Mexico Deco 3 : Condesa-Roma

Mexico Deco 2 : Mexico City

In a prior post I cited the Palacio de Bellas Artes as the ultimate jewel in Mexico City's formidable architectural pantheon. But that leaves plenty of other riches to savor, and one of my favorite styles is the Arte Deco, which is well-represented in the city. In particular the Condesa-Roma district has a concentration of Deco buildings which rivals the best in the world and thus will receive its own posting in the near future. But for the moment here is my sampling of the Deco riches which Mexico City has to offer.

Mexico City 7 : Bookstores

It’s a feast for the bibliophile on Calle Donceles in the Centro district. Located in one of the older sections of the city, Donceles is only about a block from the Zocalo, and it has imposing old buildings, cobblestones and wrought-iron lampposts. Happily, the book shops are clustered together as is the fashion in Mexico City -- there’s a street for perfumes, a street for jewelry, a street for lighting and electrical fixtures, and so on. Even more happily, the Bookstore area on Donceles Steet was not very far from our hotel, maybe ten short city blocks.

These are my kind of bookstores [1], i.e. they are stocked with old, used and musty books, which are varyingly piled on tables; spilling out into the streets; or stuffed onto very high shelves, some which take a 12 foot tall stepladder to reach. The ones piled on the tables are my faves because they are the cheapies!.

But the pick of the lot may well be a little store in a location not on Donceles Street. The bookstore is the Méjico Viejo, and it’s smaller than the typical used bookstore in Mexico City but much tidier and with a classier, more professional look with two floors of tightly packed antiquarian volumes. Its unlikely location is the Pasaje Iturbe, a commercial indoor mall that runs from one street to another (there’s a Starbuck’s nearby at the corner of Gante and Madero and that was our point of reference which eventually led us to the Méjico Viejo). 

Librería Méjico Viejo. Pasaje Iturbide local 11, sobre calle Gante 6, entre Madero y 16 de Septiembre, Centro Histórico, Del. Cuauhtémoc, México D.F

See also : Kurt Hollander, “Mexico City's Literary Circle,” L. A. Times, 8 Nov 2009; and Browsing the Bookshops on Calle Donceles.

  [1] In Mexico, at least in Mexico City, the bookstores don’t seem to have much of an online presence, not yet, anyway. A few spot searches in ABEBooks limiting the results to a Mexico location yielded nothing. One of the happy results for the collector is that there are bargains to be found in certain specialty areas like pulp fiction and (non-Mexican) antiquarian.

Statue of Augustine de Iturbide

Pasaje Iturbide shops. The Mejico Viejo is 
about half way down on the left.

Mexico City 6 : Palacio de Bellas Artes

At the far end of Alameda Park is the Palacio de Bellas Artes, my favorite building in this most architecture-rich of cities. With its stunning combination of white-marble, Arte Deco and Art Nouveau elements, the Palacio indeed would rank high on any list of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Happily for us it was only a couple of blocks from our hotel.  

Alas it was summer season and not a lot going on in the way of performances so we didn’t actually get a chance to go into the theatre. Next time. But there were still plenty of riches to savor, not the least being the murals which adorn the second and third floors, the most memorable of all being Diego Rivera’s El Hombre en El Cruce de Caminos (Man at the Crossroads).

The Palacio is both an opera house and museum, and there are lots of rooms and sections with exhibits and displays. I was fortunate enough to stumble upon an exhibit in the first floor east wing which covered the Palacio’s early years. The various program booklets, press clippings, posters, promotional materials, magazine articles, and glamour photos were a veritable nirvana for performing arts memorabilia buffs.

Program booklet article on a rising star named Maria Callas.

Mexico City 5 : Coyoacán

Museo Frida Kahlo (La Casa Azul)

Museo Leon Trotsky * 

 

Mercado, Plaza Hidalgo, Jardin Centenario

The quesadilla stand at the mercado

Bread at Casa del Pan!

  * For historical background, see John Mitchell’s article in Mexico Connect, The Leon Trotsky Museum - Murder and Marxism in Mexico City, which is a concise overview of Trotsky’s time in Mexico and in particular his last days at Viena 45.