Narrow Colonial Street, Havana, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Narrow Colonial Street, Havana, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Narrow Colonial Street, Havana, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-8C6619

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A narrow Havana street in the 1950s was still operating on the assumption that it would remain exactly this forever — Spanish colonial facades slowly shedding plaster over wrought-iron balconies, American cars parked bumper to bumper along a lane barely wide enough to fit them, the whole arrangement suggesting a city that had absorbed the twentieth century without quite deciding what to do with it. Havana in this decade had a particular relationship with American automobiles: they arrived in quantity because American money was arriving in quantity, and both were treated as permanent features of the landscape. The buildings on either side carry the ornate upper floors and ground-floor commercial arches of nineteenth-century Cuban urban architecture, a style the city had accumulated over generations and then simply stopped maintaining, so that grandeur and decay occupied the same wall. Pedestrians move through the canyon of shadow between buildings as though running an errand rather than posing for posterity, which is exactly what they were doing. Within a few years the cars would stop being replaced and the buildings would continue not being repaired, and this particular mixture of prosperity and neglect would become the most photographed urban texture in the Western Hemisphere.

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