FROM TOP TO BOTTOM:
Streetscape with traditional verandas in Isabel Segunda.
House in 3 Benitez Guzman Street in Isabel Segunda, now demolished and the lot is a parking for an adjacent drugstore.
Sugar warehouses in Esperanza (1979 photo), much damaged after Hurricane Hugo in 1989.
The two remaining boilers - out of five that originally existed - in the ruins of the Playa Grande Sugar Factory in Barrio Llave in the island's west end. These ruins were categorized by New York Times journalist Hugh Ryan as a must-see for history buffs.
By Jorge Ortiz Colom, R.A.
Preservation Architect/Institute of Puerto Rican Culture/Ponce, PR
Vieques's built urban and rural heritage represents a very important epoch in the economic exchanges between Puerto Rico and neighboring islands. More than the other Spanish colonies, Puerto Rico's Vieques Island, thanks to its strategic location, was a cultural and economic crossroads between the smaller French and English-ruled islands and the Spanish Caribbean world.
This is reflected in the architectural and building influences of places and structures still remaining in the “Isla Nena” soil. Some estates like Campaña (near the shooting field in Barrio Puerto Diablo) and city houses like the Delerme Anduze House, one block from the square, show great similarity with French Antillean vernacular, thus witnessing one of the cultural ingredients of this island's colonization. Other houses, more similiar to the criollo ones seen on Puerto Rico's Big Island, remind the observer that Vieques belongs to a larger milieu.
Spain's power as a stabilizer of the unsettled conditions of early 19th century Vieques is revealed in the soberly Neoclassical civic and institutional buildings it built such as the lighthouses, the town hall and the Conde de Mirasol Fortress, solidly built out of technically simple rubble masonry, just like many other utilitarian and civic structures of the Big Island. The Fortress, for years seat of government, prison, and an abandoned ruine before the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture saved it by making it a museum and center for outreach and conservation of Vieques's history and culture.
The suitably military-solid Fortress overlooks the port of Isabel Segunda; the building made out of rubble masonry and “azotea” (near-flat brick) roofs placed on bulletwood purlins, opens up to the breezes with wooden-board doors and windows within brick-reinforced openings. Though as such it is typical mid-nineteenth century Spanish institutional building, its quality impresses. The outside earth-filled battlement walls that give the place its “fortress” sobriquet, are not unassailable castle walls, rather a means to mold the shape of the hill and prepare the platform to raise the main building inside.
The town, called “Isabel Segunda” after the reigning Spanish queen at the time, is above all a collection of diverse architectural influences in a Caribbean island harbor town, the houses sporting wide verandas and frames of native woods; still proud survivors of the modern anonymity that surrounds them. Some streets leading to the harbor are wide, with the pretension of being small boulevards; they are still venues for much commercial activity. The main square is not just a place to linger: beneath it - but hardly visible after the last remodeling - there are the remains of a large rainwater cistern that was the town's major supply until more modern aqueducts were built. Facing the square you may see the institutional-neoclassical schools built up in the early 20th century (1907 and mid-1920's), but still following traditional design elements, including wide pediments, facade symmetry and classrooms on either side of their entryways.
Near the square still remain some of the more important residences of the town, a few on high brick plinths but most of them curiously hardly elevated above the street level and thus more open to the bustle outside. Hip roofs, more resistent to hurricane winds, are common and similar to those seen in neighboring islands: a frame inspired on that of the boats that navigated the interisland passages. It's much like an upturned boat hull converted in a shelter for landlubbers. The Nere Delerme house – a protected historic site – on Calle Benítez Guzmán 7 – another survivor of a modernized street – permits a peek to witness the spectacular build of such roofs.
The Delerme Anduze house in the very visible juncture of Muñoz Rivera and Antonio Mellado Streets impresses with its imposing dormered roof (again, a Franco-Antillian trait) and its veranda, now a gallery that opens into an interior commercial space. The veranda overhangs have a very elegant structural solution: large curled-at-the-end iron bars screwed to the walls and to exposed wooden beams; the ensemble has proven its worth resisting many hurricanes.
These houses alternate with simple commercial buildings in brick or concrete, with many doors opening to the street, some of them roofed over with gable or hip roofs like the houses. In Vieques's traditional buildings there is hardly any ornamental exuberance, they are as a rule austere and they tend to delight more by their excellent technical quality in the use of wood and other materials, as well as their proportions. The also strike an effective dialogue with the windy, maritime climate of the Antillean microislands, picking up the constant breezes through slats in the doors and windows and the beautiful transoms, insulating from heat with the large roof volumes, and thanks to the ceiling height directing hot air upwards, beyond the reach of the users' comfort zone.
A now-vanished house in 3 Benítez Guzmán Street, with clearly English inspiration and of a moneyed family, had a complex hip-roof geometry, ventilating dormer, and the living room was surfaced with a material known as “lincrusta”, essentially sawdust with linseed oil and resin, molded in ornamental patterns in hardened plates, the only case of using this material in a Puerto Rican house. But a house that defies time is the Smaine house in the corner of Antonio Mellado and Prudencio Quiñones streets. This protected house has a high base (used as a lower story), a perceived center-hall layout, the wooden main story sheathed in pressed metal imitating rustic stone, and an extensive ell extension – known in Puerto Rico as a “martillo” (hammer) – and the Mellado street side has a curving side stair that passes next to a cylindrical iron cistern, common in the late 19th century. This house presents a half-hipped roof similar to those in the Virgin Islands, that allows for more efficient ventilation of the roof space.
In the early 20th century, like other Puerto Rican towns, there was adopted a type of building with imported pine and concrete, with less pitched, bungalow-inspired hip roofs. At Isabel Segunda there's for example the Jaime Puig house in 65 de Infantería street – flanked by three other houses more or less its age but still more faithful to older forms. Buildings like the former “Casa Amarilla” at the corner of Muñoz Rivera and Carlos LeBrun streets follow, in concrete, the concept of the high-ceilinged shop with multiple openings to the street, at the same time presenting an interesting use of simple Doric columns and the 45-degree chamfered corner, celebrating the urban space it creates, and similar to what is seen in cities like Ponce.
Vieques's commercial and agricultural wealth was derived from the cultivation of cane, which notwithstanding the extreme shortage of permanent streams and derived irrigation problems, blanketed most fields from Punta Arenas to Puerto Diablo, establishing thus a rural heritage of sugar estates over all of the island's territory, where the product was artisanally cultivated and later exported to markets outside the Caribbean. Vieques had about a score of estates, with steam- or oxen-driven mills, and parts of the warehouses of a few exist as ruins. One of these estates of the Benitez family evolved into the large and “modern” Playa Grande ("Big Beach") sugarmill, only one of its kind in Vieques, exporter of most of the island's sugar and which hosted a settlement next to the factory, which was a sort of small town dedicated to the industrial workers of the sweet condiment.
José Ferreras Pagán, in his directory Biografía de las riquezas de Puerto Rico (“Biography of Puerto Rico's Riches”) published in 1902 (vol. 2, p. 87) indicates that this mill, formerly owned by Danish investor Matthias Hjardemaal, was sold in 1892 to Don José Benítez Guzmán, “being a small factory that increased its capacity and elements until it became a steam-powered muscovado mill.” Ferreras detailed the following components:
[a building] dedicated to the sugar factory and warehouse, residence for the director, employee housing, house for the foreman, store, and [single] workers' quarters: 5 multitubular boilers with their ovens that burn green bagasse, a Krajeuski (?) stalk cutter, 1 mill and its second grinder with their engines, 4 eliminators, 6 defecators, 6 Fletcher centrifuges, 10 decanters, 1 triple effect [evaporator], a two-bags-per-batch vacuum pan, 1 Cortada still, one electric generator [author's note: only five out of 32 non-American capital mills had this then], 30 iron tanks.
Its lands stretch for 4000 acres and other 1500 of Mr. J. Benítez Díaz, of which 3000 are suitable for cane growing, and 1500 acres are [presently] cultivated.
It produces some 15000 bags of first- and second-harvest sugar. The former Resolución estate in Barrio Punta Arena is annexed to this important factory.
Despite its atrocious dismantling in 1941, Playa Grande still presents significant remains that defy oblivion and abandonment.
The “biographer of riches” also describes the nearly vanished Santa María mill. This one had belonged to the Leguillous (buried close by) and also to the Le Bruns. Modernized in 1896, it had:
3 multitubular boilers with green-bagasse-fueled ovens, one mill and its engine, 4 defecators, 4 eliminators, 2 clarifiers, 4 filters, 1 vacuum pan, 4 centrifuges and other accesory equipment: as well as iron tanks for syrup and molasses.
Its equipment was built by the Fives-Lille company in France, and they can elaborate up to 220 bags in 12 hours. (Ferreras, ibid. p. 88)
Ferreras Pagán describes its buildings:
A beautiful masonry factory where all the equipment is installed along with a Deroy still, the latter which stopped being used since the promulgation of the Hollander Bill [author's note: a law that taxed alcohols exported to the U.S.A.] as sales have declined: 1 one-story house for the director's residence: 4 wooden houses for employees; a brick masonry rainwater cistern, another cistern for storing water from a creek that flows south to north near the factory, drawn by a windmill-powered pump, this for the evaporators; one store, and 11 workers' quarters.
At that time Santa María controlled 2000 acres, slightly over half cultivated. It operated until the 1920's: henceforth Playa Grande was the sole grinder of Vieques cane.
It is now barely a remembrance though the form of the factory settlement still influences the present one. Parts of two walls remain. Another mill, Arkadia, existed in the northwest, in the later-military zone, and according to some archeological field studies, parts seem to remain. It also stopped in the early 20th century.
Sugar estate ruins in Vieques reflect the importance of that episode of the island's social and economic history. Some warehouse walls can be found, in some estates like Campaña in the east there is a flair for their founders' French tastes, this according to those that have documented the place, only hundreds of feet from the “death zone” of the former Navy firing range. Other ruins are more utilitarian and sober. Some estate houses remained like the fascinating (unfortunately fire-ruined) “Frenchman's House” or Mourraille estate near Esperanza, formerly a very agreeable small hotel. This one had a generous interior courtyard and very high ceilings with a center-hall plan, being the former living room the hotel's foyer. With its hip roof, belvedere overlooking a splendid vista of land and sea, concrete walls imitating undressed stone, and huge wraparound veranda on top of a high base, it was one of Vieques's memorable spots. Of other estate houses some ruins remain, the remembrances of those not entirely eliminated by Navy bulldozers.
Near the entrance to Esperanza harbor, there existed until their near-total destruction by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 the enormous walls of the Esperanza estate warehouses. The cyclopean masonry and simple proportions of this utilitarian, rectangular edifice, spoke of solidity of these walls that protected sugar during its purging and curing process. However, the passage of time and uncompatible modern repairs weakened the building, setting the stage for its loss.
In the remains of the Pacience estate in Barrio Santa María - later a part of the Santa María sugarmill previously mentioned - are the remains of the tombs of the first governor of Vieques, Théophile-Joseph-Jacques-Marie le Guillou, with massive French inspired construction and a pyramidal top, a symbol of transcendence very favored as an iconic form of European tombs. There are other vaulted tombs at its side. These are above earth – sarcophage type, also following French custom.
Much of this interesting agrarian past rots away in oblivion amidst the scrub, but notwithstanding the existence of "directives" to preserve heritage within the military installations, most estate ruins in former military lands are fragments of walls or floors, lime and earth between leaves and bushes – not to speak of the empty shell of the Puerto Ferro lighthouse, almost standing like a ruin of a vanquished enemy awaiting its Carthage-style disappearance, not by force but by age and weather. (The other lighthouse - Punta Mulas, near the town – was carefully restored in collaboration between the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and the Municipality, and of late has been a museum though it is now closed.) Even so, the resistance of these materials come from the earth have made these walls and footings faithful defenders of the presence of the past facing the trauma of modern and destructive military “arts”. Now there's hope for this heritage's recovery in peace.
Even though there have been made archaeological reconnaissances that demonstrate that these ruins and remains, historic and Pre-Columbian alike, are a very important patrimony and a key part of the Caribbean jigsaw puzzle, Puerto Rican archaeologists had not been permitted for a long time to dig and analyze findings in military soil. This has left a gap in early Puerto Rican history, since it is known for years that Vieques was a major bridge and contact since the time of the first human migrations in this region. Puerto Ferro Man, a most significant anthropological find, remains, thus, an interesting phenomenon without (until, we hope, now) a context that explains him and his times.
Between 1978 and 1985 an American consultant group hired by the Navy made a historic resource survey in Vieques naval lands. Not informed by the knowledge or experience of our archaeologists and preservation architects, a collection of reports was made of these findings located in hills and dales of Vieques. But the lack of communication between both groups has hampered the construction of an useful interpretation of the remains. Our people had been denied for years access to a vital part of its cultural heritage, and also to the people's right to know themselves through history and its eloquent "textbook" of material culture.
Now that many of these resources are accessible there is a need to revise the condition and significance of these places since they can be venues for cultural tourism and kindred activities, now blossoming throughout many Caribbean locations in spite of many difficulties. The cultural landscapes of the long-time inaccessible areas evidence the achievements and losses of Vieques society both as a carrefour of cultures and, also, as subject to agricultural and later military latifundia. They deserve to be conserved since they define the community's personality and they may be reused for the enjoyment, education and recreation of present and future generations.
jo
July 10, 2001, Guayama
Revised August 2002
Second revision Dec. 2004
Illustrations March 2010
Translation by the author, Mar. 5, 2010, finished in Vieques
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