The Conflicts and Hopes of a Nation, Rendered as a City
Written: Jan 25 '04 (Updated Jan 27 '04)
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Pros: The "Paris" of Chile, where the national identity is stored, presented, and fought over.
Cons: The "Paris" of Chile, where the national identity is stored, presented, and fought over.
The Bottom Line: Hard to love at first, but many people love it ... Read the article!
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Santiago |
Our plane took off from Santiago at 11:45 PM on New Year’s Eve, 2003. Just before midnight, it banked to the right, and all around me, people gasped.
There, suddenly, was all of Santiago by night. A great rectangular patch of yellow lights, across which the city’s main axis, the Alameda, glittered in the many colors of business. Just in front of the Alameda, the long black phallic extrusion could only be Cerro San Cristobal -- the “Central Park” of the city. All around, the great rough grid, sprawling but not yet filling the valley.
It was 11:58, and I imagined that there, in my line of sight, at least three million people must be counting down.
I knew it was midnight because the whole city seemed suddenly to shiver. Bright colors flashed across the enormous surface -- it could almost have been a trick of the light. The applause around me was not just happy new year (whom would we be applauding, exactly?) It felt like applause for the city -- the applause of people departing a city that many of them -- either tourists or Chileans -- deeply loved.
Santiago is not an easy city to love. Considerable courtship is required, and my first glance on a summer day did not leave me an eager suitor. The taxi from the airport to my hosts home took me on the peripheral highway, Avenida Amerigo Vespucci, Along the way, I saw: (a) proud signs announcing various districts (comunas) that were clearly doing the best to be communities, despite the bleakest poverty, (b) a suburban shopping mall, (c) cut out of an otherwise beautiful hillside, a new district of highrise housing and offices that was clearly being designed to have none of the advantages of its density -- everyone was going to have to drive cars there, and even from one building to another.
When I got my bearings and began walking into the city, I found myself in the pleasant middle-class comunas of the inner east. My host lived in La Reina, an area of comfortable homes with few attractions apart from the cavernous Jumbo supermarket. An easy walk took me to Providencia or Las Condes, and to the subway line that runs the length of the Alameda across the city center.
Only on the second day did I see one of the most dramatic reasons that one might want to live here: the Andes, towering over the city to heights pushing 20,000 feet (over 6000m) only a few linear miles away. Santiago’s ambient summits easily outdo the sharp relief of Southern California mountains. The Andes are so huge and so close that it takes a while to process that they are indeed part of this planet. Even in summer -- here at latitudes comparable to Los Angeles in the north -- the highest peaks are brilliant and heavy with snow.
These mountains fall abruptly to the city, and from there, the valley where Santiago sits is a long alluvial slope similar to the slope that raises Hollywood a bit above Los Angeles. East is almost always gradually uphill in Santiago. Not surprisingly, the wealthiest comunas are in the east, closest to the Andes. West of them, still with a fine view of the mountains in the sky, are the vibrant areas that have real pedestrians and where people can actually meet each other (Providencia, Bellavista, Ņuņoa). West of them is the City Center, an important concentration of government and tourism but also the site of two major universities, which keep the area active well into the night.
It would take months to form impressions of all the corners of this huge city. Like most visitors (and most locals for that matter) I spent most of my time in a few central comunas, and can speak only of them. If you visit, though, or even read guidebooks, these are the same comunas that you will hear about in detail. So I will try to avoid the obvious guidebook facts and offer something more ...
Look and Feel
Comparisons with Los Angeles (the big one) are almost unavoidable as I walk Santiago’s streets. It’s hot, it’s slightly smoggy, with limited tree cover composed mostly of fast-growing eucalypts plus some palms -- neither of which are all that useful for shade. The architecture is either (a) a jumble of sizes and styles that seem intended for maximum dissonance or (b) “planned” communities so consistent in style and size that you long for dissonance (If just ONE of these houses were painted magenta, I might survive … ). If the architecture were music, you’d be facing a choice between hard metallic rock and sedating Windham Hill.
Poverty and affluence also meet in many types of jumble. While there are reclusive suburbs of the very rich (the kind that have prohibitions on painting your house magenta), the most interesting neighborhoods are mixtures of rich and poor. Take, for example …
Providencia: Everything’s Here, so It’s Hard to Say Anything.
Just east of the City Center, this large and central comuna is impossible to generalize about. Guidebooks, absurdly, try to. To me, Providencia is simply the most concentrated area that shows off all of Santiago’s qualities. You could no more generalize about it than you could about this teeming city as a whole.
If you are walking the city’s main spine, the Alameda, Providencia is almost continuously commercial. It has lots of shiny storefronts, but also many vertical shopping centers of identical and distinctive design that we might call “Guggenheim shopping.” Square buildings with square atriums, their stores face inward on multiple levels, but the walkway spirals up along each face of stores, so that you can pass by every store in the course of a long helical walk.
Step away from the Alameda, though, and you’re in the “jumble” of rich and poor, tall and low. Walking along one block, you may pass:
-- Tiny storefront specialty stores -- a butcher, a florist, a breadmaker, etc. -- each in low huddled buildings that may be almost shacklike, some with the owner’s equally shacklike home right behind them. But despite their low-end look, you’ll see expensively dressed women emerging from them, clutching tiny bags.
-- various kinds of low, depressed apartment buildings which, like the shacks, announce their seismic vulnerabilities to the world.
-- single-family homes, often of some grandeur, on tiny lots, usually fenced with impenetrable bars but with lovingly tended gardens inside.
-- 15-storey residential blocks, mostly of the Brutalist school so popular in both the US Public Housing era and in the communist world under Stalin.
These last deserve a special look: Some of the Brutalist towers are barely recognizable as Brutalist, because Santiago’s apartment dwellers show an amazing talent for balcony gardening. Some towers seem to be mostly foliage, as plants erupt from every balcony to intermingle in the brilliant sun. These lush towers vibrating with life are one of my happiest images of Santiago.
Ņuņoa: Chickens, as Heard from a Penthouse
South of Providencia, out of the bustle of the Alameda, you probably won’t see this comuna unless you know someone there, as I was fortunate to do. Here is the same jumble that Providencia is, but slightly less expensive, slightly less developed, and with far fewer tourists.
My friend took me to his 10th-floor “penthouse” (my word) and as we stood on the balcony admiring the view, I had one of those epiphanies: I realized that I while I had stood on many balconies, and heard many chickens, I had never had these two sensations at the same time.
Sure enough, I could look almost straight down into the backyard of a humble cottage. There was a chicken-coop, and a yard full of chickens. I remarked on this pleasure to my friend, and he agreed that it was a happy sensation, but not likely to last for long. This land is becoming too valuable, he said. Before long, we’ll be looking at nothing but other highrises.
I’m a supporter of density, but for the first time, I imagined that small buffers zoned for chickens might not be a bad thing.
Las Condes: The Closest You’ll Get to Starbucks, and the Furthest from Chile
My online translator says that “el conde” means the earl or count, but gives no meaning for “la conde”, of which Las Condes would be the plural. Las Condes, then, suggests a gathering of lesser nobles with a frisson of gender-confusion. And indeed, in this age when titles can be bought, it seems the perfect haven for bourgeois-aristocracy. I can imagine George Bush (either one) feeling right at home here.
Las Condes, east of Providencia, is Santiago’s newer commercial center. Highrise offices, highrise hotels, highrise luxury homes -- most with unopenable windows confining you to artificial air. Here, at high density, is the same exclusivity that you’ll find further east in the culdesac suburbia of Vitacura. If you like Century City in LA, or Lincoln Center in Manhattan, or “The City” in London, or La Défense outside Paris, you’ll certainly love Las Condes.
For the rest of us gringos, Las Condes offers one useful thing: “Starlight Coffee.” It’s an exact replica of a North American Starbucks (Chile is actually very good at replicating foreign objects.) They serve coffee in the North American style, whereas in the rest of the country, “café” denotes Nescafé instant. Starlight Coffee was the only reason I ever went to Las Condes, or can imagine any other North American wanting to.
Cerro San Cristobal: Every Phallic Extrusion Should Have a Virgin on the Tip
Cerro San Cristobal is not really a hill, but a ridge, an extrusion from the Andes that penetrates the city from the east, almost to the City Center. One of its highest-altitude points is at the end. Here, a gigantic Virgin Mary looks right down on the City Center, and out to a view that takes in most of the city. The Virgin’s embrace wraps around a small amphitheatre built into the summit, where countless young couples enjoy each other’s company in suitably virginal ways while ostensibly taking in the view.
Every city should have a great park on the scale of Central Park in New York, Stanley Park in Vancouver, or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Santiago has Cerro San Cristobal. It’s comparable in size to these other parks, but divided into distinct islands, rare flat patches amid a roar of precipitous slopes. Much transportation in the park is by funicular (climbing the steep western tip) or by gondola (a longer ride that climbs gradually from a point well to the east). Inside the park, you’ll find the zoo and a botanical garden (both endearing but hardly world-class), several mediocre restaurants and tourist traps, and numerous hiking trails along the flanks of the ridge, all offering breathtaking views (except on the days of breathtaking smog).
And the Virgin herself is certainly worth a look, for she is enormous, beatific, blastingly white, and mysteriously free of pigeon-droppings. Perhaps, I think, she’s slightly electrified to scare off the urban beasts. I wonder idly if I could obtain such a treatment, and if it would consign me to eternal chastity … (No, and yes, I conclude …)
Barrio Central (City Center)
At Santiago’s center, where the three lines of the sleek French-designed Santiago Metro meet, is the concentration of government, shopping, tourism, and universities collectively known as the Barrio Central. (This is a good time for North Americans to pause and realize that barrio -- a loaded word north of the Rio Grande -- is simply the Spanish word for “neighborhood.”)
It would take me weeks to fully explore this centroid of the national identity. But in a few days, I came to admire:
-- The Museum of Precolumbian Art. Beautifully situated around a quiet courtyard just steps from the urban bustle, this very small museum houses just the right number of compact amazements. Only the very best is here -- from Easter Island, from the Atacamians and the Incas who absorbed them, and of course from the Mapuche, the huge indigenous group that still guards its identity in the south. The natural sunlight in the galleries is just right. A city that had enough gems like this would have no need for a Louvre or Metropolitan Museum.
-- Plaza de Armas. Every Chilean city has such a town square. As befits Santiago, this one is enormous, flanked on two sides by government buildings and on two sides by commerce. Because I was there just before Christmas, an incongruous inflated plastic Santa -- in full North Pole drag -- hung suspended in the roiling heat looking out on the sun-drenched plaza.
The Plaza de Armas has one of Santiago’s finer pieces of public art, a haunting semi-abstract sculpture of a beheaded but conscious Native figure. As usual, don’t try to read the “artist’s statement” -- it’s a bunch of banalities intended to curry favor with all sectors of society. Just let the sculpture speak for itself.
-- La Moneda. The name means “small change” or in this case, “the mint.” The manufacture of coins moved out of this building long ago, and it is now the presidential palace. It was here, on September 11, 1973, that the Chilean Army mounted a full-scale military assault on elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. You can visit the room where Allende gave his final address to the people, shortly before he is believed to have committed suicide. To me, though, the sculpture behind the Moneda is more powerful than anything inside of it. There stands Allende, his body the solid, grandfatherly presence of Plato’s philosopher-king. Stress builds, though, as my gaze moves toward his face, and especially toward his trademark extra-heavy glasses. There is no glass of course, and inside the lenses I can barely make out eyes inside deep holes. I have rarely seen such a powerful statue of a political figure, and of course, its power lies in the conflicted feelings that this man still brings to the fore for any Chilean who was politically aware on “Chile’s September 11”, that day in 1973 when military might overcame democracy, and the country plunged into 16 years of violent fascism. Of the dictator who ruled this dark age, Augusto Pinochet, there are no statues. But Allende’s statue is not as prominent as it might be -- tucked into a corner of the square behind the Moneda, it is visible but not central, as old military-hero statues often are. Perhaps Allende would have preferred this, for he was the type of president who didn’t pretend to know everything, or have access to all wisdom. He had an ego, of course; nobody gets that far in politics without one. But you can see in this statue the reclusiveness of a Prospero, Shakespeare’s exiled Duke whose “library was dukedom large enough.”
There are many other things in Barrio Central … Other museums, the small hill of Cerro Santa Lucia, guarded at its front gate with a whole Lourdes worth of tightly packed Catholic imagery. There are many other things to see, and fascinating people to meet, throughout this Great National City. But those will be for another trip, perhaps for yours.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Time to Travel Here: Dec - Feb
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Urbanist
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