Appreciating Palermo: A Real Estate Tale

Nearly a decade ago, my wife and I purchased an apartment in the Buenos Aires barrio of Palermo, near the botanical gardens and the city zoo. It was then, and still is, an area of high-rise residences that only vaguely resembles what it was half a century ago, when the Argentine elite occupied handsome mansions known here as petit hotels. Only a handful of those survive, one of them now housing the Museo Evita (pictured above).

The other major landmark is La Colorada, the red brick building that, at the time of its construction in 1911, housed the directors and managers of Argentina’s British-owned railroads. Designed by architect Regis Pigeon, its raw materials arrived as ballast on the boats that then carried grains from the Pampas back to Europe. With its original exterior exposed – most city apartment buildings are covered with concrete, stucco or some other smooth surface – La Colorada still stands out today.

Our own modest property, a second-story apartment in a utilitarian building that dates from the mid-1970s, has some handsome details like parquet floors, but it hardly matches the elegance of La Colorada’s marble staircases and central skylight. Directly across the street, though, the Palacio Bellini is a better indicator of trends in a neighborhood that, according to the daily Clarín, is now one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods for its access to green spaces such as Parque Las Heras.

When we bought our property, we knew it was a desirable location, for its access to parks, public transportation, restaurants and other amenities, but we never imagined it would become this desirable. We are just three short blocks from the Museo Evita, and barely a block from La Colorada and the Palacio Bellini. And we wonder whether, at some point, our simple but comfortable pied-à-terre will become the target of developers who want to buy us out.

Moon Handbooks Patagonia on the Road

Continuing tonight, my promotion tour for the new third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia will feature a series of digital slide presentations on southernmost South America. In addition to covering the capitals of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the gateway cities to Patagonia, I will offer a visual tour of the Chilean and Argentine lakes districts, Argentina's wildlife-rich coastline and Chile's forested fjords, the magnificent Andean peaks of the Fitz Roy range and Torres del Paine, and the uttermost part of the Earth in Tierra del Fuego. I will also include the Falkland Islands, with their abundant sub-Antarctic wildlife.

The next event will take place tonight, October 26, at REI San Francisco, 840 Brannan Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, tel. 415/934-1938. On Saturday October 29, at 2 p.m., I will speak at the San Mateo County Library, 1110 Alameda de las Pulgas, Belmont, CA 94002, tel. 650/591-8286.

There will be two events on Monday, October 31. At 2 p.m., I will be at the Santa Clara County Library, 13650 Saratoga Avenue, Saratoga, CA 95070, tel. 408/867-6126. At 7 p.m., I will be at REI Saratoga, 400 El Paseo de Saratoga, San Jose, CA 95130, tel. 408/871-8765. The following evening, also at 7 p.m., I will be at REI Fremont, 43962 Fremont Blvd., Fremont, CA 94538, tel. 510/651-0305.

The season’s last event will take place Thursday November 3, at 7 p.m., at the Lafayette Library, 3941 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette, CA 94549, tel. 510/385-2280. Under the auspices of the World Affairs Council East Bay Chapter, this is the only event that will charge admission - $15 for WAC members, $17 for all others. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for a wine tasting and tango demonstration, both included in the admission charge.

For those planning trips to the south, there be will be ample time for questions and answers. Books, including my other titles on Argentina, Chile and Buenos Aires, will be on sale at all the events.

Eternity with Evita? the Crypt Brokers of Recoleta

An aerial view of Recoleta Cemetery

It’s a common aphorism that it’s cheaper to live extravagantly all your life than it is to be buried in the Cementerio de la Recoleta, the elite boneyard of Buenos Aires. My own description of the cemetery, in the current editions of Moon Handbooks to Argentina and Buenos Aires, argues that it’s even more exclusive than the surrounding neighborhood, which has some of the city’s most valuable real estate: “enough cash can buy an impressive residence, but not a surname like Alvear, Anchorena, Mitre, Pueyrredón or Sarmiento.”

A fixer-upper on the resale market

Well, I may have been wrong. According to the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, the Buenos Aires real estate market has its own post-mortem sector with so-called “crypt brokers.” At present, about 20 percent of Recoleta’s tombs are on the market, at prices ranging from US$20,000 fixer-uppers (like the one above) to US$500,000 luxury lodgings; prices also vary within Recoleta because, as the real estate cliché goes, everything depends on “location, location, location.”

By this standard, the median price of roughly US$250,000 could conceivably purchase an apartment overlooking the cemetery, but you would enjoy that only as long as you lived. On the other hand, if you invest the same amount of money in the cemetery itself, you could find yourself spending eternity alongside…Eva Perón! On the crypt next to Evita’s, the owner has placed a small “for sale” sign with his email address (dsabelli@hotmail.com) and, according to Clarín, he’s received about 20 to 30 messages since putting it on the market in January.

Tourists gather outside Evita's crypt.

Given that Evita’s tomb is the most visited in all of the Recoleta, anyone interred next door will at least get a few curiosity seekers awaiting their turn to see the former first lady’s final resting place, as in the photo above (these are not potential buyers lined up for the open house). On the other hand, those who need more immediate gratification might consider looking to buy her apartment at Posadas 1567 (pictured below), less than five blocks from the cemetery gates.

In life, Evita lived not so far from her final resting place.

Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires in San Carlos (San Mateo County)
This coming Saturday, August 13, will mark the first of several digital slide presentations on Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires, at various branches of the San Mateo County Library. This week’s event starts at 2 p.m. at the San Carlos Library (610 Elm Street, San Carlos, CA 94070, tel. 650/591-0341). There will be ample time for questions and answers.

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Skinny Houses & Luxury Landmarks

Earlier this month, New York’s narrowest house – a mid-19th century construction in Manhattan that’s only 2.4 meters (less than eight feet) wide - went on the market for US$4.3 million. By that measure, Buenos Aires’s Casa Mínima, in the colonial barrio of San Telmo, is a mansion that sprawls across its 2.5-meter facade on the cobbled colonial alleyway of Pasaje San Lorenzo (dating from 2008, the photograph above includes the adjacent building, which has a normal frontage).

Dating from the early 19th century, the Casa Mínima is no longer a residence and is not for sale (the photograph above dates from the 1930s). An improbable legend says it was a manumission gift from a slaveholder to his former chattel, but it now belongs to businessman Jorge Eckstein. Eckstein has made it part of El Zanjón de Granados, an events center that sits atop a warren of colonial tunnels (pictured below) that are now open for tours.

For anyone who wants an idea of what it might be like to live in such small quarters, and can’t afford Manhattan prices, a tour of the Casa Mínima offers an alternative budget option. The house’s narrow entrance leads onto a slightly wider patio (pictured below) where the former kitchen sits and a wall-hugging staircase leads to an even narrower bedroom, which features a street-side balcony directly above the exterior doorway.

And Now for Something Completely Different

About 2-1/2 years ago, I wrote about Lord Alain Levenfiche’s attempt to sell his 14th floor apartment in Retiro’s Edificio Kavanagh, the landmark building that will celebrate its 75th anniversary this year. According to the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, Levenfiche has upset his consortium neighbors, who value their privacy highly, by gutting the historic interior for a remodel and renting it out for meetings and events – “turning it into a tacky nightclub,” according to one resident. Strangers come and go at all hours.

Overlooking Plaza San Martín, the apartment, once occupied by the building’s original owner, Corina Kavanagh, remains on the market. Levenfiche has lowered the price to just US$4.5 million – making it just a tad more expensive than the narrowest house in Manhattan. Unfortunately, unlike the Casa Mínima, the Kavanagh is not open for tours; unless we decide to make an offer, neither you nor I are likely ever to see its interior.

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Poetic License (Real Estate Division)

Chile’s Nobel Prize poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) may have been a committed Communist, but that didn’t keep him from enjoying bourgeois comforts - including spacious, idiosyncratic homes in the capital city of Santiago, the beach community of Isla Negra, and the port city of Valparaíso. Today, all three of them are open to public visits under the auspices of the Fundación Neruda, a non-profit that controls the poet’s legacy. In the absence of official statistics, I would guess that Santiago’s “La Chascona” (pictured below) is the most visited, followed by Isla Negra and Valparaíso’s “La Sebastiana.”

That’s a pity because, in at least one sense, La Sebastiana is the best of the bunch, the place where visitors can feel the poet’s presence most closely. Because demand is so high at La Chascona and Isla Negra (pictured below), visiting them means taking an organized, even regimented, tour. At La Sebastiana, by contrast, visitors are free to roam around the five-storey house, just as Neruda’s own guests might have done (the poet was legendary for his hospitality and informality).

High in the hills, La Sebastiana (pictured below, courtesy of nostalgiaportena) may have been Neruda’s favorite, if only because of the scenic port city’s own informality and spontaneity. Valparaíso, he wrote, “grabbed me, she subjected to her will, to her absurdity: Valparaíso is a mess, a cluster of crazy houses.” On the slopes of Cerro Bellavista, with a view to the harbor, it was an ideal site for watching the city’s legendary New Year’s Eve fireworks, but it’s nevertheless a more orderly place today.

So orderly is La Sebastiana, in fact, that it has recently opened a 2,500-volume library specializing in Chilean poetry, including Neruda’s own works, those of fellow Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral, and lesser known figures - to non-Chileans at least - such Vicente Huidobro and Pablo de Rokha. For literary pilgrims, La Sebastiana bids to become an even more obligatory stop on the tourism circuit.

Meanwhile, Valparaíso got another shot in the arm with the announcement that the UNESCO World Heritage Foundation will provide a grant of some US$140 million to repair damage from February’s massive earthquake (which, however, hit other cities, such as Talca and Concepción, much harder). Valparaíso has been a World Heritage Site since 2003, and the money will go to repair and rebuild “culturally significant buildings” that were damaged in the quake. Unfortunately, Valpo didn’t get all the money it had hoped for but, at the very least, it’s a good start.

Housing and Happiness in Buenos Aires

Having grown up in Washington State and spent most of my adult life in California, I have almost always lived in single-family detached houses with large gardens. Only since 2002, when we bought an apartment in Buenos Aires, have I spent any significant time in an apartment building - in this case, a ten-story structure in the barrio of Palermo.

Unlike California, where trees and fences give our two-story house substantial (if less than absolute) privacy, in Buenos Aires we are in far closer quarters. In fact, we could literally climb over our balcony railing onto the neighboring building’s balconies on either side (as the photograph here suggests). That said, we’re fortunate to live in a relatively quiet middle- to upper-middle class area where all night parties and other conflicts with neighbors are few - unlike the sorts of happenings that Buenos Aires Herald columnist Guido Minerbi details, with gentle humor, in a recent Sunday column. Anyone thinking of purchasing property in Buenos Aires would do well to read Minerbi’s column, but not to take it too literally.

For all the potential aggravation of living in a mega-city, porteños (as residents of Buenos Aires are called) are apparently a happy bunch. According to a recent survey published in Forbes, the Argentine capital is the world’s tenth happiest city, although the author’s comment that “it’s a slightly diluted version” of Rio de Janeiro is bizarre, to say the least.

Nevertheless, that’s not the only positive assessment of Argentina in the news recently. According to Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven, it’s the world’s 13th happiest country, tied with Ireland and the Netherlands. The United States, by contrast, is tied for 27th with Guatemala, Malta, Saudi Arabia, and Trinidad & Tobago (five countries that, culturally at least, would appear to have little in common).

Any such survey, of course, is open to criticism of its methodology and conclusions but, at the same time, it’s interesting that two such surveys would appear nearly simultaneously. Especially about a city that’s so renowned for its shrinks that historian Mariano Ben Plotkin detailed the phenomenon in Freud on the Pampas: the Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina, published by Stanford University Press (2001).

My own Palermo neighborhood is notorious for its concentration of psychoanalysts in its so-called Villa Freud and, in any event, I'll be flying to the world's tenth-happiest city on Wednesday for about two weeks.

Buenos Aires Fixer

In early 2002, when I was preparing the first edition of Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires, the Argentine government had just collapsed, and the economy was in free fall. At that time, my Argentine wife and I had been considering a kitchen remodel on our California home as we had an inheritance from my mother, but as I wandered the city and looked at realtors' offerings, I realized we could consider our dream of an apartment in the city - for about the same price as our California kitchen remodel. A few months later, we purchased a two-bedroom unit in Palermo, near the Jardín Botánico Carlos Thays, from a dentist who needed the cash to purchase his partner's share of their practice. In fact, he got a pretty good deal - nearly three times the price he had paid in pesos - but had he sold a few months earlier, when the peso was at par with the dollar, he would have done even better.

The Buenos Aires real estate market has since rebounded, and bargains such as the one we got are hard to find except in outlying barrios that, unlike Palermo, have yet to become fashionable. Those with a little cash to spare, though, can consider the 14th-floor apartment in Retiro's iconic Kavanagh building (pictured here). Originally built for Corina Kavanagh, with five bedrooms in more than 700 square meters (around 7,000 square feet) , it's now owned by British Lord Alain Levenfiche and on the market for a modest US$5.9 million - possibly the city's single most expensive apartment.

Your Patagonian Hideaway

Six years ago, in the aftermath of Argentina's unprecedented economic collapse and a dramatically devalued peso, my wife and I bought an apartment in Palermo, one of Buenos Aires's finest neighborhoods. At the time, we thought it was a stretch for us but, with an inheritance and some equity in our California house, it was not out of reach. I don't want to broadcast what we paid for it but, in retrospect, we regret we didn't buy two.

Given the depressed peso, quite a few foreigners have bought into the Argentine real estate market since then, with greater or lesser success. I analyzed some of the rewards and pitfalls in Buenos Aires in an earlier post, but that dealt with existing housing. Getting something built can be another issue entirely, as my friend Patrick Symmes, author of Chasing Che, found when he set out to build his dream fishing cabin near the Patagonian town of Trevelin, in Chubut province.

In the course of researching his book on Che Guevara's 1950s motorcycle trip through the Americas, Patrick became enamored of the region - and who wouldn't, given landscapes like those of nearby Parque Nacional Los Alerces (pictured above)? The reality of getting his cabin built, though, was a real challenge, as he details in the October issue of Outside Magazine. Anybody considering a similarly adventurous project would do well to read his good-natured, but ultimately serious, account of his experience.

At Home in Buenos Aires

Over the last several years, Buenos Aires has made frequent appearances in the travel sections of daily newspapers and in travel magazines of various orientations. Now, though, it's starting to crack the mass media in other categories, as happened last week when, fortuitously, we saw our own Palermo apartment on HGTV's House Hunters International.

That's a little misleading, as I'll try to explain. In the program in question, a couple from Punta del Este (Uruguay) were relocating to Buenos Aires for professional reasons, and needed to find housing for themselves and their two Labrador retrievers. It meant downsizing, especially for the dogs, and one of the apartments they visited was a spacious flat in a new building just two doors away from our rather more modest unit (whose exterior was visible in some of the street shots). The view of the café across the street (pictured above) is virtually identical to ours but, in a city where people often leave their dogs on balconies during the day, this apartment's semi-circular balcony was not large enough for two 80-pound Labs (one of our neighbors has a rather shy and quiet Rottweiler who spends much of the day on theirs). Eventually, the couple settled for a smaller but luminous Recoleta apartment with a larger balcony.

Buenos Aires's idiosyncrasies, as seen by a foreign resident, also come out in an insightful article by novelist Maxine Swann in last week's New York Times Home & Garden section. Swann points out, for instance, that "Mentioning you have an appointment with an analyst, or that your child does, is comparable to saying you have a hair appointment," even though "the Argentines I was meeting did not seem particularly interested in self-improvement." That may be the case, of course, unless you consider "Tango Therapy" as a means of self-improvement (a few years back, during the 2002 economic meltdown, one dance instructor offered "Self-Help Tango" during the annual Festival de Tango).

Swann points out some of the pitfalls that anyone living in the city may encounter, such as improvised repairs in her Chacarita rental that led one plumber to say "What the hell is this?" Her landlord, meanwhile, built a rooftop pool that once flooded her apartment, and she missed the opportunity to buy an apartment after the meltdown, though she and her Argentine then husband managed to rent a spacious Recoleta flat at bargain prices.

Nothing that Swann writes will really surprise anyone who's lived here, rather than just visiting as a tourist, but she does a good job of summarizing the rewards, as well as the drawbacks, of this fascinating city. It's essential reading for anyone considering a leap into the Baires real estate market. For what it's worth, she says her next novel will be set in Buenos Aires.