La Paloma Cafe
Café La Paloma
On the south-west corner of the junction of Santa Fe Avenue and Juan B. Justo Avenue — formerly the Maldonado Stream, which was channelled underground in 1930 — a large structure can be seen today: it houses a shop selling mattresses and divan beds.
Let us go back roughly a hundred years and picture the same place, as though conversing with ghosts that seem to slumber in that corner of Buenos Aires, only metres from Palermo railway and underground station.
Café La Paloma was another of Buenos Aires’ urban legends. Let us imagine ourselves walking through the area in 1915. The character of the place was shaped by several factors: a stream along whose banks stood humble dwellings — little more than shacks — a barracks bringing a constant influx of soldiers, run-down brothels that were then officially ‘permitted’, a railway station, and a broad road leading out from the city centre towards Belgrano. Naturally, there was no shortage of cafés, taverns, little drinking houses, canteens and inns, as well as general stores resembling those found out in the countryside. Tango, of course, had a conspicuous presence there.
And on that corner, where Santa Fe met the stream, there stood, like a landmark for rest, gambling, paid love and Buenos Aires music, a distinctive café that gradually became part of the city’s everyday history: La Paloma. Perhaps its name recalled the tenement house in the Villa Crespo district that inspired the playwright Andrés Vacarezza to write his sainete El Conventillo de La Paloma.
Let us imagine ourselves there at dusk one evening that year. The café resembles many others that abounded during the early years of the twentieth century: a long counter covered with a sheet of tin, beneath which was a store of blocks of ice delivered each day by a small cart bearing the words Hielo Cristal. There was a swan-neck tap for chilled water, wooden-topped tables, Viennese chairs, a couple of battered billiard tables, a small stage for a tango orchestra and doors leading into a dark and mysterious interior.
From the windows one could look out over Santa Fe Avenue, with the Maldonado Barracks opposite and the stream alongside, carrying little or much water according to the whims of the weather. Behind rose the bulk of the newly constructed station buildings and the long row of arches supporting the viaduct. Francisco García Jiménez believed that the establishment had taken its name from a young woman who had driven many admirers to distraction: Flor del Arroyo…
Francisco L. Romay recalled that around 1911, when he was chief of a local police precinct, he had to intervene on several occasions to break up fights in the establishment, riding his horse right into the notoriously combative café.
“One night in 1910,” wrote A. de Durañona, “all nocturnal Buenos Aires gathered there: milongueros, swaggering compadritos and women of the night, for a special performance by ‘Pacho and his Quartet’, whose ‘horn violin’ was played by José Bonano (‘Pepino’), with Luciano Ríos on guitar and the flamboyant Carlos Macchi — ‘Hernani’ — on flute, to whom Roberto Firpo dedicated a tango.”
The old bridge over the Maldonado Stream
During those years Café La Paloma belonged to a man named Domínguez, who hired Maglio and thereby succeeded in attracting large crowds. The only problem was the enormous rats that came from the neighbouring stream, multiplied in the cellar and occasionally made incursions into the tango venue, with predictable consequences.
Juan Maglio frequently performed there with his bandoneon, and pieces such as Armenonville, La Morocha and Sábado Inglés could be heard in the café. In 1924 the Sexteto Paquita appeared there, led by the first Argentine female bandoneon player, born in Villa Crespo, whose full name was Francisca Bernardo.
At some point we followed this advice from Jorge Luis Borges: “I owe some of my best ideas to the streets, cafés and barber shops.”
Don Otelo Coisutti, who had worked as a barber in a small room at the back of La Paloma, recalled that once a week he attended to the café’s regular customers there. He also cut the hair of conscripts from the nearby barracks, charging them twenty centavos, since they brought their own towels.
Those were also the days when, as the old Patricios conscript Oscar Planell recalled, “the conscripts from the neighbouring Patricios and Grenadiers regiments would settle their differences in veritable pitched battles inside the café, with tables and chairs flying through the air and sabres being drawn.”
Arguments over gambling or the handling of women in the sex trade were common there, and well-known figures were also regular visitors, among them the nearby resident Dr Alfredo L. Palacios, who came to discuss party political matters.
The café had an emergency exit opening on to a vacant field that formed part of the extensive Quinta Bollini estate. Those who did not wish to be arrested or questioned by the police — who visited frequently — would escape through it. The barber remembered that afterwards one could invariably find a knife or revolver lying on the ground, discarded by those who had fled.
He smiled as he recalled how one of his customers, whenever he sat down for a shave or haircut, would take a large revolver from his belt and — as casually as though it were a pair of spectacles — place it on the marble-topped table beside the combs, brushes and Eau de Cologne.
Along the pavements beside the stream ran a narrow path of worn bricks, protected by a wire fence to prevent people from falling into the Maldonado.
Around 1930 the stream was channelled underground and a broad dirt road was created above it, where local children played football. Later, tables for gambling were installed in the cellar, and games would continue throughout the day — or until curious rats appeared.
At the height of its popularity the café also had a Salón para Familias — a ‘Family Room’ — although in reality it was little used, since La Paloma did not enjoy the best of reputations.
The exterior of the establishment was whitewashed, as was customary for businesses of this type, which closely resembled the traditional pulperías of the countryside. On the Santa Fe pavement there was a drinking trough for horses, for riders, horse-drawn flatbed carts and the small carts of street vendors were still commonplace.
Café La Paloma occupied the pens of poets, tango lyricists and chroniclers with long memories. Enrique Cadícamo left these verses:
And down we would go for a drink
with faithful friends of old,
from the days when the musicians played
over there, opposite the Barracks.
There the New Year began,
with Luciano and Pepino,
giving tango its fragrance.
It was a fierce and touchy café,
with a quarrelsome atmosphere,
and it was called “La Paloma”.
On that very site, as far back as the days of Rosas, there had stood a pulpería, the first tavern and general store encountered after crossing the Maldonado Stream. The writer Lucio V. Mansilla recalled it as such in one of his books of memoirs.
By around 1960 the café no longer existed. A pizzeria called Nápoli had opened on the premises (1). The establishment was later abandoned for several years, although a bronze plaque still remained on the wall of the chamfered corner. Fashioned in the shape of a partly rolled parchment and dating from an earlier age, it bore the customary engraved inscriptions… Not long afterwards, it too disappeared.
Reference
(1) According to Horacio Vázquez: “At the beginning of the 1960s, a modern bar and pizzeria opened under the name La Paloma. It belonged to the same owners as the La Paloma pizzeria at the corner of Corrientes and Serrano, in Villa Crespo, whose surname was Paley.”
Sources
Vázquez, Horacio — Personal communication
Efemérides — Patricios de Vuelta de Obligado
Portal: www.revisionistas.com.ar
Del Pino, Diego A. — Cafés de la Av. Santa Fe de Dorrego a Plaza Italia (2000).
