Until 1903, the place where you are standing was in the sea. 15 years after the end of slavery and the proclamation of the Republic, the federal government wanted to economically revitalize Rio de Janeiro and leave its slave-owning past behind. In this year, president Rodrigues Alves projected a grand modernization of the port area, which would radically change the central region’s coast. Along with better sanitation projects, the work would increase trade, revenue, and “work conditions,” or, in other words, the government saw the necessity of rescuing the city’s image in order to attract more immigrant labor.
The work was supervised by the engineer Francisco Bicalho, an eminent figure at the Clube de Engenharia and influential within the corporation.
According to historian André Nunes de Azevedo, Ph.D. in social history from PUC-Rio, the port’s revitalization project “expressed the mechanistic urbanization vision of his mentors, in which a series of straight, symmetrical routes functioned as objective connections, with no leeway for the winding curves that established alternatives in the connecting streets.”
In this period, Ave. do Cais (now Ave. Rodrigues Alves), Ave. Mangue (which became Ave. Francisco Bicalho) and Ave. Central (renamed Rio Branco in 1912) were created.
In the process, the entire shoreline was buried in sand and the coast was disfigured. In his book, Le Port de Rio de Janeiro, France’s vice-consul in Brazil, F.A. Georgelette, described the old coastline:
“Along the entire coast, punctuated with dark and sad streets, with miserable, dilapidated homes, mostly tenements and working class homes, where a disparate population bubbled over, they constructed a large quantity of wharfs and warehouses (…) and innumerous little wooden piers accessible only to pilot vessels. The majority of these wharfs and warehouses disappeared, together with this unsanitary neighborhood, under the blows of handheld pickaxes used to clear the land for the new port. It was necessary to construct others, of a provisional nature, while the vast general warehouses which would soon substitute them remained unfinished, but well planned.”
These warehouses still stand on the Olympic Boulevard, and today they hold parties and events, such as the Armazém da Utopia.