Opened as a symbol of progress, Avenida Rio Branco spans generations and has a history of 120 years

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On its 120th anniversary, little remains of the road remain from its opening other than the original route. Of the 86 buildings built specifically to give Rio a Parisian feel, through a competition to choose the facades, only ten are left to tell the story. The tram gave way to the VLT. Of the 1,800 meters of long straight road that connects Praça Mauá to Avenida Beira-Mar, 600 meters are now designated for pedestrians and cyclists. The Brazilian wood seedlings planted at the time of opening were not yet in bloom, but there are hundreds of leafy trees side by side, providing some charm to the walk among the enormous buildings in the modern or post-modern style that have come to dominate the landscape since the second half of the last century.

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The street was created to be a symbol of the progress of the republican system. It represented overcoming the city’s Portuguese and royal past. The funny thing now is that a newspaper ran a competition to see what the name of the street should be, and the winner was “Avenida Dom Pedro II,” says Andre Nunes de Azevedo, author of “The Great Urban Reform of Rio de Janeiro,” highlighting that the result, of course, was met with disgust and was officially ignored.

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In the imagination of the street’s creators, progress had to come hand in hand with beauty. The inspiration was Paris, which emerged from the reforms promoted in the French capital by Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the second half of the nineteenth century. The idea was to make the road a postcard. literally. Many of them were produced against a backdrop of avant-garde buildings, inspired by the eclectic taste of the Parisian Belle Epoque.

In fact, the Haussmann criterion is followed to the letter here. Including the demolition of old palaces and residences without offering their residents, most of whom are humble people, a decent and viable alternative. It is no coincidence that the great reform that the city underwent under the leadership of Mayor Pereira Passos, closely followed by President Rodríguez Alves, was called the “Preamble” between 1902 and 1906. Hundreds of properties were destroyed and thousands of people were displaced from their homes.

Although Avenida Río Branco is part of this reformist context, writer André Azevedo, also a professor of history at URG, makes an important distinction and notes that in the case of the road, most of the confiscated and destroyed property belonged to people with property:

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– The idea of ​​opening Avenida Central to expel the poor does not correspond to the facts. Where it was built, in the Candelaria region, only the rich and people from the urban upper middle classes lived. Confiscations affected wealthy properties, not dwellings. Now, the great urban reform, as a whole, affected the popular areas, especially in the port area and in the area of ​​Santa Rita, which is now Gamboa, Saudi… There, there were tenements and apartment houses, and many people were evacuated. But the Central Avenue itself was open to the land of the elite.

In the final part of the album documenting the original buildings on the boulevard – with the winning drawings of the façade competition made by their designers alongside photographs of the buildings already completed by Mark Ferries – there are detailed spreadsheets containing data on each of the properties demolished to make way for the road, their owners and the amounts paid in compensation. The summary indicates that 512 tenants were compensated on 29 streets that were in the route. The original road, which runs through the old town remaining from the colonial and imperial periods, was actually designed long before, and still during the empire, by Pereira Passos himself.

– The original design was designed by Pereira Passos, yes, but in 1876, when Emperor Dom Pedro II requested a major urban reform it ended up not being implemented. The opening of the street itself was a federal project of President Rodríguez Alves, coordinated by the Minister of Transport, Industry and Trade, Lauro Muller, and with the support of the Engineering Club led by Paulo De Frontin – explains Azevedo.

It did not take long for the new street to assume the mission implied by its name: central importance in the life of Rio. Strolling along Avenida Central was one of the most amazing activities. Much of the country’s history has also passed through it: from unforgettable political demonstrations to the parade of blocs and samba schools during the Rio Carnival.

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—At a certain point, historical films were purchased for the city’s public archive, and are now housed in the Cinemateca Brasileira. One of these films was The Burial of Paolo De Frontin (1933) and we see the Rio Branco moving, which is very interesting, cars going in both directions. Only a few films remain from that time, says historian Beatrice Kouchner, director of the National History Association of Rio (ANBOH-RIO).

Rio Branco is a mirror of the city in all that is beautiful and, at times, chaotic. In recent years, it has also become a reflection of the emptying of the centre.