by Dick Rothschild

If Alonso Garcia Bravo is looking down upon this fair city which he laid out in 1529, he must be smiling. In the Centro Historico, Avenida Benito Juarez and its sidewalks have been handsomely repaved and a similar restoration of Avenida Reforma is likely to be completed by the time this edition of The Oaxaca Times is off the press. These important avenues are still located exactly where Bravo placed them on his plan some 480 years ago.

While Alonso Garcia Bravo is hardly a household name today, he was prominent in his time, having also created the street plans for both Veracruz and Mexico City . Bravo used the Zocalo, which had just been delineated by Juan Pelaez de Berrio, as the hub of his layout of Oaxaca . All this took place years before the original Catedral was begun in the 1530’s. The Catedral we admire today is actually the third church on the site and was consecrated a full two hundred years later.
The transformation of Avenida Benito Juarez is breathtaking in two respects; the stunning improvement it has made in the appearance of the streetscape and the speed at which it was accomplished under seemingly insurmountable working conditions.

When we left Oaxaca last April the street was a nondescript patchwork of macadam with ankle-turning gullies for water runoff at the curbs. Navigating its sidewalks, especially at night, without stepping into one of the crater-like potholes was akin to successfully threading your way through a skillfully laid mine field. This February, on our return, we encountered a beautifully paved street and sidewalks adorned with stately lampposts and newly planted shade trees.

The repaving of the portion of Avenida Independencia which runs past the Catedral and the opulent Teatro Macedonia Alcala, may take until 2010 to complete. This part of the restoration has necessitated deep excavation trenches to reach and replace the historic avenue’s aging water, sewer and electrical lines.

To find out more about this restoration and improvement initiative, I tracked down Architect Guillermo González Leon, the Project Director for the Central Historical District. I found him in his modest second floor office on Calle Porfirio Diaz.

Gonzalez, a short strongly-built man dressed in a fashionable striped shirt and jeans, impresses one as no-nonsense professional. He has the look of a man who has seen it all and learned, somehow, to successfully navigate the muddy waters and submerged hazards of a project such as this one. He told me that this street reconstruction project got underway last year and with luck will be completed either late this year or in early 2010.

While Gonzalez is responsible for overseeing construction, his office did not create the paving patterns. Those inspired designs are realized by imprinting concrete while still wet with rubber molds to replicate paving stones. The design is the work of INPAC (Instituto Patrimonio Calbire), a local governmental architecture organization.

After the concrete is imprinted and then touched up with hand tools which gives the blocks a little individuality, a glaze is applied. The glaze gives the polished look of old paving stones burnished by centuries of use. The applied glaze will doubtless wear off and, in time, to be replaced by the real thing.
The street reconstruction is being financed by the Oaxaca State government and its Department of Pubic Works has overall responsibility for the project. The actual work is being accomplished by private contractors hired by the State.

While no additional streets are scheduled for reconstruction for the time being, additional street lighting and benches are being planned for various locations around the Central Historical District to make the area even more pedestrian friendly.

Oaxaca , with all her enticements, has always been a femme fatale. But even a glamour girl as she ages can use a little nip here, a little tuck there to offset the ravages of time. Thankfully, these seem to have achieved what we, her ardent admirers, had hoped they might.