a very crowded, and very micro, microcentro

The central business district of Buenos Aires is called the MicroCentro, which I guess would translate as "the little downtown". The part of downtown is old, the new glass office towers are a half mile away or so, near the highway separating the MicroCentro from Puerto Madero. (Of which more in a later post.)

I walked around the MicroCentro today around 2:30-3pm, and it was pretty remarkable how packed the streets were with pedestrians in the mid-afternoon. The main pedestrian shopping strip is Florida. I first visited Florida on a Saturday or Sunday, and so I thought that it was mostly a tourist destination. But no, on weekdays, when people go to work, the street is so jammed with locals that it's pretty hard to spot a tourist. This is really the center of town, a place where most everyone goes from time to time.

Here's a photo of Florida -- it's not so great, I'll try to replace with a better one later. If you click to view the bigger version you can see it a bit better:


And here is the crowd on Florida crossing Corrientes, one of the main avenues:


Okay, I've lived in Manhattan for two decades, and even I find this crowd somewhat difficult to navigate. Not to mention slightly anxiety-producing.

But Florida and Corrientes are at least spacious. Other streets in the MicroCentro are so, well, Micro, but still so crowded, that even a dedicated urbanite such as myself can get stressed out. I've seen lots of old cities with narrow little streets, but I don't think I've ever seen such narrow streets with so many vehicles barreling down just inches away from the curb. You have to negotiate teeny little sidewalks, scooting by people coming your way, or having to step in the street to pass old ladies going your way, all the while with smoke-belching buses whizzing by your shoulder. I didn't get any action shots of this today, but I did get a shot of people trying to cross the street once the light changed. Even this can be trecherous:
Later I'll get some shots of the actual narrow sidewalks. It's pretty amazing, two people can just barely squeeze past each other, and the cars and buses sometimes drive with their wheels literally an inch or two away from the curb. But, amazingly, the Portenos are very blase about this. And in general, they've very blase about the crazy traffic. They're not worrying about getting hit by a bus -- it's the bus' problem to avoid them. God bless 'em, it's such a different, and no doubt healthier, approach to risk than we norteamericanos have.