User:ProfA2024/La City (Buenos Aires)

La City is the popular name (after the equivalent London central district) given to the sector of the Microcentro of Buenos Aires concentrating most of the banking and financial institutions of the nation. It includes some 20 city blocks just North of the Casa Rosada and Plaza de Mayo delimited by Corrientes, Leandro N. Alem, Rivadavia avenues and Maipú street, its limits not being exact as it's not an official denomination. The area is part of San Nicolás (Comuna 1) but the name is never used locally. It is presently semi-pedestrianized and sees very little activity after banking hours and on weekends.

History

Beginnings

View c.1930 of the traditional skyline of La City from Leandro N.Alem Avenue.

The history of this sector of the city center (immediately adjacent to Plaza de Mayo) as a financial hub can be traced to 1822, with the establishment of the first Argentinian Bank (Banco de Buenos Aires) on the colonial building of the former Real Consulado de Buenos Aires at the corner of the present San Martín and Bartolomé Mitre streets (presently occupied by the Art Deco headquarters of the Banco Provincia de Buenos Aires). The area was known then as "Catedral al Norte" ("North of the Cathedral")

In 1854 the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange was founded at the site of a house belonging to the family of José de San Martin (today 118 San Martín St.) and in 1862 it moved on block away at 216 San Martin St (today housing a small museum). Other now defunct banks followed, Banco de Mauá y Cía. (1858), Banco de Carabassa (1860) and three years later Banco de Londres y Río de la Plata.

Consolidation

Actual headquarters of the Central Bank, finished in 1876.

Towards 1860, the Stock Exchange purchased the lot at 216 San Martín St (current denomination) and held a design competition which was won by the foreign firm Hunt & Schoroeder. The relatively simple two story building (today holding a philatelic museum) was inaugurated on January 29th of 1862.

En 1867, the Banco de Londres purchased a lot on the corners of Bartolomé Mitre and Reconquista and hired the same firm of Hunt & Schroeder for the project, inaugurated in 1869. Its central hall, measuring 13,50 m x 27,50 m by 12,80 in height, with an overhead metal structure was one of the largest covered spaces in the city at the time.

The Buenos Aires Stock Exchange building, inaugurated in 1916.

In 1872 the Banco Hipotecario de la Provincia de Buenos Aires purchased the lot at 275 San Martin St. (current numbering) inaugurating in 1876 the Italianate structure still standing on the site. When in 1932 the bank moved to La Plata (the capital of the Province of Buenos Aires) the site became the headquarters of Argentina's Central Bank, Banco Central de la República Argentina, still functioning, making it the oldest banking building still in use in the country.

It was the beginning of a flurry of construction during the last decades of the 19th and early decades of the 20th, which saw the erection of many magnificent structures in the then in vogue Beaux Arts, Italianate, Historicist styles as headquarters by many local and international banks. [[Category:San Nicolás, Buenos Aires]] [[Category:Unofficial neighborhoods of Buenos Aires]]