Tropical Walkabout

I guess Mexican politics isn't that interesting.  Back to Puerto Rico!

San Juan has a subway.  Strangely, it doesn’t quite make it into the old city.  It’s the best way to get to the University of Puerto Rico campus, however, so we’ve done a lot of walking (or bus riding) through the intervening neighborhoods of Miramar and Santurce. 

They’ve cleaned up the prostitutes from Miramar, at least while the sun is out, but the place has seen better days.  Much better days. The old hotels either either falling apart or abandoned, and the height of fine dining seems to be a Pizzería Uno shoehorned into a misbegotten attempt at urban renewal, Fort Lauderdale-style.  (Next to a Taco Maker, of course.)  The architecture is not-quite-Art-Deco tropical, so it’s easy to imagine a future Miramar in which the buildings have been rehabbed, the gang graffiti erased, and the offices of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano represent a club-owners sense of irony rather than … well, why does the PRD have an office in San Juan?

It could happen.  Miramar is a neighborhood where old women and teenagers greet the bus driver by name as it meanders between the old city and the Sagrado Corazón subway stop.  It’s even got a little movie theater playing indie flicks.  But it ain’t there yet.

Same goes for Santurce.  It’s a little nicer, but not by much, and there are some abandoned buildings.  The Plaza de Mercado was disappointing.  It turned out to be small and utterly unfunky, populated by day by beer-drinking older fellows who claimed to be retired construction workers.  (Which, in fact, they probably are.  Many employees here retire at 55; and about one in eight people live on a pension of some sort.)  The fruit for sale was just fruit, like you can find in any Cambridge convenience store.  And the market was spotless.  Being in a country where the health and safety regulations are ruthlessly enforced is a good thing, of course, but it takes some of the romance out of food shopping. 

Comments

[Will Baird]

Noel, please, keeping blogging about your trip. It's fascinating and illuminating.

Query: I'm in Atlanta on a slow connection - ironic considering I am in an IBM training class - so my googling is pretty painful. However, does Puerto Rico have anything analogous to the 'county'? I would assume so, but...I could be completely wrong.

[Noel Maurer]

Hi, Will,

Puerto Rico does have counties; what it doesn't have are municipalities. That is, the "municipio," a county, is the only level of local government. There are no incorporated cities, towns, or villages, but every square inch of the island is inside a municipio.

Just like inside the U.S., it can be hard to map local governments across states. Puerto Rico is particularly unique that the state police outnumber the grand total of local cops.

[Michael]

The subway is useless until and unless it goes to the airport. Until it does, I agree with (I believe) everybody else on the island that was a great scam and the most expensive stretch of rail on the planet.

If by some vanishingly small chance they extend it to Ponce, I'll change my mind. But I ain't holding my breath.