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Culture and Ideas: The Chá Viaduct, São Paulo
The Chá Viaduct remains a central thoroughfare connecting central São Paulo, providing an elevated passage over the low lying region long known as the Anhangabaú Valley. The Anhangabaú Valley has its own history of transformation, connected to the transformations that allowed for the construction of the Chá Viaduct. Anhangabaú (a name derived from Tupi, often translated as “bad spirit”) was the name of a tributary river that flowed through this valley, creating a natural border for the settlement founded by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the Anhangabaú River was one of many waterways to be canalized and buried under the expanding city. By the early twentieth century, the area had been converted into a green pedestrian park, connecting several of the most important civic and cultural buildings of central São Paulo, newly enriched by coffee exports and incipient industry.
As the city underwent further change, embracing automobiles and expressways, Anhangabaú Park changed yet again, becoming a rapid thoroughfare for traffic that occasionally flooded – a river had originally run through this low lying area, after all. At the end of the twentieth century, the pedestrian park was remade yet again, undergoing a controversial reform in the early twenty first century. The links below depict some of these changes over time. The first shows Anhangabaú Valley as a picture post card in the twentieth century. The second displays a nostalgic clip, one of many that may be found on the Internet imbued with nostalgia for a lost past. These simple online videos and their accompanying comment sections are historical sources themselves: depicting not just selective images of the city’s past, but creating historical memory (and inevitably, arguments) over what that past means.
“Cartão postal da Cidade de São Paulo” Conhecendo o Acervo-Museu de Imigração (January 24, 2017)
http://museudaimigracao.org.br/blog/conhecendo-o-acervo/cartao-postal-da-cidade-de-sao-paulo
“Postais antigos do Vale do Anhangabaú” (December 21, 2015)