaping in Belle Epoque style, with a column in the center topped by a bust of the Viscount de Mauá sculpted by Rodolfo Bernardelli. After this make-over, it was renamed the Praça Mauá, an attractive plaza that welcomed transatlantic liners bringing foreigners, political leaders and cultural icons to the city, at a time when it was striving to become a magnet for tourists. At the same time, the Federal Port Inspection Office was inaugurated, together with one of the city’s earliest skyscrapers, the famous Edifício A Noite.
I had a Portuguese uncle, a cab driver at a taxi rank in the Praça Mauá. Called José Moita, he arrived in Rio de Janeiro from Oporto during the 1910s. He sat down behind a steering wheel and never left (...). But the core of his work and his life was the Praça Mauá. The heart of the Docklands, this plaza must have reminded him of the old wharves in Portugal from which his great-grandparents could have set out for unknown lands, when ships had neither engines or compasses. The Praça Mauá was the center of Rio – the starting point for its street numbers. For Uncle Joe, the entire world began here. 35
It was journalist Irineu Marinho (1876-1925) who decided to build a new headquarters for his A Noite newspaper at Praça Mauá 7. This was where construction began on a 22-story building constructed with reinforced concrete, which was an innovation at that time. He hired two architects for this project: Belisiário da Cunha Bahiana who followed the Art Déco school, and Joseph Gire, a Frenchman trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He also worked on many other projects in Rio between 1916 and 1933, designing the Hotel Copacabana Palace, the Hotel Glória and the Governor’s residence: the Palácio Laranjeiras.
However, this venture outstripped the wallet of this newspaper owner, who sold it to another investor. The newspaper headquarters filled only a few floors, sharing the building with the head offices of companies such as Philips and Pan Am, as well as two news agencies (La Prensa and United Press Association), the US and Canadian Consulates, and the old Rádio Nacional studios.
Since it was first set up in Rio de Janeiro, the Rádio Nacional radio station has operated out of this building in downtown Rio. Today, housed on only two floors (20th and 21st), it was famous for its soap operas and promotion of local performers like Francisco Alves, Dalva de Oliveira, Emilinha Borba, Marlene, Cauby Peixoto and Radamés Gnatalli, associated forever with the days when this building was the heart of a lively and unconventional lifestyle.36
From his corner on the square, he watched thousands of immigrants arriving by land or sea, with all their fears and hopes. In 1929, in 1929, he watched the 22 stories of the A Noite building go up, and, fifteen years later, the Rádio Nacional station crush the competition. Sometimes he drove stars like Linda Baptista, Marlene, and Nora Ney, but his favorite was singer Angela Maria. The Praça Mauá plaza had a lyrical and cosmopolitan background with a whiff of the underworld, and he was part of it.37
With two plazas – Praça Mauá and Cinelândia – linked by its main thoroughfare, this area formed a new landscape. Finally remodeled and neatly laid out, this was to be the new visiting card of the freshly-hatched Brazilian Republic and its rejuvenated capital, shedding the image of its old and outdated colonial past.
