Going to the River: Part 3
Essay, Marcelo Ballvé, Jun 08, 2007
 Editor's Note: In the first parts of this series, the author left his apartment in the historic district of Buenos Aires and began walking toward the river on the city's eastern edge. He explored city blocks that were once underwater and forded polluted avenues. Here, in the third installment, he navigates the redeveloped docklands, an enclave of wealth superimposed on the city's old port.
Photos by Christian Denes
Read parts one and two.
Like many planned communities, Puerto Madero – the city's redeveloped old port – is a highly regimented area. Once I'm on its sidewalks I immediately notice the environment's artificiality. Many of the familiar features of the Buenos Aires street landscape are absent: there are no towering sycamores, cracked sidewalks, or deep rain gutters clogged with leaves and refuse. There are no newspaper stands or overflowing trash cans. There are no lottery vendors standing on street-corners in their garish vests, spools of numbers in their hands. There are none of the decrepit old men who look after parked cars in exchange for tips and are to be found, one to a block, in other central parts of the city. There's a notable absence of dog feces. The lawns here are perfectly green and always freshly clipped. The trees, being younger and more susceptible to pruning, are perfectly managed and well-behaved.
It is common in Buenos Aires to talk of Puerto Madero as the city's newest neighborhood. It is certainly new, but the term "neighborhood," does not adequately describe its configuration. In reality it does not operate as a typical neighborhood at all. It is more useful to think of it as a kind of secular mini-state of privilege and exclusion within the bounds of Buenos Aires.
To a significant extent, Puerto Madero operates under its own law and authorities. The neighborhood is effectively administrated by a "mixed" corporation, the Corporación Antiguo Puerto Madero, presided over by a board composed of elected officials, high-ranking bureaucrats and private developers. It is the developers, linked to multinational investors and real estate firms, who hold the real power.
Puerto Madero has its own security force. The Policía Federal – the police force responsible for security in the rest of Buenos Aires – has limited jurisdiction here. Instead, it is the Coast Guard, the Prefectura Naval, which is responsible for patrolling Puerto Madero's streets. The explanation for this unusual arrangement is that traditionally the Argentine Coast Guard has jurisdiction over all ports and surrounding riverine and maritime coastal areas. Puerto Madero has not seen any real ship traffic in ages, unless one counts the private yachts that populate its tiny and exclusive marina; but thanks to the heavy presence of the relatively uncorrupted Coast Guard officers, it has the city's lowest crime rate.
At every street access into the neighborhood, the coast guardsmen in their distinctive khaki uniforms and jaunty caps scrutinize car and foot traffic flowing in and out.
 My usual route to the riverside takes me along the wide, pebble-encrusted sidewalk along the outer border of Puerto Madero. Then, after a block or so, I turn right, toward the "wet docks"— the long rectangles of penned up river water where the cargo ships used to anchor. Today, the docklands form the scenic and architectural heart of Puerto Madero. The neighborhood's postcard-ready views and breezy cafes are predicated on the existence of the enclosed river water.
I usually take a shortcut across a corner of one of the perfectly maintained grass plots bordering the reconverted brick warehouses. I feel slightly apprehensive as I do, expecting that at any moment a Prefectura Naval officer might order me off the grass and onto the sidewalk. So I look guiltily over my shoulder as I tread on the grass and scramble past a few bushes sprouting among antiseptic briquettes of tree-bark.
My shortcut then leads through a section of the valet parking bay for a steakhouse, Estilo Campo, recognizable by its wooden wagon wheel leaning against the wall near the entrance. In the afternoons, the restaurant's waiters loiter outside, smoking or fooling with their cell phones and talking while they try not to feel ridiculous in their pseudo-gaucho garb. Behind them are the panoramic windows displaying cattle and lamb carcasses sizzling on spits in preparation for the dinner crowd. Beyond the valet parking and a ramp to an underground garage, a few steps lead to a kind of recessed garden terrace, occupied by the high-end chain, "Coffee House". Here one might sit under shade umbrellas, drink coffee and purchase beans from Papua New Guinea, Hawaii or Jamaica. Finally, a set of concrete stairs lead to the wide dockside walk or promenade.
Here, along the wet docks, I can begin to breathe more freely. The city's acrid breath has faded. The wind carries the first hint of the open river.
As I walk in a northwesterly direction to round the first wet dock, or dique, the restaurants are in a row to my left, some with a raised deck overlooking the water. Remnants of the well-scrubbed midday clientele are arranged around outside tables, working on their tans and enjoying the views as they finish late lunches or lounge over coffee.
To my right is the wet dock itself, the first body of water larger than a puddle I'll see in the course of the afternoon. At this point in my walk, not long after the fording of three busy avenues, the sight of water is refreshing— even if it is a sequestered portion of river. Puerto Madero's five wet docks are arranged in a row like cars on a train, connected by a system of locks that regulates water levels. On either end of the docks are two large, wide-mouthed quays, which face toward the open river. Relatively narrow bridges cut between the docks, allowing vehicle traffic and pedestrians to pass back and forth. These are rotating bridges, and can turn on their enormous hinges and curved rails to let ships pass from on dock to another. However, with the exception of the fourth or northernmost dock, which is home to the yacht marina, ship traffic is now nearly nonexistent.
The dock I walk along is the first in the series, since ships would enter the port from the south and exit via the quay to the north. It is also the largest one. It is called Dique Uno, Dock One.
One weekend, as I made my way to the river, I noticed that Dique Uno was crowded all around with families. It turned out there was a Formula One powerboat competition being held within its confines. Boys pressed against the railings or were hoisted to sit on their fathers' shoulders in order to watch the sleek boats roar from one end of the dock to the other, burning fossil fuels. People clapped heartily although I had the feeling few knew what was really going on. It impressed me how much pleasure the men and boys derived from the roar of the engines and the tall waves the arrow-shaped boats managed to kick up in the enclosure; for my part, I was fixated on the plastic bottles, trash and other debris that bobbed crazily in the churned up waters.
On weekdays, the walk is nearly deserted, especially in the middle of the afternoon, which is when I usually go to the river. Other than tourists, and a few office workers who have the slightly guilty look of truant schoolboys as they while away a few minutes, I typically have the dock to myself. It is a relatively peaceful place. It isn't uncommon for birds to swoop and hover over the surface of the murky water enclosed in the dock. If there is any wind, it is alongside the diques that I'll first feel its real strength, finally being out of the protection the city's buildings provide. Though the river itself is still a good distance away, the wind carries with it a humid, cold smell— the scent of open water.
 Puerto Madero's designers made a few worthy decisions when they redeveloped the old blue-collar docklands. Clearly, there was an effort to preserve old architecture: brick warehouses were restored and converted to offices, not demolished. Some of the infrastructure was kept intact. Alongside the water one can still see the original anvil-shaped iron moorings, which were manufactured in Wales, according to the still-visible engravings from a Cardiff foundry. Here and there are the cranes once used to load and unload ships, bent over the water. The cranes are spaced out about two to a dique, and there are also pairs of them clustered at the end of the docks, rusty iron hooks dangling forever some thirty feet above the ground. Today, the cranes are mostly used as photo backgrounds by tourists and as roosting and perching spots by birds. The ground below each of them is spattered white by bird droppings.
As I walk down the length of the docklands,I look ahead of me, northward, in the direction of downtown, to gauge the clarity of the day. If the day is very clear and free of haze, as it might be after a few days of rain, then I can look down the entire length of Puerto Madero. The redone warehouses and low-slung glass-fronted office buildings face one another across the rectangles of water. A profusion of objects bristle between: the undressed yachts' masts in the last dock; the white pedestrian bridge with its queer shape like the bone of an angular prehistoric creature; the 19th Century museum ship, with its leaning triple-mast, docked permanently on the city side of the fourth dock.
I cross between the first and second docks. I pass the bridge operator's little brick house and a few, gnarled old tipas (known in English as Pride-of-Bolivia trees). I cross on a wood and metal footpath next to the passage for vehicular traffic. The footpath is narrow enough so that it is impossible for more than two people two walk abreast across it.
The bridge doesn't simply take me to the other side of the dique, it delivers me to what is technically an island. Puerto Madero is divided in half by the old wet docks: one side is attached to Buenos Aires and the Argentine mainland; the other side is the neighborhood's insular section, surrounded by water. This is land that was gradually won from the river, through successive waterfront development efforts that continually dumped rubble and landfill in order to expand the territory available for port facilities. This island is connected to the rest of Buenos Aires via the four rotating bridges like the one I have crossed, but if the bridges were ever opened simultaneously, it would be set adrift. One would have to swim in order to return to the city.
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