Augusto Ivan de Freitas Pinheiro and Eliane Canedo
Research and contributions: Cristiane Titoneli
The 1960s
It was between 1940 and 1960 that cities began to expand at a dizzying pace. During the 1960s and 1970s, rural-urban population proportions switched places44 in Brazil, which had been a predominantly rural country for 550 years. In parallel to this trend, automobiles became an indiscriminately defining element in urban design, with a focus on laying out new neighborhoods or upgrading old districts.
Following in the footsteps of the sweeping urban renewals implemented by Mayor Pereira Passos in the early XX century, Mayor Henrique Dodsworth (appointed by President Getúlio Vargas in 1937) took office in the same ‘engineer mayor’ style. During the eight years of his administration, he implemented a broad-ranging roadworks program that was designed to streamline automobile traffic in the city, with this means of transport viewed as a symbol of modernity.
Two major projects were implemented in order to ease traffic jams in the CBD, where Avenida Rio Branco was lined with banks. Opening up fresh possibilities for expansion, they had massive impacts on social life and the urban fabric, wiping major cultural landmarks off the map of the city. The first project lasted only three years, with Avenida Presidente Vargas inaugurated in 1944. The second was the Avenida Perimetral ring road, where construction began during the 1950s, and was completed only in 1968.
Grounded on the argument that the downtown area was full of narrow and unhealthy streets clogged by tramlines and choked by pedestrians, the Mayor decided to carve out a broad avenue that was to be eighty meters wide, running four kilometers from the Igreja da Candelária church to the Estação da Leopoldina railroad station.
Designed as the backbone of the new downtown traffic system, Avenida Presidente Vargas soon became a symbol of Brazil’s Third Republic, known as the Estado Novo. Its wide lanes offered a perfect stage for military parades and other major political events. Underscoring its magnitude, the Brazilian government built two imposing buildings facing this thoroughfare: the new Central do Brasil railroad station and the sumptuous Palácio Duque de Caxias, a massive structure housing the Ministry of War that was inaugurated in 1944.
At the same time, demolition contractors were busy opening up space for these works and removing all ‘obstacles’. These included four of the oldest churches in the city, one of which was the Igreja São Pedro dos Clérigos, a Baroque gem built in 1733 and listed by the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service (SPHAN).
In all, 581 properties were torn down, most of them in the Cidade Nova district and quite near low-cost housing areas around the Praça Onze square. These neighborhoods had become home to much of the Black population, when families were forced out of the downtown area by waves of demolitions under the Pereira Passos administration. They were joined by thousands of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, fleeing Czarist Russia and then the Russian Revolution.
Offering refuge to blacks, whites and mixed-race people, the Praça Onze square was a rare example of supportive co-habitation, endowing it with a rich ethnic and cultural pluralism. Jews and Blacks shared classes at the Escola Benjamin Constant school. In the same street as the Clube Juventude Israelita Jewish youth club, the Tiferet Tizón Zionist organization, synagogues and kosher restaurants rubbed shoulders with centers of Black culture, like the homes of Tia Ciata and many other Black residents who moved to the Morro da Conceição hill as work progressed on the avenue. They were all part of Little Africa, which became a landmark for Black culture and a symbol of Rio’s street carnivals.
Planning for the second major construction project – the Avenida Perimetral ring road – began during the late 1920s. At the request of Mayor Antônio Prado Júnior, French architect Alfred Agache worked on this project between 1926 and 1930. Its initial route was altered so often that a decision was finally (in 1956) taken to work with the design drawn up by Affonso Eduardo Reidy and Edwaldo Vasconcelos at the Urban Planning Department of the Works Bureau.
Implemented between 1957 and 1978 as a way of clearing clogged city streets, it was intended to improve traffic in neighborhoods located north and south of the Centro, with no need to pass through the downtown area. With two lanes in each direction and an average width of fifteen meters, the Avenida Perimetral viaduct was 4,750 meters long. Towering some seven meters above the ground, many squares, streets and buildings were demolished in order to make way for this new thoroughfare.
An elevated highway running parallel to the bayfront and detouring around the downtown area, its route included underground sections, ramps, roundabouts and viaducts. For reasons of cost, the entire project was elevated, with massive impacts on urban landscapes, mercilessly isolating the oldest part of the city on the shore of the Guanabara Bay.
The decision to start work on this project prompted countless disagreements, with vehement protests from nearby entities like the Clube da Aeronáutica club and the Companhia de Navegação Lloyd Brasileiro shipping line. However, the institution that was most severely affected was undoubtedly the monumental Mercado Municipal market in the Praça XV plaza.
The urban renovation plans for this area called for the complete demolition of the market, but with no proposals for transferring it to some other site. Dropped like a bomb on its merchants, this information caused widespread concern and rejection, as it affected the future of 10,000 families. The Mercado Municipal market was demolished in 1962, with only one of its five towers left standing. Housing the Albamar restaurant, it is listed as a Rio de Janeiro State cultural heritage asset.
The construction of this project extended through two decades and ten administrations, inaugurated in two stages by two Brazilian Presidents: in 1960 by Juscelino Kubitschek, with the between the National History Museum and the Candelária church bearing his name; and in 1978 by Ernesto Geisel. Embroiled in controversy for the next seventeen years, Mayor Luiz Paulo Conde suggested that it should be demolished in 1997.
With these two massive projects, the automobile became a lead player on the downtown stage. Strolling around, friendly relationships between the ground floors of the buildings with streets and landscapes – aspects of a good urban setting that are highly appreciated – were forgotten by the designers of these public works. The decline of the old Port was inexorable, as the main customs house moved to the Caju district, deeper into the bay. However, there were other factors that tipped the docklands into a decline.
As urban development began to spread into this region, the successive slopes of the São Bento, Conceição, Livramento, Providência, Pinto and São Diogo hills formed a physical barrier separating the Saúde, Gamboa and Santo Cristo neighborhoods from the rest of the city. Although streets were laid through the valleys between these hills, other barriers appeared: the railroad, and then heavy traffic along Avenida Presidente Vargas.
Built between the Port and the bay, the Avenida Perimetral elevated expressway not only blocked the sea view; the murky spaces under its viaducts were perfect hideouts
where all sorts of shady activities flourished. It was not easy to live under these conditions, particularly as there was no upgrade program for these neighborhoods that would draw them out of decay and reverse this deterioration.
Making things even worse, the Brazilian capital was transferred from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília on April 21, 1960, at the order of President Juscelino Kubitschek, who was born in Minas Gerais State.
This was a severe blow to the city’s economy, as it lost access to 80% of the Metropolitan Region tax revenues, which were earmarked by law to the municipal boundaries of Rio de Janeiro, excluding the Baixada Fluminense lowlands.
Still coping with public works redesigning the urban spaces where they lived, and clinging to the glamorous image of Rio de Janeiro – stereotyped by foreigners as a tropical paradise packed with carnival parades, beautiful women and great soccer – its residents were unaware of just how poorly prepared the city was to cope with what lay ahead: the lost decade of the 1970s. [II]
The long-standing decadence of the old Docklands became even more dramatic with the introduction of new port operations technology. The old system of cranes loading and offloading goods stored in warehouses lining the wharf was replaced by containers and yards – which was missing in this area.
With the port area choked by city traffic and no large tracts of open land for storing containers, the Port of Rio gradually began to transfer its operations to the Caju district, with easier access and plenty of room for growth.
The Port moved, but its warehouses remained, largely derelict. Some were taken over as squats by the homeless, while others were filled with huge samba school floats and workshops; some housed a wide variety of purposes, none of which helped recover the lost dynamic of this area.
Their decrepit appearance and the scale of the problem scared off any attempts to encourage new types of occupancy, particularly due to the massive size of the warehouses and the lack of security in the surrounding streets. Neglect of this entire neighborhood was quite clear: during the 1990s, the Docklands were rated as the worst-lit area in the entire city, in a ranking drawn up by the Rioluz Streetlighting Department at City Hall. Dark and deserted at night, it was nevertheless home to around 22,000 people, most of them living on the string of low hills separating the docklands from the rest of city.
This dilapidation was apparent everywhere and at any time: treeless sidewalks, old and obsolete sewage and drainage networks, epic floods, unkempt squares, open-air garbage dumps, potholed streets, ruined townhouses and abandoned rail yards and tracks.
Having opened the XX century in glory and promises of a brilliant future, the Rio Docklands limped into the mid-1970s as a despised area cold-shouldered by the rest of the metropolis.
[II]
During the 1970s, the Moinho Fluminense company pursued a modernization strategy for its facilities and equipment. By the end of this decade, wheat was being offloaded from ships directly into a pneumatic system that carried it to a conveyor belt leading to the silo, through a tunnel under the main wharf running parallel to Avenida Rodrigues Alves.
(Histórico do Moinho Fluminense. Centro de Memória Bunge heritage center, São Paulo)