By Jorge Ortiz Colom
Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña
Originally published in Axis 7 (2004), annual magazine of the Institute of Technology of Jamaica, Kingston.
Puerto Rican historic architecture has been a victim for decades of a vile though unintended reductionism into its merely Spanish colonial aspects. Though by itself not unimportant, the creolization of southern Spanish building traditions has been quite felicitous especially in the unique geographical and climatic siting of the walled city of San Juan, Outside this compact, elegant ensemble, Puerto Rico’s historic buildings take on multiple and varied personalities to an extent unrecognized by even Puerto Rican preservationists themselves. Especially downplayed is the influx of African emigrants, non-Spanish European nationalities, specific regional syncretisms, and even forms and spatial solutions adapted from the smaller islands to the east and southeast.
It can be convincingly said, along the old saw that PR is the smaller of the Greater Antilles, which is true at least dimensionally, that it is also the largest of the Lesser Antilles. The southeast quadrant of Puerto Rico, facing across a wide stretch of Caribbean the (formerly or presently) French, English, Danish and Dutch islands, seems to be literally a continuation of the building traditions of down-islanders. Half-hipped roofs, shingle-covered cabins, tray ceilings, wood structures built with the precision of a shipwright’s, dormers, outside kitchens... these are (or, unfortunately, were) found in this portion of the Island.
Generally speaking, until the arrival of the Americans in 1898 PR was not so much an unified nation or ethnic group as much as a collection of export-oriented towns and regions opening up into the numerous harbors and inlets through which agricultural raw material - like muscovado sugar and high-quality coffee as toasted beans - were exchanged for other types of food, manufactured and consumer goods, and equipment and machinery to keep agriculture and agro-industry going. San Juan also was an administrative and military center with the requisite public buildings and fortifications, also executed with the same technical vocabulary of the civilian structures.
1. San Juan
Despite its superficially Spanish ambience, San Juan architecture displays very climate- and socially-specific solutions to living in a dense tropical city. Placed in a barrier islet that closes the north end of a large bay, the old city is continuously swept by a persistent marine breeze. The comfort problem is to channel these winds to render the living spaces habitable. This is largely realized by very high ceilings – 4 to 6 meters (13 to 20 ft) is the norm. The patios act as ventilation shafts for air exiting the inner spaces. The use of materials is crucial. Walls are near-always made of brick, dried by the sun or low-temperature wood or coal fires – or of mampostería (i.e.: rubblework, the terms will be used alternatingly), a mixture of calcareous rock, whole or broken bricks, mud, lime and other inorganic fillers. The mampostería system defines structurally amorphous walls, but the opportune placement of rows of brick every 40-50 cm (16 to 20 in) reinforces the walls and grants them solidity. Whether of adobes or mampostería, the wall material is very susceptible of quick erosion by wind and rain-borne water, so it is preventively plastered with a mix of freshly slaked lime and sand.
These are breathable walls that tolerate partial penetration of humidity from the outside, which in reaction to the sun’s heat evaporates absorbing heat and effectively cooling the walls. To increase cross ventilation inside, openings between spaces are invariably doors, which take on numerous functions. The rooms of San Juan houses, which are individual spaces mutually interconnected, normally opening to the street or to the inside yard, open into each other by means of door like openings – whether arched or flat on top – and the only aisle like connectors are seen in the stair halls and the galleries that open to the yards. To make a window, a door is made with a protective open railing: this ensemble is known locally as an antepecho. Solid windowsills are less frequent, in some buildings nonexistent.
The manufacture of the doors is complex and shows their function as a sophisticated climate regulation system that transcends its original purpose as an access regulator for people. Invariably set in pairs, San Juan doors are made in relatively resistant woods such as Spanish cedar [acajou], fiddlewood, Spanish elm [cypre or spruce], rarely locust [courbaril] or imported, resinous pines.
These will have slim (40 mm = 1½ in) jalousies that can be operated by opening a small access door (postigo) and frequently glass in the upper panel or in a transom. Transoms are also made of fretwork or horizontal fixed narrow shutters, and there are also simpler ones made of straight or turned wood pieces. They usually cover the rounded top of arched openings.
To increase available space and to catch scarce water (piped aqueduct water was not available until 1897), San Juan houses have invariably flat - actually, very slightly sloping – roofs known as techos de azotea (“terrace roofs”, henceforth mentioned here as azotea roofs). A covering of hydraulic cement made out of lime, sand and either ashes or ground clay (usually taken from broken bricks or vases) rests on top of several layers of roofing bricks of 25mm = 1in. thickness. These in turn rest on purlins held up by closely spaced beams of balata or bullet wood set in pockets on the walls. However, until the end of the 19th century there also existed some houses with gable and hip roofs covered by the more traditional barrel clay tiles. [The shape of these is determined by the use of the human thigh as a mold.]
The norm was to leave these ceilings exposed below and this has become part of the charm of Old San Juan houses. Floors are covered with clay or marble tiles, the latter in random or checkerboard patterns. If not on ground floor, they have the same structural system as roofs. Walls are almost always plastered, and following some found evidence, in the better houses they were commonly painted with geometric and naturalistic motifs, probably as exuberantly as the known practice in Cuban townhouses.
San Juan houses are generally very austere; their beauty is more akin to their proportions and to the quality of interior spaces with their subdued lighting and vertical amplitude. The main ornaments seen are cornices, both inside to bolster the bullet wood beams, and inside to splash water outside from the walls and thus protect them. Cornices are first roughed by projecting normal and thin bricks in their general outline, and finished with lime plaster and the use of wood or cut metal molds. Some can include garlands, dentils, or Greek inspired geometric motifs. Wall opening surrounds are also projected and express the inside reinforcement of the openings, which is brick. Opening lintels include “straight arches” – quoin shaped bricks sustained by gravity and their peculiar shape, and arched lintels, half-round more frequently in San Juan but some elliptical or segmental ones are also seen.
Blocks are built fully to the street line, and being these streets relatively narrow the tall house walls shade them. Projecting second or third story balconies with brick-on-wood floors and an independent small roof known as a tejadillo serve as a means of contact between the private and public realms and as an efficient way to shade walls. Their balustrades are made of turned pieces with wooden base panels, and the evident inspiration is similar balconies seen on Canary Island and some mainland Spanish towns.
Inside sheer walls on the simpler houses sometimes ring courtyards, but more common is the use of arcades and projecting inside balconies, in a few cases covered with panes of jalousie shutters but mostly open. The inside balconies act as galleries to link rear rooms of the houses. In more substantial places like Fortaleza, the governor’s residence, shuttered galleries are further enlivened by the use of colored glass pieces.
This architectural style was so successful that it also influenced the early-20th-century concrete row houses, which had to assume the proportions, height and even details of their older neighbors. Some exceptions stand out like the former González Padín building with its ribbon windows and open concrete frame, and the 10-story Banco Popular art deco tower with its oceanlineresque curves and massing. A few more modern intrusions in the old blocks also were erected before 1950 and modern austerity and asymmetry can be found next to the traditional houses. But the pre-1900 houses make up about two thirds of the total of nearly 900 buildings of the Old City, in fact making it have more integrity that Old Havana or the older part of Santo Domingo.
Streets in San Juan are relatively narrow and as said before shaded by the tall walls of the flanking houses. In the late 19th century slag cobbles imported from Britain were used to pave the streets, until then unsurfaced (bare earth and mud when wet) or at places covered with bricks or wood. Their network runs in a grid that rises northward on a hill and some steeper inclines are made in slate-covered steps. Canary Island slate is used for sidewalks, plazas and some private courtyards in the city. Other outer surfacing materials are brick, concrete – obviously a 20th century response – and argamasa, a mixture of cement, brick dust, stone and clay fragments. The latter is easy to set up, mix and surface and has been a favorite of recent open-space restorations.
As a pre-utility city, San Juan has not taken kindly to the accoutrements of modern living. Though old iron water mains and brick sewers run beneath the streets, electricity and telephone are strung on short poles jerry-rigged to parapet walls on top on houses. The aerial landscape complicates with satellite TV dishes (cable doesn’t want to install here), domestic accessories like heaters (solar and electric), the occasional clothes-drying perch and all sorts of small penthouses built to take advantage of expansive views to the harbor alive with cruise ships, ferries, cargo ships and myriad boats. Some of these penthouses (called miradores) are original, others have been sanctioned by the Institute of Culture, but still many are improvised, sometimes clandestine jobs.
San Juan has come a long way from its physiognomy of the 18th century when, not yet built out to its fortifications, it was mainly made out of gable or hip roof houses with expansive side yards, only densifying in the southwest quarter by Fortaleza, the Cathedral and the Plaza de Armas, traditionally the city’s main civic square fronting City Hall. The massive protecting walls made the city grow up inside, first filling in and then up. At the close of the 19th century, the ½ square mile sector had close to 20,000 inhabitants with its imaginable sequel of hygienic and social problems!
In this essay I won’t go in detail in the fortifications and civic buildings that have been described and reviewed in other scholarly and popular essays and descriptions. It should suffice to say that the latter category was built in the same technique that was used in private homes, albeit with more classical decoration and large, generous inside patios that could perform ceremonial functions. The early 19th century Intendencia (General Staff) fronting Plaza de Armas, even after being victim of a slipshod restoration in the early ‘80s, is probably one of the better examples. The former infantry barracks known as Cuartel de Ballajá (1845) are also important, but the original upper floor and roof structures were lost to an ill-advised renovation by the American military in the late 1930s, those elements are now made in quietly-spalling reinforced concrete. So it happened in the St Thomas Aquinas convent (now Institute of Culture offices). The originally 16th-century building also had its original brick-and-bullet wood floors changed to concrete.
The two older churches in the city (St Joseph and the Cathedral dedicated to St John) are among the very few buildings in the Western Hemisphere that include authentic late-Gothic structural systems. These are visible only from the inside and consist of impressive stone stairs, not accessible to the public, and ribbed vaults made in local stone. Both churches however were finished inside and out in the Spanish colonial mode using the structural systems previously mentioned and simpler half-round vaults and domes usually reinforced by massive brick-and-stone buttresses. There are three other churches in the old city, all of them vaulted: St Anne’s on calle Tetuán, the conventual church of St. Francis of Assisi in calle San Francisco - there was an adjoining parish church, razed in the first decade of the 20th century - and the interesting Christ Chapel (on the intersection of calles Cristo and Tetuán. A few houses and buildings have small private chapels, usually only readable by the presence of domes on the roofs, as with the house in calle O’Donnell and calle Fortaleza (actually art-decoed on the outside, but indeed it’s from the 1800s).
Fortifications are massive stone and mampostería works usually roofed with vaults and which derive their protective functions from their adaptation to the city’s hilly geography and the sheer height of the walls. Though hardly tested in battle and turned obsolete by the advance of post-1850 military technology, these walls are the most memorable element of San Juan’s panoramas, and they have been protected on the unesco world heritage list along with La Fortaleza.
Fortaleza has a remarkable split personality: the front to the civic, street side is a mildly exuberant palace made with the traditional domestic vocabulary of the city. To the back, overlooking the walls, it morphs into a medieval castle with twin crenulated towers and a near-blank wall, much like a transplanted castillo of El Cid’s time. On the roof of one tower there’s a stone sundial still used to tell time.
Summing up: San Juan tells in its architecture a stimulating history all the way from the 1500s of a Spain hardly putting its best foot in Renaissance modernity, all the way to mid-20th-century art deco and early modern movement. In 1951 the district was legally designated a historic district, fortunately avoiding the nefarious effect of the bulldozer and ill-advised urban renewal, even when the outside-the-walls harbor warehouse district of La Puntilla did fall victim to a grandiose plan of ersatz-Sanjuanero apartments, partially executed – most of the area is nowadays a parking lot. However the old, neoclassical Arsenal complex of one-story warehouses and a chapel still stands fronting the Bay. It is used for exhibition space, offices and cultural facilities.
Old San Juan is no longer the trading and financial center of Puerto Rico – this moved to the International-Style towers of Hato Rey, 4 miles southeast. It is still the cultural and political heart with numerous museums and galleries and the Governor of Puerto Rico still lives and works in this quarter. Many government offices make their home here, specially the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, overseer of the correctness of Old City (and elsewhere in Puerto Rico) restoration and heritage-recovery work.
2. Outside San Juan: Archidiversity
Neglected by Spain because of its lack of gold, but kept because of its strategic location, Puerto Rico survived for 300 years making ends meet. The 300-mile-plus coastline was ideal for pirates and smugglers, and in fact contraband of spices, ginger, tobacco and foreign manufactures was a way of life in most of the island. Its geography – a large mass of limestone or volcanic-origin mountains ringed by narrow valleys – made Puerto Rico turn outward to other Caribbean countries, making it a veritable carrefour of influences. PR’s mixed blood population, even if somewhat “whiter” than its neighbors, is a typical Caribbean mélange of all nations of Europe, Africa and some indigenous Arawak (Taíno) remnants. Aspects range from Nordic-type blonds to jet blacks, all of them speaking a common Spanish language (there is no pidgin or patois here) tinged with Arawak and African words and southern Spanish regionalisms.
a) - Indian Heritage
Arawak remnants are expressed in words (names of towns like Mayagüez and Guayama) and common nouns like batey (a yard, also the usual name for plantation villages), macana (a club or baton), or guaraguao (a type of tree famous for its quality wood, also a large eagle like bird), or guayacán (the lignumvitæ tree, so common in our islands). Thanks to strict archaeological laws, much cultural remnants have been found, especially household or religious implements in stone or bone, burials, pottery shards, and rock engravings or paintings. Some built stuff has surfaced: the holes of old grass-and-stick huts called caneyes (square, for the chieftains) or bohíos (rounded, for the others); fortunately described by early Spanish chroniclers - and several impressive ceremonial parks where a ritual game superficially similar to soccer was played by contending yucayeques (towns).
The Institute of Culture’s 13th-century Caguana Complex west of Utuado consists of several rectangular plazas framed by oblong stone monoliths, many engraved with images of nature or fecundity. One of these plazas, the largest, points to a limestone hill in the shape of a cemí (triangular-shaped votive statue representing a god). The whole complex descends to the clear, swift waters of the Tanamá River. Caguana is now an open-air museum that draws tens of thousands of visitors yearly.
Two miles north of the city of Ponce there is the Tibes complex, about seven centuries older than Caguana. Here some of the seven ceremonial patios are circular, and one is in the shape of a star. The sparse vegetation adds a sense of poignancy to the area. On the way from the reception center to the plazas, there is a simulated “Indian village” of rounded bohío huts.
Indian building techniques were appropriated by the early jíbaros (peasants) and until circa 1950, square, hip-roofed bohíos on stilts could be found at every bend in the countryside. Rustic trunks made the framework, broad intertwined leaves like the banana’s and some grasses clad the walls and the roof thatch was made of a grass with long, lustrous leaves - known as the enea - and which grows yet abundantly along riverbanks. Nowadays all eliminated by the use of wood or concrete houses, there was no effort to rescue some examples of these huts to evidence an ancestral and hardscrabble way of life that was the stuff of daily rural existence for so long. Easily erectable, wholly biodegradable, and nearly free, the bohío was a viable solution for landless peasants: if they had to move, they packed and left the house to return to the soil. Where they moved, they would find the same building materials all over!
b) - African Influences
From 1520 to 1850 inhabitants of West Africa were dragged involuntarily to the balmy Caribbean shores to work in agriculture, construction and manual labor. Puerto Rico was no exception: most of its black population came from an assortment of countries along the Gulf of Guinea. They were diverse – their identity was defined by their condition of servitude. They were anyway able to recover signs of identity. With goatskins on discarded rum barrels, and covert messages of revolt and conspiracy on body movements, the bomba dance is one of the better-known influences of Afro-Puerto Ricans. Root crops, bananas, and many dishes are clearly African – pig’s feet stew, pigeon peas, mofongo (mashed plantains, in itself an African word), okra, etc. In fact, Puerto Rican gastronomy is largely shared with the Afro-Caribbean countries, and many concoctions will be recognizable to natives of other larger or smaller islands.
Though the full form of African building vernacular did not make the Atlantic crossing, some vestiges – diluted with European technique - were retained: these include the use of gable or hip roofs, compact rectangular shapes of residences, the use of broad verandas for shade and protection, the inclination to paint and embellish in strong colors, and most strikingly the tendency to group houses in compounds based on proximity and family links instead of the more property-limit-influenced regular arrays favored by Europeans. These compound groupings subsist, appropriately, the northeastern township of Loíza; where over 80% of inhabitants are of African descent, mostly descendants of free blacks. Though the houses themselves are now the boxy modern vernacular with some older ones mixed in, several groupings in the Medianías (middle points), an area of sandy grounds and palm groves bordering the Atlantic coast east of the town, exhibit that “compound” topology. This place is, however, being mutilated by modern low-rise apartment blocks promoted by mostly white landowners and developers.
Southeastern PR is also largely black, but the presence of large agricultural latifundia has prevented the growth of large compounds though much smaller ones can be found amongst the former cane fields. In many cases the compounds have had to rescue unclaimed lands alongside rivers and creeks, or even in the right of way of roads, and have assumed a curious, linear aspect.
c) - European Hegemony
Europe was the dominant economic and cultural influence in Spanish-colonial Puerto Rico. The emphasis is in Europe, not Spain. As a neglected agricultural backwater, 17th- and 18th-century freebooters and smugglers from Dutch, Danish, English and French islands would frequent the island’s unguarded Caribbean coast and establish relations with the old estanciero (estate owner) families. The estancieros farmed family operations with some outside help, cultivating easily marketable raw materials such as tobacco, ginger, and hides without paying taxes or duties to Spanish authorities.
Many of the estancieros were poor emigrants from southern Spain or the Canaries, disinherited children of impoverished grandees, usually deeply religious in a popular way and with no formal schooling or culture. Some came as military in transit. All intermingled with the remnants of aborigines and escaped African slaves, creating the rustic jíbaro (an Indian word that eventually became synonymous with “peasant”). And then some of these jíbaros or emigrants secured Spanish Crown land grants (there was then no private property) and others merely squatted and improved unassigned parcels.
Rural European vernacular, alongside aboriginal techniques and native materials, condensed in the building of the first generation of rural houses. Still, despite neglect and unsympathetic changes, at least two of these houses stand near the town of San Germán, PR’s second-oldest settlement. These are raised high in hardwood stilts, are roughly square in shape with a squared array of hewn posts serving as structure. The roof is a solid pyramid of Spanish half-round tiles, still in serviceable shape. Entry is from the side or the bottom, which was used for storing agricultural implements, some farm animals, and the height of the floor from the soil helped refresh and hygienize the house, protecting of course from ground-borne vermin.
Several late-18th-century chroniclers commented on these houses, seen scattered on the countryside or grouped around “town” squares, as “dovecotes” (palomares). The urban houses were in fact weekend homes for rural agriculturalist dwellers that descended on town to be able to go to church or to the markets (also generally on Sundays after mass). The town squares were unkempt open spaces that were used to place market stalls or to stage volunteer militia drills. In them or facing them would be the Catholic parish church - generally the only building in many towns at least partly erected in brick or stone. (But, in fact, many other churches were as wooden as the houses.) Nearby there would be another house, probably a wooden vernacular structure, assigned the function of Casa del Rey (”King's House”), that is, seat of the government's representative, usually a part-timer citizen with no salary or stipend to earn.
3. Plantations
Most of this sparsely populated ur-Puerto Rican life took place in either San Juan or the lowland valleys. The mountains, not very high but steeply sloped and covered with impenetrable vegetation, were a mysterious hinterland until the second half of the eighteenth century with initial timid attempts at colonization. Coffee reached PR's shores in 1757 and proved an ideal match with the rain-misted, cool and volcanic soils of the Western Mountains of the Cordillera Central.
Cane had already reached the island in the 16th century, but the small demand for Puerto Rican sugar exports, and the lack of adequate infrastructure for irrigation and cultivation, had hamstrung efforts for its development. Even in 1800 sugar production in Puerto Rico was insignificant and most of the product was for local consumption or for making rum in small quantities.
The enormous worldwide turmoil of the late 18th and early 19th centuries - French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars and the Latin American Wars for Independence, changed Puerto Rican life forever. Shorn of most of its empire, Spain tried to make do with the remnants. In PR, this meant its reinvention as an agricultural colony to provide tropical products to Spain - and North America, for hard currency. The 1815 Real cédula de gracias (Royal Decree of Grace) established generous land grants and incentives to moneyed emigrants that came to the island to develop agricultural estates for export crops. A motley group of foreigners - white Venezuelan loyalists fleeing independence of that country, evicted Franco-Haitian planters, successful Dutch or Danish traders looking for new investment opportunities, ambitious young Spaniards and other Europeans with no job prospects in their countries - all came and set up large estates dedicated mostly for sugarcane production. Then dozens of sugar mills with their distinctive towers and chimneys, navigating in a sea of green cane, would rewrite PR's rural landscape. A fresh round of slaves and free laborers would also come in to toil the fields. And the already residing free laboring peasants would be forced by law to employ themselves in the fields under penalty of fines or jail.
Cane haciendas were built of locally produced brick and rubblework, with roofs of local hardwoods and tiles, later of tin as it could be imported cost-effectively. The use of hard wall and structural materials had a double rationale: the valleys had a dearth of hardwood trees but a surfeit of good stone and clay; and since part of the sugar making process involved heat – steam for the engines of the grinding machinery and heat for the coppers used for clarifying the syrup into sugar, many components of the factories had to be incombustible.
Cane was ground in hardwood (later on, also iron) mills powered by oxen or wind. Still in some places of North-Central and South-eastern Puerto Rico truncated conical towers identical to others found in nearby islands like St Croix and Antigua stand on windswept elevations. And the freshly-squeezed guarapo (cane juice) was heated in rows of coppers (pailas), ladled by obliging slave or free laborers, solidified, dried in large closed warehouses and exported in cone-shaped loaves, or in barrels, as “muscovado” for the American and Spanish markets.
Some early central factories were built at this time- also using the masonry-with-gabled-wood and tin-roof system then prevalent. New machinery was brought from the USA but Puerto Rico-based planters favored mostly British equipment. Well-known Scottish machine manufacturers from the Clydeside – such as Manlove Alliott and Co., McOnie Harvie & Co., and Mirrlees, Tait & Yargan – had numerous clients in Puerto Rico. There were also American manufacturers like the West Point Foundry in upstate New York, and French ones, like Caill & Cie. of Paris.
Thirsty sugar cane needed irrigation to be cultivated in the semiarid southern region. Thus, the first plantations gathered by the region’s few permanent rivers. Diversion walls were built inside the water to channel it to brick channels to the fields. In some places the channels bridge secondary streambeds, often with the majesty of Roman aqueducts – like a fragment of the Río Jacaguas system in the Luciana estate in Juana Díaz.
Estate houses increased in size and importance. Normally utilitarian though elegant responses to climate, many were built of wood or mampostería and brick. Hard materials were more common in the wood-scarce coasts, but in the coffee mountains these buildings became poems to the structural potential of native hardwoods. As with the former estanciero residences, they were lifted by columns from the earth. Imposing bases of brick or stone would shelter utilitarian half-basements.
By this time a center-hall organization probably derived from vernacular European origins was modified for the tropics. This hall became a large living space, often two with a more private and familiar one on the back (known usually as the antesala or anteroom because it used to be the access in 2-story houses once the horizontal throw of the stairs was factored in). These living rooms were separated first by a wall and later on by a sometimes exuberant wooden partition known as a mediopunto (“halfway point”), made with different details of lathed, moulded, or jig sawed pieces, sometimes also hiding cupboards and other storage. Flanking on one or both sides, enfilade, the bedrooms, normally interconnected among themselves for more privacy. Usually to the back there is an ell-type extension named the martillo or “hammer”, for service spaces, kitchens, storage and occasionally baths.
Verandas as discontinuous extensions of gable roofs were standard-issue on both front and back sides – wraparounds, hip roofs, and continuous roofs over verandas were apparently more of a Lesser Antillean (or US) influence in the east and southeast. The rear veranda became generally a gallery for connecting service spaces, and could be partially closed by fixed and operable shutters in the sun-rich South. Also a distinct component also of probable “down-island” influence is the freestanding cookhouses found on some South-eastern estate houses – most extant estate house kitchens in PR are inside the martillo. Baths in estate houses are usually 20th century alterations; if in any case they were inside they’d be placed as far back as possible as the latrines in Lares’s Torres estate close to the urban zone.
Techniques of wood construction reached their apex in these years. The quality of finishing, dressing and profiling large wooden pieces and fitting them with complex joints and hardwood pins was a nearly-arcane art, and the resulting products have held up well despite decades of neglect. Skills learned from Spanish and European master carpenters and the fine detailing of shipbuilding were translated into solid, relatively hurricane-resistant construction.
Estates were mini-communities defined by large irregular yards around which the main buildings (estate owner and manager houses, crop production and storage facilities) would cluster. In cane estates these were known as bateyes from the Taíno name for yards; in coffee plantations these yards would be square or rectangular and made of brick and stone, surfaced with hydraulic plaster. These were called glacis and would be used for drying coffee beans resting on tarps, unless it rained. The production and warehousing buildings would also present gabled roofs and solid post-and-beam work, same as the adjoining planter’s houses.
The coffee processing machinery, much of it impressive in its size and inventiveness, was also mostly built on-site with available quality woods, and much of it has resisted wood-eating pests long after its abandonment. All this was roofed from the 1850s onward with imported corrugated metal (“tin”), which for decades was the only nonlocal material used in these structures. By the late 19th century American and Canadian resinous pine was appearing mostly as a cladding material. It was brought undressed and finished locally.
Now the towns acquired the historic persona that defines them to this day. A complex hierarchy of agricultural exchange centers intertwined by minimal dirt roads, usually passable only on horseback, opened the hinterland and mountains to the new investments. Nearly 40 of the 70 towns in Puerto Rico were established in the 19th century. Export was “barely legal” – most agriculturalists made revenue by selling directly to the St. Thomas traders, and Charlotte Amalia City in fact became Puerto Rico’s de facto trading center. Doubtlessly, as evidence shows, architectural influences were also traded between the islands. The use of arched openings in VI houses, and the use in PR of high hip and half-hip roofs, continuous verandas, and the similarities in woodwork detailing show the level of architectural exchange between the bustling ports of the “Spanish” colony and the Danish enclave.
Rural laborers either lived precariously in straw bohíos scattered amongst the fields or in small boxlike houses made of native or imported wood. These latter houses, roofed with tin and having a simple gable or inclined roof, could be transported on carts to whenever the owner could find employ. (This has been seen in most Caribbean islands, for example, like the Barbadian chattel houses). These had minimal architecture: the siding was shiplap and the doors and windows were made of planks. Furniture was limited to folding cots, hammocks, and possibly a few rustic chairs and a table. In contrast the hacendado (estate owner) houses exhibited native furniture with woven cane matting-backed sofas, chairs, tables, armoires, side tables, four-poster beds, etc. made in PR with fine native woods.
4. Consolidation of agricultural towns
Town planning principles were simple and based on the Spanish Laws of the Indies, with a regular layout of blocks around a central square, a format capable of continuous extension and modularity. Adjustments for steep topography are common and the grids skew around rivers, creeks and ridges. Only one town – Hormigueros, developed from a major hermitage and pilgrimage locus – has a radial planning principle, centerd on the lower steps to the Monserrate Hermitage. It blossoms, notwithstanding the abundance of modern concrete boxes, into a tropical interpretation of a European-type hillside village.
The most common type of house built in the towns outside San Juan was the center-living-space, wood frame, side-gabled house. Their distinguishing mark on the townscape was the long and continuous balconies serviced from the inside by several paired doors. Those on each end opened to the most important bedrooms, and the center doors to the living space – frequently the dramatic medio punto exposed to view by the curious passer-by. The distribution is like of the previously mentioned estate houses, including the frequent existence of ell-type martillo extensions. A few on narrow lots will have the living rooms to one side and the bedrooms to the other. To get privacy these houses are lifted at least 1 m (3 ft) from the street, so both privacy and street borne dust were controlled. Besides the rest of the house was lifted from the ground to improve ventilation and avoid vermin. This was done with hardwood or brick-pillar stilts, or with brick or rubble walls. At the front façade, this elevation was sealed off by a wall, almost always of hard material and sometimes decorated with mouldings and ventilation holes. In some situations, these bases acquired considerable height and could become veritable basements. The now-demolished Piazza house in Yauco had a base of nearly 6 ft (1.8 m) where wine was made with grapes grown on family property.
Many times around, these houses became the second stories of mixed commercial and residential structures. The owner habitually resided on top of his business. The lower floor could be of brick, or mampostería, or in later examples concrete (to fireproof the first level with its combustible merchandise). The second living floor will usually open into a second-floor balcony overhanging the public right-of-way. The regular rhythm of lower floor doors and the general symmetry of the buildings helped facilitate construction and layout of the structures and also provided a clear facade definition for the street. Even though the architecture was vernacular (learned as a craft, largely empirical and dependent on the capacity of the builder to visualize and imagine the completed work), enjoyable and subtle variations can be seen even in the same town or city. One common variation is those houses built out of brick or mampostería with a parapet roof descending uniformly and hiddenly from the front wall. Hip roofs are also visible in many places, and still a very small quantity of these houses – like San Lorenzo’s protected Machín House – have Spanish half-round tile roofs.
Balconies, the visible image of these houses, are quite varied in their treatment. In smaller and mountain towns, like, for example, San Germán, turned wood posts and balusters are common. In regional centers, iron substitutes wood, sometimes reaching a flowery exuberance as in Yauco’s Césari house, also a protected property. (There the balconies were in fact prefabricated in France.) Mayagüez is defines by numerous brick casas with imposing balconies in brick arches closed off by iron balustrades. Ponce has much iron balcony work with classical trim. More fanciful gingerbread is (now rarely) seen in the Southwest region, and also in the Anglo- Franco – Nordic Antillean influenced southeast and east coasts. San Juan is quite sober, and in fact in the late 19th century some iron was integrated in balcony work. In some cases, these iron balconies can still have the label of their manufacturer – usually British, but there were also local foundries to meet demand.
Wood cladding can be quite varied. Clapboards aren’t merely the single-round-cut shiplap; some can have quite complex beaded or variable-width profiles. As told previously, wood was shipped in bruto to the island and local sawmills or wood traders would profile cladding planks to order. Until the last quarter of the 19th century, structural wood was normally native hardwood, but the growing scarcity of this material would make imported posts and beams a niche. It is also known that quite a few prefabricated houses of American or British manufacture were also brought in.
Because of frequent devastating fires in the town centers, some towns had ordinances requiring fireproof construction on buildings facing the plazas or at one or two blocks distance. This was not the norm everywhere, for example in Lares, two-thirds of the downtown was made out of wood until the Feb. 2, 1945 fire - caused by a Candlemas ritual bonfire that went out of control - eliminated nearly 100 houses in the town square area.
The towns also had commercial buildings of wood or brick frame, the latter made similar to the structures in San Juan, with regularly spaced double doors of solid wood planks or metal plate, but the proportions, detailing and roofs were different. Many had geometric or neoclassical details sometimes with some flair, and roofs were frequently of wood frame. On the upper portions of the wall, yeux-de-bœuf, small ventilating holes often detailed with mouldings and decoration, helped move stale air out of the warehouses. Imported cast-iron internal columns were used in some of the larger buildings, and it is known that the Mayagüez marketplace was shipped piece-by-piece from France. Remnants of that disembodied structure are known to exist.
The large commercial structures were the warehouses for agricultural products in transit, and in the same manner of building, limited processing facilities were constructed in the major trading centers. Coffee roasting plants existed near harbors; however, sugar was not further refined but shipped as muscovado brown outside the island where European or American refiners would “whiten” it. But the molasses normally ended as rum, for centuries the Antilles’ favorite drink. Some of it was made in cities and other smaller producers were in the estates themselves. (And some of the molasses was used for building, craftsmen found out its superior quality as a cheap, easy-to-blend consolidator for mortars or mampostería, rubblework.)
The cities attracted qualified landless workers for the burgeoning trade, transportation and limited manufacturing activity. They occupied smaller wooden houses on the blocks farther from the town square, usually gabled-roof houses on narrow, deep lots. Sometimes the land was rented or leased. If the lot size permitted and the person had sufficient resources, these houses would be miniaturised versions of the typical urban side-gable houses, one or two rooms wide with a generally rectangular plan. Sometimes they were so narrow that the “shotgun” arrangement (rooms linked enfilade with each other) seen in parts of Southeast US and other Caribbean islands repeats itself here. Houses as narrow as 8 ft have been found in Ponce! Otherwise they would present the same climate tested solutions such as high ceilings, double doors with jalousies, front balconies, verandas, stilt-assisted elevations from the ground, etc.
In the urban peripheries, clusters of bohíos could be found where the partially employed occasional and menial workers lived. Some of these clusters were urban and rural at the same time: the men could go work at the nearby fields (which invariably at that time reached the very edge of urban zones) and the women could do household jobs for the ladies at the town houses. There were cases in the larger towns where adjoining agricultural estates were subdivided for urban growth – several estate houses in Ponce are seen imbricated within the urban fabric. There was no concept of establishing buffers for parks or gardens, or for raising vegetables, herbs and other food staples.
Some towns grew sufficiently in the late 19th-early 20th century to the point that ensanches or extensions to the towns were platted by the city on former farms. They may even have, as in Juana Díaz, Lajas and Yauco, their own squares supplementing the older plaza. The practice of growing towns by addition of new blocks, continuing the grid layout, persisted until practically 1948 when the first new post-war subdivisions were constructed on the old San Patricio farm southwest of San Juan. From then, it’s a wholly different story...
Traditional landmark and civic buildings generally reflected all these years an extension of civil building traditions, possibly with better quality of the commanding authorities had resources to build well. The Catholic parish churches, lying on or in front of the squares, show different solutions to the problem of congregating large numbers of people. Mostly built out of mampostería, many use wide bullet wood-beam (ausubo) roofs, in some cases extending interior spaces by employing 3-nave layouts. There are also impressive vaulted spaces in others. Poorer parishes made do with post-and-beam wooden churches, all of them lost to fire or hurricanes.
Town halls and casas del rey (offices for the representative of the colonial government) also were in front of, or close to the town squares. These were of conventional construction, their civic function possibly exhibited by a clock tower or front arcades. (Arcaded or covered sidewalks are very rare in Puerto Rico, most shade and rain protection for passers-by is provided by the overhangs of second story balconies.) The squares as such were multifunctional and in many towns fully open spaces. The volunteer militias would drill here, and they were also the venue of weekly markets for produce and consumer goods. In the cooler nights, they would be used for socializing in promenades where the dainty ladies of the town would march one way and the bachelor gentlemen the other way. In some coffee towns the plazas doubled as drying floors for coffee beans! The one in Isabel Segunda (Vieques Island) has a huge cistern beneath to store water for the citizens of this riverless island. By the 1880s and later, some civic amenities sprouted up like fountains, bandstands and benches. Trees were added to define small park like spaces. The best kept example of these early squares is the one at Humacao, which acquired its present configuration before 1920 and it presents two portions: an open esplanade in front of the quasi-Neogothic church, and a garden area with two transverse axes defining four garden areas with a fountain at the center of each.
5. Urban variants, harbor settlements and transportation
The location of towns had to take into account protection from nature (especially floods after intense rains) and at a time human threats, especially privateers and foreign invaders. Even when after 1820 Caribbean territorial claims were largely settled, latent instability in Europe made colonial authorities quite wary. Many larger towns had nearby large stone forts near the entrance to the harbors or on commanding heights above them. The last major fort in Puerto Rico was the one made on top of the city of Isabel Segunda in Vieques Island (ca. 1845). It is a rectangular one-story building with an additional story below on one side and a semicircular room on the other. It is ringed by massive brick and rubble walls defining battlements and lookouts.
Another defensive tendency was to build the major towns somewhat inland, establishing a satellite harbor settlement connected by a road. Ponce is located 3 km (1.85 miles) inland and Mayagüez about 2 km (1.25 miles). Both of these cities developed separate harbor settlements usually known as Playa (“Beach”), with large 1-or 2-story warehouse buildings made of fireproof brick, stone or rubble. These were the economic hearts of the cities: cane, coffee and other agricultural export goods were dispatched in exchange for imported goods like manufactures, equipment, clothing, and many foodstuffs not produced locally. Passengers bound either for another Puerto Rican harborside town, or for other Caribbean, European and American destinations, also sought board on ships.
The cavernous warehouses would have massive hard-material walls on the outside, inside there’d be a forest of wide columns of hardwood, brick or imported cast iron. Roofs are of either azotea (near-flat brick on purlins and beams), or tin on enormous wooden trusses. Doors are of large wooden planks faced on at least one side by steel plate for fireproofing. On the upper reaches of the walls, for avoiding stale air, yeux-de-bœuf proliferated and “decorated” them.
Houses of all kinds for people linked to the harbor trades would sprout close to the warehouse districts. These were of an architecture similar to the houses in town but usually wood was the prevalent building material here.
One of these harborside towns, Arroyo in the southeast, separated from its “mother town” Guayama in 1855. As a gateway to the Lesser Antilles, especially St Thomas, during the second half of the 19th century it evolved from a harborside settlement, like the one described above, into a peculiar charming small city with substantial houses with American, Anglo- and Franco-Antillean influences, some still standing with some criolla houses also thrown in. These houses face each other on Morse Street, the major thoroughfare, from generous landscaped front yards delimited by iron-and-brick fences. Morse Street continues to the extensive valley where rich sugarcane estates bolstered the town’s wealth. Chroniclers remarked that Arroyo was a sort of “Little Paris” where the planters cruised on their carriages while the descendants of black slaves toiled the cane fields. The Lind family’s Enriqueta estate, where Samuel Morse did the first experiment with the telegraph outside America, is today an exuberant overgrown ruin 2 miles (3 km) to the northeast. A one-story, 3-opening Lind warehouse, with yeux-de-bœuf and curiously “wavy” door surrounds, still stands in the harbor front - nowadays an auto body-repair shop.
The Cuatro Calles sugar estate, 2 km north of town, would later be a modern sugar mill known as “Lafayette” honoring the “French” (actually Corsican) blood of its founders. Lafayette in the early 1900s threaded a railroad spur paralleling Morse St. up to the docks, and Arroyo’s importance as a sugar port was briefly enhanced. Overconcentration of the industry, improvement of roads and passenger railroads, and diminishing returns on sugar cultivation later caused the abandonment of this system and some remnants of Lafayette’s former prosperity still lie scattered around this picturesque settlement.
There were several second-order harbor settlements like those at Cabo Rojo and Fajardo that were mainly for local trade and fishing. These were somewhat casual groupings of vernacular houses lying along strands of soft beach where the day’s catch would be sorted and prepared for selling in the nearby main towns.
Two major cities – San Juan (previously described) and Aguadilla on the northwest – were directly on the waterfront. Aguadilla occupies a very narrow coastal shelf hemmed in by large calcareous hills riddled with sinkholes and caves. Aguadilla’s elongated blocks run north to south, and upon them, a mixture of brick, concrete and wood buildings – mostly made out in a simple vernacular with geometric detailing (but sometimes very ornamented on the inside) – holds fast to the pressures of development and severe neglect. In the north side of town there is a large formal park where a spring (ojo de agua) pours water forth. The seaside street used to be lined by large warehouses, but ill-advised urban renewal schemes have obliterated them and their potential for civic and commercial use.
In many other towns building types, even when founded structurally on the vernacular explained previously, would take specific variations given cultural influences by emigrant groups. Yauco’s Corsicans would prefer ornate neoclassic detailing, while Ponce would reflect variations from Catalan-inspired modernisme, a French penchant for overly ornate fronts, or Anglo-Caribbean hip roofs with dormers. At Guayanilla, nearly all extant houses have front yards unlike most other places. Fajardo used to have very deep hip roofed houses that seemed taken out from the British or Danish islands (but, unfortunately, nearly all lost by now). Isabel Segunda in Vieques Island is a showcase for a small number of remaining houses and buildings – some protected - that reveal a definite influence from the nearly islands. The hip roofs of many have the precise skill of a shipwright’s work.
Transportation infrastructure was very crude until the early 1800s, limited to a few short acceptable roads with a couple of bridges of wood or masonry close to San Juan. Elsewhere the roads were of dirt - narrow, abrupt and strewn with puddles, rocks, and cracks. In some agricultural zones some stretches would be stabilized with rocks, limestone or brick. Through the limestone hills of the north, however, some narrow horse-and-mule paths are impressively cut directly from the rock, like the “Parrot Road” (Camino de las Cotorras) south of Isabela in the Northwest.
From then on, several roads would be built to connect, first, towns with harbors; and later on from 1870 onward, different regions. The first interurban road, the Central Highway (124 km), was begun in 1875 and finished in 1886 (only missing one bridge). It runs between San Juan and Ponce, winding itself through the mountainous interior up to 2500 ft at times. This road, plus other segments elsewhere, totalled no more than 350 km by 1898. The rivers originally were crossed by fording them or crude wooden ferry barges, later on wooden bridges would be built. Iron bridges were first brought to cross the Ponce – Ponce harbor road in the 1870s, later on other similar bridges would be made on the Central Highway and other pre-1898 stretches. These box- or lattice side frame bridges were made in France or Belgium; some of these are still in service. The macadamized surface was much better than what was used before, but didn’t take kindly to overloaded ox carts loaded with sugar or rum barrels. To facilitate repair, road keeper’s houses – generous rectangular (with small extensions for kitchen and baths) azotea-roofed buildings of traditional masonry construction, built of sometimes-exposed (a novelty) brick or mampostería, housing two road keepers, each one tending 3 km of road – were located along these highways. Road keepers both did maintenance work and also served as traffic police, fining wayward “drivers” on horseback, cart or buggy.
Even so, the dearth of roads in the second half of 19th-century Puerto Rico made interurban travel hazardous by road. It was preferable to use an interurban steamer that covered PR’s major harbors. Though there were already substantial wharves and (wooden) docks in San Juan, other destinations had to use tenders to embark and disembark. The concomitant growth of the import-export trade to North America, Europe and the other Antillean islands made the sea lanes around Puerto Rico quite busy, and the increase in wrecks made necessary the erection of a 14-lighthouse system around the island beginning in the 1880s. Eleven of these lighthouses were rectangular, azotea-roofed and with internal central towers. Variants were the gabled, side-towered one at Mona Island, fully made out of iron in France, reputedly by the Eiffel workshop; the H-plan one in remote Culebrita Island; and the one integrated with El Morro fortress in San Juan. As with the road keeper houses, sometimes the rubble or brickwork was left exposed. Inside were the keeper’s quarters and the tower could be climbed through steel spiral staircases without stepping outside, an advantage in the frequent foul weather seen during the “hurricane season”.
Between 1892 and 1908 a 260-km passenger railroad was built along the north, west and southwest between San Juan and Ponce (with extensions to Guayama in the southeast and Humacao on the east) on a narrow 1-meter gauge. The single-track system was used for passengers until October 1953, and until 1957 for freight. It has left a legacy of remains like: traces of rights-of-way through remote passages; steel and concrete bridges - only a very few extant; three concrete-lined tunnels: two in the Guajataca Valley between Quebradillas and Isabela in the northwest, another in the Cabo Rojo countryside; and about a dozen hip- or flat-roofed concrete wall stations, most of them waiting for somebody to rescue them. San Juan’s dazzling 1912 French-Renaissance heap of a terminal was razed in the late 1960s. And save for a single steam locomotive with a tender and a couple of cars, rusting away in the Camuy Caves Park, all the rolling stock was sold abroad or destroyed.
6. Twentieth-Century historic architecture
After the momentous change in sovereignty caused by the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico’s Spanish-speaking, agrarian society was in the hands of a culturally and linguistically foreign entity. The US government and capital flooded the island with infrastructure that converted Borinquen into a military bastion for modern warfare - and a vast sugar latifundium. Cane shot up the slopes and was cultivated even in highland towns like Adjuntas and Jayuya. Harbors and roads were vastly improved while the carless peasants looked in amazement. Two years of direct military occupation (1898-1900) were followed by seventeen years of barefaced colonialism and later on, US citizenship for Puerto Ricans but hardly any economic or other political rights.
Two major infrastructure changes modified the landscape. The numerous small muscovado sugar operations that dotted the coastal valleys were swept away by large and small central factories. Even many of the 38 established by 1902 also failed because of miscalculations on their market and excessive debt. By the 1960s only some 25 were left. Presently (2003) there are only two and these are inactive pending resolution of ownership issues with the government.
Most central factories were massive buildings constructed in steel and the newly introduced concrete, with parts in more traditional brick techniques. Heat from boilers, used for the clarifying and drying machinery and the production of steam to power the grinding mills, was convected to the air in high refractory-brick or concrete chimneys. These became standard fixtures in the lowland landscapes.
Around the central factories there were the houses of the administrators and upper management, and the factory offices. In most mills these were small groupings called habitually bateyes from the Indian word for “outside yard”. Three settlements became veritable self-contained towns: Central Fajardo (notwithstanding its proximity to Fajardo City), Ensenada in Guánica municipality, and Aguirre in Salinas municipality. The first one has been partially rehabbed as a posh gated subdivision and another part is a campus of a private university; the second is quite mutilated and may lose the remains of the mill if a mega-hotel project is proposed in the site; only Aguirre retains a relative integrity even if many of the major structures are misused if not outright abandoned.
20th-century sugar mill houses are clapboard-on-imported-pine constructions usually recognisable by their netting-enclosed verandas. They do retain many tropic-adequate response like the lifting of the floor on stilts, relatively high ceilings, and the frequent use of wind-resistant hip roofs. Many were interestingly made out with the traditional center-hall layout and ell-type service extension, much like the criollo houses of the previous century. In the cane villages, these comfortable houses shared spaces with concrete-walled office and store buildings. Later on during the century, newer sugar plantation houses would be built fully of concrete and take on more rectangular shapes.
These houses would take different personalities depending on the hierarchy of their occupants.
The larger houses for upper management and administrator were similar in grandeur to the estate houses of the preceding era with generous livable verandas and accesory buildings for garages and domestic service. There were simpler, smaller and narrower houses in smaller lots for technicians and middle management, sometime only two rooms wide (one side living, one side bedrooms), though still keeping the front verandas. And at the bottom of the ladder there were the houses for the ordinary sugarmill maintenance workers, rectangular, balconyless boxes on stilts, that in fact could be transported as they could be given as a retirement benefit to their occupants. These weren’t too different from those used by the field workers. At least, however, like other company town houses, they would get periodic maintenance paid for by the company. Aguirre residents remember, for example, that there always was a reserve of vacant houses used for moving workers that had their homes serviced. There was an annual closed-tarp fumigation for each house and every three years the structure would be revised and termite-ridden or otherwise unserviceable parts of the house would be replaced by the carpentry and building trades staff of the corporation. In the company towns the houses would have specific hierarchy-related color schemes: the lower-tier houses would be painted gray in Aguirre and yellow-ochre in Ensenada. Middle and upper staff would get white clapboard houses. Unfortunately, when these corporations changed hands to their last, profit-moved private owners, maintenance was postponed, later eliminated. When the Government finally took over, it did not reinstate the old maintenance schedule.
Other elements of this era include extensive transportation and infrastructure works – including several hundred miles of new narrow-gauge cane railroads, docks at Aguirre and Ensenada, and the still-used rum distilling and white-sugar refining equipment. Besides neo-vernacular, “plantation style” and neoclassic buildings also the Art Deco and modern styles are seen. The vast irrigation systems developed before 1915 and that serve hundreds of square miles in Southern PR have scarcely been researched, they are a major component of the region’s cultural landscape, not to mention their continuing use for irrigating other crops like vegetables, and for supplying water to some communities and industries along the way. The irrigation dams at Santa Isabel, Guayabal in Juana Díaz, and the earthwork dike in Patillas are integral parts of this system.
With the availability of relatively cheap concrete and importation of American lumber, domestic and commercial buildings began a transformation. Commercial structures in towns followed the traditional model of multiple-door façades with parapet walls, but the thinner walls gave them away. Concrete was also favored for stilts and pilings even if the superstructure of houses was wooden.
Though the criolla and other 19th-century house styles continued to be built at some towns as late as 1925, they were displaced by a more simple, pattern-book inspired architecture of dwellings with rectangular floor plans, low gable or hip roofs, concrete balconies and sometimes walls and floors, though most were clapboard-sided with plank flooring except in the balconies. These houses not only appeared in towns and as “modern” homes in plantations, but many were built as weekend-retreat villas. Car-accessible places like Aibonito, Barranquitas and the Jájome sector south of Cayey still showcase many of these quinta homes set in exuberant gardens.
Even when the center-living-room scheme persisted well into the beginning of the all-reinforced-concrete era of the 1950s, many of the newfangled houses built from 1910 used a long front-to-back corridor to link rooms. It was frequent to place the dining room and kitchen in the back. Many of these houses were set back from the street with front yards of varying dimensions. Erecting tall towerlike extensions in the back expanded others.
Though apparent austerity and geometricity was the apparent rule in these houses, the use of wide windows with fixed colored-glass geometric inserts and pieces of turned or shaped wood actually gave many of them great elegance. Climatic and technical lessons were not lost: they were lifted from the ground and the ceilings maintained a comfortable height, albeit not as high as in the Spanish era. Unfortunately by the 1930s as a weight-saving measure much lumber to build these houses was dry and thus susceptible to fast termite infestation. Much of the “later” wood frame houses (1930 to 1960) have been demolished and substituted for concrete for this reason. During this period, both as new construction and retrofits to existing work, pressed cement hydraulic tiles with complex, multicolored geometric and floral patterns became very popular. This has been a very hardy flooring system: 80-year-old tiles have been reconditioned to near-new state, even in long-neglected properties!
Civic buildings in concrete diversified their typologies. Purpose-built city halls, schools, hospitals, asylums and courthouses replaced the earlier venues, usually converted residences - or built with the same technique. Though up to 1915 brick was commonly used, later on a large quantity of concrete structures with tin or flat parapet roofs became institutional foci of everyday life. Especially schools – vehicles of an intense though failed attempt at Anglification and Americanisation of boricua life – were erected usually on the outskirts of towns in watered down Neoclassical or Spanish Revival. A spate of intense civic building surged in the 1930s with post-Depression government subsidies, replacing older venues wrecked in the violent hurricane of 1928. The same situation occurred with private institutions like churches, Catholic and now also Protestant.
American hegemony introduced Puerto Rican architecture to swift transformations. Metric building, already the norm by 1900, backtracked into the archaic Anglo-Saxon foot and inch system. US pattern books and standards were circulated amongst architects, civil engineers (the de facto architects outside the major cities) and contractors. Stateside training by either going there or by correspondence formed most or all of the practitioners in the cultivated tradition. Notwithstanding this situation, most of them practiced with considerable respect to prevalent tradition. Drastic formal ruptures à la Bauhaus-De Stijl were unthinkable in this colonial context. Bungalow, neoclassic and later on “Spanish” revival – actually a combination of Moorish-romantic and American-Southwest mission vocabularies - became defining styles in residential design.
Puerto Rican architects of the cultivated tradition have left an interesting legacy that has only recently been reevaluated and intensively studied. Some of the exponents are:
a) Rafael Carmoega, Stateside-trained who was a major designer of schools and institutional buildings, also planner of the UPR Río Piedras campus and chief architect of the neoclassical State Capitol. Many Neoclassic and Spanish revival houses are credited to him.
b) Pedro de Castro, who learned his trade at Syracuse University in New York State. He would work largely in the matured “Spanish Revival” and also did Art Deco work, nearly reaching early Modernism before dying in an air accident in 1937.
c) Manuel V. Doménech, who studied engineering in Pennsylvania, designed great Neoclassical heaps like the Armstrong House (1899) facing Ponce’s cathedral. This house has several building innovations like the use of a brick vault on steel beam structure and a sophisticated ceiling-ventilation system. In the early American régime Domenech would head public-works efforts by the government and much building and civil works up to 1920 would bear his influence.
d) Adrian Finlayson, an American in government service, steeped in institutional Neoclassicism, who established the parameters for public-building design for the first three decades of the 20th century.
e) Martínez & Lázaro, trained in Venezuela with Beaux-Arts fundamentals. Executors of many institutional and private projects in evolved Beaux-Arts and French Romantic styles between 1910-1930.
f) Pedro Méndez, possible Puerto Rico’s finest Art Deco architect. His masterworks are the actual façade of the old Ponce marketplace and the protected Miami apartments in San Juan’s Condado district. He also built several movie theatres.
g) Antonín Necho[j]doma, a Czech trained in the US who evolved from the late Arts-and-Crafts bungalow style and historicism to Wrightian prairie-school forms; by his death in 1928 he was beginning to show evolution into a more tropical, idiosyncratic style. His work was split between large residences and institutional buildings for government and churches. Œuvre by him includes houses like the restored Roig house in Humacao, a dead ringer for a Wright design (minus the chimney, redundant in the tropics); schools with characteristic band windows and geometric glass-inlay details, and the English Gothic style Methodist temples.
h) Francisco Porrata-Doria, another Ponce native whose long career would span from academic neoclassicism (the banks at Ponce, 1924-27) to the exuberant eclecticism in the hurricane-replacement parish churches in Ponce Diocese in the 1930s, art deco, early Modern Movement and even neocolonial pastiche, a mindset akin to the much-later Postmodern school.
i) Francisco Valines, mostly influenced by Romantic and Arts-and-Crafts design. A major player in early-20th-century residential architecture, also credited with the implementation and detailing of Bennett, Parsons and Frost’s scheme for the Parque Muñoz Rivera (1920).
j) Alfredo Wiechers, the Ponce-born son of a German immigrant, who studied in Paris and later practising in Barcelona learned the ropes of Catalan modernisme. His work, built in the 1910s mostly in his hometown, is considered among the most perceptive adaptations of traditional techniques to a developed new conscience of space and detailing.
As expounded before, town planning followed by most part the extension of gridded plats began in the Spanish period. Not all though: Aguirre company town in Salinas (since 1900) was planned on Picturesque and garden-city schemes, while Neoclassical axiality defined the main quadrangle at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. Santurce, San Juan’s main suburb, was to be built as a grid influenced by the ocean to the north; bays and lagoons to the east and west; and the mangrove-studded Martín Peña Channel to the south. This grid only was realised at some areas like Condado and Miramar to the west and north. Most of Santurce is made of long streets, perpendicular to the main roads, and at the beginning many of them with dead ends. This was done by placing streets in the midpoint of the road frontage of the small farms that historically belonged to the area’s ancestral free-black population, snapped up from the 1890s by savvy speculators. Small rectangular lots were platted and soon bungalow- and châlet-type houses filled them. Later larger commercial buildings rose on the road frontage, movie palaces for the increasing population of the area (further increased with enormous, unsanitary channelside slums), and an ephemeral business center in the 1950s and 60s.
7. Current problems
After the 1930s worldwide economic cataclysm, things would change in Puerto Rico for the prelude to Modernism. By the 1940s experimental Minimalist concrete boxes, designed by a government design committee - with input by Modern-influenced architects like Richard Neutra - were being built. The postwar economic development strategy based on foreign industrial capital, government subsidies and tax breaks, and putting more spending money in a newfangled middle class, extenden from 1946 to the early 1970s. A new crop of architects serviced the increased process of urbanisation. Osvaldo Toro and Miguel Ferrer designed the Caribe Hilton hotel in 1948, it was put up the next year to considerable criticism – some called it a “soda pop bottle box on its side”. By 1950 they had drawn plans for the minimalist, somewhat Corbusian Supreme Court. By the century’s halfway point, their style was acceptable as an image of the new “modernisation” and several important institutional and residential commissions followed.
Other major player at this time was Heinrich (Henry) Klumb, a native of Cologne (Germany) and also a Wright alumnus. He put the Modernist vocabulary of simple forms in concrete to work for, not against, the climate – a vision that for decades was derided in major commercial commissions until the recent appearance of Ken Yeang’s “bioclimatic skyscrapers”. He also had a diverse practice, but his recognised masterworks are the buildings made for the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, set in parklike settings outside and in contrast to the main neoclassical quad. These include the Museum, the Library, several classroom buildings, student and faculty residences, the Student Union and the Faculty Club (this much altered to accommodate the present School of Architecture, may be taken to its original shape once the School moves to new quarters). Klumb also did houses, office buildings, apartments, and even a shopping mall in Bayamón, a suburb 8 miles (13 km) southwest of San Juan. On the latter part of his career, until his tragic death in 1976, Klumb specialised in buildings for pharmaceutical multinationals then establishing themselves in Puerto Rican soil.
Outside architects also played a reduced, though significant role. Edward Larrabee Barnes’s El Monte apartments (1963) – two curving 16-story strips outside Río Piedras - are considered to this day a model of reconciliation between collective housing, the provision of social space, and the demands of a tropical climate. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was the author of the 15-story 1966 Chase Manhattan Bank Building (now BBVA) in the Hato Rey business sector, facing T&F’s landmark Banco Popular, built the year before. Though a typical prestige-tower project of its time, it recognises climate with its deeply recessed glass panes and elongated plan shape that minimises the hotter, sunnier southern exposure.
Though “scientific” planning principles were implemented by the establishment of a Planning Board in 1942, population growth, the decline of agriculture, a sharp increase on consumer spending, and a mindless modernisation of much physical and intangible aspects of culture and technology, have outstripped this Board’s ability to “plan”. PR has over half of all automobiles in the insular Caribbean, which hardly fit its highways, streets and roads. Car-dependent suburbs and shopping complexes, many made in spec builders’ utilitarian design, fill the landscape of old cane estates and dairy pastures. Since the year 1949, when the old San Patricio farm south of San Juan Bay began seeing the earthmovers and concrete trucks place row upon row of identical 900-square-foot houses in postage-stamp lots, the destiny of urbanity and collective life in Puerto Rico was sealed and destined to become a tropical travesty of American edge-city anomie. Only now the more perceptive professionals are searching for solutions that may recover, among other elements, the lessons of the past, without a nostalgic return to what is already obsolete. But its conservation is an imperative as it gives an unavoidable reference that can be a beacon for intelligent spacemaking in the future.
January 24, 2003 / revised American version July 2004
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THE ESSENCE OF PUERTO RICAN HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE - ENDNOTES
(endnote 1) In some walls molasses or agave sap have been found used as consolidating agents or in mortars. This is more common where the raw material is readily available (cane plantations or dry zones in the southwest quadrant of Puerto Rico). Source: information on author’s personal records and correspondence.
(endnote 2) Spanish names: cedro, capá blanco, capá prieto and algarrobo, respectively. Biological names in the same order: Cedrela odorata, Petitia domingensis, Cordia alliodora, and Hymanæa courbaril. LITTLE, Elbert ; WADSWORTH, Frank H.; and MARRERO, José, Arboles comunes de Puerto Rico e Islas Vírgenes, San Juan: University of Puerto Rico, 1967, pp. 217,308, 627, and 648.
(endnote 3) Spanish ausubo, biological name Manilkara bidentata or Manilkara balata. Ibid., p. 593.
(endnote 4) Curiously, this tree’s biological name is not lignumvitæ, but rather Guaiacum officinale, in other words, a derivation of the aboriginal word used in Spanish and French (gaïac). Ibid., p. 264.
(endnote 5) There was no discernible national or tribal origin in Puerto Rican slaves, unlike in Cuba where a substantial group of slaves came from present-day Nigeria, and where the Yoruba religion, disguised as Catholic saint-worship, still exists. On general African cultural characteristics that migrated to Puerto Rico, with an emphasis on language, see ALVAREZ NAZARIO, Manuel: El elemento afronegroide en el español de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1982, chapters 1 and 2. Another historical study of note is SUED BADILLO, Jalil with LOPEZ CANTOS, Angel: Puerto Rico Negro. San Juan: Editorial Cultural, 1986.
(endnote 6) For example, PR’s gandures (pigeon peas) are a staple in Barbados, while Antiguans may eat white rice with red “peas”, exactly the PR arroz con habichuelas. Fish is common; funche (fungi, boiled cornmeal), or boiled root crops known as viandas will be eaten alongside bacalao (salt fish or cod, popular in Jamaica). Cubans and Puerto Ricans share an affection with pot roast (boliche and carne mechada, respectively) and fried pieces of pork. There are Puerto Rican equivalents of pepper pot (sancocho) and what Jamaicans call escovitch fish (pescado en escabeche). The food is not as spicy as in other islands and curry is not used (Indian immigration here was negligible), but fruits and vegetables are widely shared, not to mention PR’s highly rated coffee and liquors. A recent, good reference on Afro-Puerto Rican gastronomy (from the Loíza area) is: Rivera Rodriguez, Carmen Lydia: Holy Broth / Caldo Santo, San Juan, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña – Promoción Cultural, 2003.
(endnote 7) Some of these chroniclers were the late 18th-century Benedictine friar Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra, Alexander O’Reilly, an Irishman in the service of Spain at that time; and there are several 1823 drawings (the text of which they were part was never found) by a French naturalist, Auguste Plée, archived in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. See: ABBAD Y LASIERRA, Íñigo, Historia natural, civil y geográfica de la isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (with endnotes by chapter by José Julián ACOSTA Y CALBO and a foreword by Gervasio GARCIA). Madrid, Doce Calles, 2002. Part of the O’Reilly document is in: TAPIA Y RIVERA, Alejandro, Biblioteca Histórica de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1970. The Plée illustrations have been reproduced on the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña’s magazine.
(endnote 8) These emigrant investors had to be Catholics. This didn't faze natives of part- or fully Protestant countries like Britain, Denmark, Germany or the Netherlands. They favoured conversion of their ancestral beliefs to be able to secure their investments. Cf. ACOSTA Y CALBO, José Julián, third endnote to Chapter 26 of ABBAD Y LASIERRA, op. cit., p. 382.
(endnote 9) For details on the sugar making process in the pre-central factory days, references suggested are Moreno Fraginals, Manuel: El Ingenio, complejo económico social cubano del azúcar. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2001 (new edition of the original Spanish-language text), Chapter 5, pp. 143-211, and Appendix 2, pp. 591-656. Though this book focuses in Cuba, much of the information applies to situations seen in Puerto Rico, and the descriptions are very explicit and documented. Also see Lewisohn, Florence: Divers information of the Romantic History of St. Croix, Frederiksted: St. Croix Landmarks Society, 1966.
(endnote 10) A copper is, in sugarmaking lingo, a half-spherical iron or brass bowl of several feet diameter, mounted in such a way that it can be heated from the bottom. Coppers are used for heat-clarifying cane juice in preparation for crystallization. Frequently numbers or specific names were assigned to the different coppers used in an array for sugar clarifying. The three-to-seven copper arrays were set over a low or sunken vaulted brick structure with a ventilating, tapered square-section chimney on one end. On the other end heat was applied by burning wood, charcoal or bagasse. The smaller copper where the sugar began to crystallize was known as a “teache” or tacho in Spanish. The whole single-furnace copper-based sugar clarifying system was called in Puerto Rico, curiously, a tren jamaiquino or “Jamaican Train”. There was also the archaic tren español or “Spanish Train” in which each copper was individually heated. A typical damning expletive in Puerto Rico is quemarse en las pailas del infierno – “to burn in the coppers of hell”, still used today by people that never have seen this kind of paila. See LEWISOHN, F. op.cit., and BROWN-CAMPOS, Richard and VAZQUEZ SOTILLO, Nelly, La influencia de la mecanización en las haciendas azucareras de Puerto Rico en el siglo xix. Mayagüez, P.R., Richard Brown-Campos, n.d.
(endnote 11) French word, literally “ox eyes”. The singular term is œil-de-bœuf. In Spanish the words ojo(s) de buey are used. A Latin synonym also used in English is oculus (plural oculi), though it refers mostly to this element in cultured architectural traditions.
(endnote 12) There is major recent historical study made about the Lind estate in Arroyo: Overman, C.T. A Family Plantation: History of the Puerto Rican Hacienda La Enriqueta. San Juan, Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia, 2000. It has been, however, exceedingly hard to obtain a copy so it is only mentioned as it has not been perused or reviewed. Also, the Linds had a substantial house in Charlotte Amalie (St Thomas) in Nørregade, 6, in the Kongens Kvarter. It is now “Bethania”, the meetinghouse for the adjacent Frederik Lutheran Church. Note that modern St. Thomians usually write the street name as “Norre Gade” in two words and without the slash in the Danish letter ø. GJESSING, Frederik and MACLEAN, William: Historic Buildings of St. Thomas and St. John. London-Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987, pp. 67-69.
(endnote 13) The last ferry-barge (ancón) was operated over the Río Grande de Loíza next to Loíza town up to 1980. Its final incarnation was made in steel plate with wood reinforcement and was moved by hand pulling it on a cable stayed on both banks of the river. Source: author’s personal information and recollections.
(endnote 14) Thirteen of these lighthouses still stand – the one at Rincón was wrecked in the 1918 earthquake and what remained disappeared in the hurricanes of 1928 and 1932. A concrete tower was built in 1935 in their place. Adjacent there was a wood frame keeper’s house, since disappeared. Cf. NISTAL MORET, Benjamin: Thematic Nomination: Lighthouses of Puerto Rico. San Juan, Puerto Rico State Historic Preservation Office, 1984 (unpublished).
(endnote 15) Several well-known architects up to 1930 studied architecture by correspondence, such as the Cayey painter Ramón Frade, who built extensively there; and another well known residential and institutional architect like Francisco Valines (Frenchman’s House in Vieques, Muñoz Rivera Park in San Juan). About Frade, see: DELGADO MERCADO, Osiris: Ramón Frade León, pintor puertorriqueño (1875-1954). San Juan, Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y del Caribe, and the Ramón Frade (RFr) collection in the University of Puerto Rico’s Architecture and Building Archives (aacupr).
(endnote 16) This doesn’t mean necessarily that there was absolute conformity to the norm of tradition or emulation of known American models. Buildings inspired by Wright, the Greene Brothers, the Neoclassicists and the Arts and Crafters exist; but there were attempts at ruptures to create a more idiosyncratic type of building. Several of the Wiechers buildings in Ponce (1910s) and Nechodoma’s Cott-Larrauri house in Coamo (1926) are examples of new syntheses pointing to specifically Puerto Rican solutions. On Nechodoma see MARVEL, Thomas S., Antonin Nechodoma: The Prairie School in the Caribbean, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1986; and on Wiechers: RIGAU, Jorge: Puerto Rico 1900, New York, Rizzoli, 1993, pp.107-114.
(endnote 17) Brevity doesn’t permit the author at this time to elaborate on this latter style. Critical views of it can be seen in in RIGAU, Jorge: Puerto Rico 1900 (in English), New York, Rizzoli, 1993, p. 177-209. (chapter titled “Spanish Revival as Spanish Denial”)and in VIVONI FARAGE, Enrique, ed., Hispanofilia / Hispanophilia (Spanish and English texts), University of Puerto Rico Press, 2000.
