Many of us have been surprised to find ourselves at number 7 on Avenida de Reina Victoria, very close to Cuatro Caminos, a modern glass building whose lower part is covered by the façade of another previous brick building, with a profuse decoration based on brick and tile. Until a few years ago, the commercial ground floor was occupied by an office of the Madrid City Council and, for some time now, by a private business.
The new building, which was built in 2005, respected part of the facades of the old San Antonio de Padua market, on the avenue and towards the small Esquilache street. We have not found any information about who the architect was (in the database of the College of Architects of Madrid orphan figure), although in some places it is attributed to Miguel Álvarez Naya. It would not be strange if this municipal architect had been involved since it fits with his participation in other industrial buildings (he is the author, for example, of the Belga Sawmill on Alameda Street) and with his taste for modernism that can be seen madirada with the neo-Mudejar on the façade that is still preserved.
How the first covered market arrived in the Cuatro Caminos
When Madrid begins to look towards its northern suburbs, informally grown at the city’s gates, it often does so as a space for informal commerce. The street sales turned Bravo Murillo Street into an immense street market where its neighbors and Madrid residents who went out to buy in search of better prices were supplied, since some products were taxed when crossing, precisely, Cuatro Caminos. The descriptions that appear in the press of branches of the 19th and early 20th centuries use echo-colonial metaphors in their descriptions, such as a customs house or Moroccan souk, to emphasize the need for salubrize the neighborhood
Soon neighbors and some influential figures in the new neighborhood began asking the City Council to build a covered market. Some of them, it should be taken into account, were the industrialists of the neighborhood, that is, merchants with establishments whose payments to the municipality are regulated, so street sales represented unfair competition for their interests. An example of a note that appeared in the press is this note that appeared in the newspaper. Spain in 1904:
“The passivity that presides over all the actions of our City Council is worthy of censure. For several years there has been a long row of fixed stalls on the right sidewalk of Bravo Murillo Street, starting from the Cuatro Caminos roundabout, where open-air fried meats, fish and vegetables are sold. Apart from their unsightly appearance, they produce unpleasant fumes, which increase as soon as four drops fall, as these vendors have turned the road into a waste dump, and are a hindrance to traffic. It will not be hidden from our councilors how convenient it would be to make all these stalls disappear, which exist without a municipal license of any kind, and build a market, for which there are land in the Cuatro Caminos in excellent conditions and private capital willing to undertake the works. ”.
In reality, the image of boxes filling the streets and forming markets had been normal in Madrid until a few decades ago. The first covered market was that of San Ildefonso, which was built in 1835. From that year onwards the rest began to be built, which by no means put an end to street sales, which often extended around the area. the new markets. Completely eliminating street vending was a difficult issue for the city council in the following years, since it fed many people in two different ways: those who practiced it and those who bought their livelihood in street markets in neighborhoods that did not yet have street vending. enough market stalls to feed them.
The procedures for the tender for the Cuatro Caminos market began in 1915 and the building was a reality inaugurable in 1919. The covered market came to join the rest of the landmarks and services around the roundabout, which more or less in the same years reached a neighborhood orphaned by municipal attention. In the surroundings were the relief house, the Cervantes school, the popular library and the parish of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles. Right in front, the Titanic buildings were built that still dominate the heights of the roundabout. It was the same Metropolitan company that brought the metro to the neighborhood, which was the first line of the network, and urbanized Reina Victoria. The same one that had built the garages right next to the market, which were demolished in 2021 after a long neighborhood fight for their conservation. Of the enormous infrastructure, today only the old wall with a jagged profile on Esquilache Street, next to one of the market facades, remains. A dead end street where advertisements are often filmed that houses the solitary walls of the first neighborhood of Cuatro Caminos.
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