By way of a beautification effort, Viceroy
Juan José de Vértiz y Salcedo had a two-lane street built along what was then the shores of the
Río de la Plata. Marking the eastern end of the city, the thoroughfare was landscaped with
cottonwood trees (
alamos, in Spanish), and was thus inaugurated in 1780 as the
Paseo de la Alameda. The paseo became a popular weekend promenade, and its contiguous shores an unofficial riverfront park popular with bathers until an 1809 edict banned the practice for reasons of "moral terpitude." The frontage remained flood-prone, and in 1846, Governor
Juan Manuel de Rosas had a contention wall six blocks long built along the paseo. Inaugurated in March 1848 as the Paseo
Encarnación Ezcurra (in honor of his wife), Rosas had it renamed the
Paseo de Julio that October in honor of the Ninth of July, date of the
Argentine Declaration of Independence (the road's southern half was renamed
Paseo Colón, in honor of
Christopher Columbus, in 1857). An
English Argentine investor, Edward Taylor, opened a pier along the promenade in 1855, and the flood-control walls were extended northwards to
Recoleta, and south to
San Telmo, in subsequent works completed in 1865.
Immigration in Argentina afterwards made the Paseo a veritable bazaar, in which Italian
trattorias, French
bistrots, German
beer halls, and Greek restaurants operated alongside
brothels and seedy bars. The increasingly commercial desirability of the street, however, prompted the city to mandate in 1875 that all buildings along it be designed with
porticos, a regulation still in force and one which forced the paseo's more precarious establishments to close. A sudden economic and population boom led the new President of Argentina,
Julio Roca, to commission the development in 1881 of an ambitious port to supplement the recently developed facilities at
La Boca, in Buenos Aires' southside. Approved by the
Argentine Congress in 1882 and financed by the prominent
London-based
Barings Bank (the chief underwriter of Argentine bonds and investment, at the time), the project required the
reclaiming of over 200 hectares (500 acres) of underwater land and was accompanied by the widening of the Paseo de Julio into a
boulevard. These improvements were capped by the installation of a decorative fountain on the median, for which an Argentine student of
Auguste Rodin's,
Lola Mora, was commissioned. Unveiled in 1903, the
Font of the Nereids sparked moralist outrage over its nude
Venus, and the masterpiece was relocated to its present
Puerto Madero site in 1918. ==Points of Interest==