São Paulo, City On The Edge

INTRODUCTION: EDGE CITY

Talk to yourself before you go to São Paulo. This doesn't have to be done aloud. If done aloud it is best not done while walking on the streets in your own neighborhood gesturing wildly. But do it. Ask yourself why you want to visit São Paulo. Don't go because you want to see the Amazon rain forest. Don't go to practice your Spanish.

São Paulo may be the largest metropolitan area in the Western hemisphere, though comparing metropolitan areas is a difficult problem in its own right. It is a shopper's and a diner's paradise, but if your primary interest is shopping and haute cuisine, there is already at least one book about that.

For me, São Paulo is edge city. It is most of the things you won't easily find in any American megalopolis. It is city full of people living on the edge, barely getting by. There are upper middle class and wealthy people, but mostly there are people on the edge. These are the interesting people.

What passes for middle class in Brazil would not be considered such in the US. I remember a discussion with a friend from Salvador, a city in the northern state of Bahia. We were discussing prostitution in Brazil, which is legal. I know several women who are or have been prostitutes, most often single mothers without the financial support of a man, none of them living with a man. Some of them were or are married, others having children without marrying, which is more common in Brazil than in the US. I met one with an adopted child, adopted as a single woman. None of them were drug users, except for possibly cigarettes or alcohol in moderation. The discussion arose because these women were independents, without pimps, either working in clubs (called boates) or on internet sites. All were well over 18 years of age, the age of consent in Brazil. My friend told me that the prostitutes I knew were middle class, not the very poor who were sometimes underage and had pimps. This was something I had not experienced, and was not likely to experience. The point is, middle class women in the US would not be supporting themselves or their families as prostitutes.

Families are often extended, of necessity, because the wages are too small for people to live alone. So you find families living together, in close quarters, mother with daughter and son and her grandchildren.

And yet, Brazilians are proud. They are proud of Brazil and most of the residents of São Paulo I know would not live anywhere else. Some are immigrants from other cities, but many are natives of the city. Knowing locals makes visiting more than tourism. It helps to get the city under your skin.

The city is about food, nightlife, and people. Restaurants and bars are its heart, and they are well attended. It is a late night city, especially on weekends, and many restaurants don't open until 7 PM and are not crowded until 10 PM or later. There are also special clubs you won't find in the States, at least not legally. And some of what you might find seems odd, like the bingo parlors. These are attended by young men, not by old women as in the US, and are not held in churches. The current president, Lula, was busy shutting them down in early 2004.

It is a city of immigrants. Italians are heavily represented, but there are also many Japanese, Germans, and others. Though the language is Portuguese, there are more Italian restaurants than Portuguese restaurants. Nonetheless, there is a subtle Portuguese influence.

The city has no beaches, no beautiful mountains, and the architecture is not so old and stately as in Rio, though you can find wonderful old buildings in Centro. Unfortunately, they are falling down and ready for urban renewal.

So why go? Let me show you why I go.

CHAPTER 1: CITY OF NEIGHBORHOODS, CITY OF IMMIGRANTS

A recent Brazilian book by journalist Levino Ponciano is entitled São Paulo: 450 Anos, 450 Bairros, which translates as 450 years and 450 neighborhoods. This modern city with ancient roots is composed of neighborhoods with distinct personalities, like mini-cities within the city. Understanding the city entails understanding some of these cities within the city, particularly when it comes to choosing where to stay and where to play. Choosing the right place to stay is essential for your safety and for meeting your goals, and depends in part on how long you intend to stay, how much you intend to spend, and why you want to go. The right neighborhood is key.

This neighborhood setup is different than is found in American cities. The dictionary definition of bairro is district or quarter, but I prefer to call them neighborhoods. Postal addresses use them, so when you write to someone in the city you include the neighborhood before the city, even though the postal code should take care of it. They are essential for using taxis, because the drivers look for places by neighborhood. However, names can refer to two levels of neighborhood or district, with neighborhoods within neighborhoods. For example, within my favorite bairro Moema is another bairro, called Indianopôlis. If you look on the large street map of the city, a book with hundreds of maps, you will see this. By the way, the word bairro is pronounced bahro, with a sort of guttural sound on the h.

Not many Americans choose the bairro Moema, which is one reason I like it. I also like it because of its safety, its density, and the diversity of its offerings. When I say offerings, I mean things to do. Things related to the people and the culture. Moema is sort of the Greenwich Village of São Paulo.

JARDINS

If travelers to São Paulo are aware of neighborhoods at all, they are familiar with the Jardins, and most often with Jardim Paulista. There are several Jardins clustered near the central area of the city. All of these neighborhoods are upscale, home to upper middle class and wealthy residents, though Jardim Paulista now has many apartment buildings. To make matters more confusing, within Jardim Paulista is the bairro Jardim Paulista as well the bairro Cerqueira César. Both are upscale, with open spaces, impressive homes, ritzy shops, expensive restaurants and plenty of hotels and apartment buildings. The other major Jardins in the area, Jardins Paulistano, América, and Europa, seem to be within the larger bairro Pinheiros, which borders Jardim Paulista. When I say seem to be, I am referring to what the city book of maps shows, but as I have stressed, it is confusing. Even people who have lived in the city all their lives sometimes have trouble determining borders without asking for the physical address.

Historically, the Jardins were the original suburbs, the first neighborhoods designed for the flight from the urban centers. When you see them today this is hard to believe, since they are now surrounded by city, but it is as in any major urban area that has experienced significant growth.

Brazil went through phases of immigration from Europe starting in the mid-nineteenth century with Swiss and Germans. The immigrants were to replace the plantation slave economy that had become a problem between Brazil, then an empire independent of Portugual, and Britain. The British were strongly opposed to slavery and they had considerable power over Brazilian and Portuguese trade. Though early experiments with immigrants were not successful, immigrants were becoming a necessity for growing labor needs.

Immigration was significant after the 1870s with the subsidized import of masses of Italians. Many of them settled in the state of São Paulo, which was weaning itself from slavery through modernization of the means of production, a snowballing effect of the accumulation of capital that had eluded the more northern regions, including the coffee growing areas of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. These Italian immigrants were a success on the coffee plantations, but large numbers of them left the plantations and moved to the cities.

I had a first hand look at this history when I visited the small town in the interior of São Paulo state where my mother was born in the 1920s, Santa Rita do Passo Quatro. It was once a coffee producing center and my mother was born on a coffee growing farm, the Fazenda São José. Like the remainder of the farms in the area, it is no longer active in the coffee economy. But this fazenda is owned and preserved by the Fundação Carlos Chagas. I was allowed to visit the farm, a rare privilege, because the President of the Foundation had a technical background similar to my own, his in statistics and mine in mathematics. The Fundação Carlos Chagas is the Brazilian counterpart of our own Educational Testing Service.

My mother's family lived on what is called a colônia, as tenant farmers. They were somewhat atypical since her parents were Spanish by birth, having married in Grenada. They returned to Spain when she was around twelve or thirteen years of age, after her father died.

When my mother lived on the farm, it was owned by a wealthy Portuguese landowner, but sometime after she left it became the possession of an Italian immigrant, an industrialist with other businesses in São Paulo state. He replaced the owner's home with a mansion. The Fundação Carlos Chagas became owners when the Italian industrialist's heirs sold the property. Their father's other businesses had gone bankrupt and they were forced to sell the now non-productive property after his death.

The Italian owner is rumored to have had an interesting lifestyle. His wife lived in Italy, but the children were with him, and he built an outbuilding, a dormitory, for them so they were not with him in the main house. However, besides a magnificent white-tiled kitchen and elegant dining room and salon, the main house had many small bedrooms off a hallway from a master bedroom, where it was rumored he kept the women he brought from São Paulo for his entertainment.

The point of the story is that the immigrants began to displace the original Portuguese. They moved to the cities and turned old neighborhoods into places of business and also into slums. Around the turn of the century this gave rise to real-estate development on a grand scale on what were then the southern outskirts of the central city of São Paulo.

Those with the means escaped the epidemics and the poverty of the older bairros like Bixiga (pronounced bee she ga) and Brás for the newly developing planned communities called Jardins. (Bixiga is not an official neighborhood name, but was then and is now a nickname for an older Italian neighborhood in Bela Vista.) The slums became ghettos.

Jardim Paulista and Jardim América were both early products of this development aimed at the upper middle class and the wealthy. As I understand it, Jardim América came first, through the efforts of Companhia City. Their plan was to develop complete urban settings, with gardens, shops, schools and beautiful homes and gardens as had been done in Europe. This was not something native to Brazil, and the company hired a British architect and city planner named Barry Parker, who had done similar work in London. Supposedly the name Jardim América was chosen in honor of the American wife of one of the Englishmen who worked the project.

The success of this enterprise was picked up by a group of landowners and developers who started the Companhia Edificadora de Villa América. They divided up the farm lands that were to become Jardim Paulista. The good fortunes of these developers inspired the development of Jardim Europa and possibly Jardim Paulistano, though the order of development for Jardim Paulistano in all this is not clear.

Today Jardim Paulista is a popular district, with almost 83,000 inhabitants distributed within its smaller bairros. There are hotels and apartments available in the neighborhood, and it is home to upscale shops and restaurants.

I have stayed in Jardim Paulista, in the bairro Cerqueira César, home to a large number of upscale hotels like the Mofarrej, once a Sheraton but now part of the Melia chain. I know this hotel because it once housed the American Express office, now more conveniently located just off Avenida Paulista near the metro station.

Whenever I went to the Mofarrej, the place was deserted, like a tomb. The entrance is distant from the gate, so a taxi is necessary at night for security purposes. The area around the gate is across from a park, deserted and dark and dangerous at night. This is like much of Jardim Paulista to me: too many dark, open spaces to be safe at night. I am a walker, and I try to avoid walking on dark, deserted streets at night. This is the reason I prefer Moema.

When I stayed in Jardim Paulista I stayed in what is called a flat service. The place was a duplex apartment, meaning it had an upstairs bedroom, with the living room and dining room and kitchen downstairs. These are the best deals if you are staying for a month or more. However this place was secured by a friend and the people at the front desk and in the parking garage did not speak English at all, which sometimes made for some difficulties. This was during my second stay in the city and I spoke almost no Portuguese. Now it would not be a great problem, though I prefer places where some English speakers work the desk. An English speaker at the desk does not imply that the place is designed for Americans, because a great number of Europeans speak English as a foreign language, making it almost universal.

In his book São Paulo: 450 Bairros, 450 Anos, Levino Ponciano calls Jardim Paulistano, in Pinheiros, a grand and strange neighborhood, with grand shopping, closed clubs, grand buildings. It still preserves beautiful residences, guarding the golden years of São Paulo, which I take to have been in the twenties and thirties. It seems that unlike Jardim Paulista, which has evidently lost many of its large residences to apartments, Jardim Paulistano is still much like it was seventy or eighty years ago.

MOEMA

The neighborhood Moema is to the south of Jardim Paulista. Moema is split into two sides by Avenida Ibirapuera. On one side is the older neighborhood bounded by Avenida Indianopôlis, which changes names to Avenida República do Líbano upon crossing Avenida Ibirapuera to the other side of Moema. Avenida Indianopôlis is named for the US city in Indiana. If one follows this street beyond Ibirapuera it is a short walk to the large, tree filled Parque do Ibirapuera, which borders Jardins, Moema and Vila Mariana, and is near Itaim Bibi and Pinheiros.

As mentioned earlier, one of the neighborhoods in Moema is called Indianopólis. It borders the large street by that name, and is also bounded by Avenida Ibirapuera. On that side of Moema, the streets are named for Indian tribes. On the other side, across Ibirapuera, they are named for birds. The word Moema is an Indian word, from the Tupi-Guarani, literally meaning a lie.

According to Ponciano, the name Moema was only given in 1987. Before that it was called Indianopólis. The neighborhood goes back to 1917, but it was not until the so-called economic miracle of the 1970s that the area took off. In 1917, a large avenue called Araci was built, which in the second half of the 1960s was paved and lined with trees by mayor Faria Lima. The paving of that street led to the development of the 1970s, and today that street is Avenida Ibirapuera. There are around 70,000 people living in this dense neighborhood.

Some other neighborhoods in the south of São Paulo that are clean and safe are Itaim Bibi, Pinheiros, Brooklin (named for the same city in the US), Morumbi, and Vila Madalena, which has the reputation of being the Soho of São Paulo and is located on the northern boundary of Pinheiros. For buffs of aviation history, the development of both Vila Madalena and Jardim Paulistano involved engineer, farmer and businessman Luís Santos Dumont, brother of Alberto Santos Dumont, the Brazilian father of aviation.

THE JAPANESE

Beginning in 1908 there was a save of sponsored Japanese immigration into the São Paulo State. The neighborhood where they settled in the city was Liberdade and is beside Bela Vista (Bixiga), and just south of Centro. It is of note that the largest population of Japanese outside Japan is in Brazil, mostly in the state of São Paulo.

Liberdade is a tourist attraction, with some fine Japanese restaurants, though it is not necessary to go there to find excellent Japanese food. It is not a neighborhood where I would consider staying, as it has a reputation for being dangerous at night. However, it is where you will find the Communidade Budista Soto Zenshu, next to the Museu da Imigração Japonesa.

If you visit this museum you will learn that there have been several waves of Japanese immigration and besides the Japanese communities founded in rural São Paulo, there are many in other areas, including the Amazon region. There was also a period of reverse immigration when some Japanese returned to their homeland. This was in the 1990s, when Japan was booming and Brazil languishing. It was called the dekasegi phenomenon, and upwards of 250,000 Japanese left Brazil for Japan.

Liberdade is also where you will find my favorite Japanese restaurant, the traditionalist Sendai. On the street where the Museum of Japanese Immigration is located is a little place called Junk Burger. I don't know if it is good or not, but it might give you an idea of how Brazilians use American words in names. You will also find places around the city with names like Soft Dog, Fast Chicken, and Magic Chicken. When I pass Fast Chicken I can't help but think, not fast enough.

This is a smattering of background about São Paulo neighborhoods. These are only the more select places in the south of the city. São Paulo is an enormous city, with fine neighborhoods in the north, such as Alphaville or Santana, but without the character of those southern neighborhoods I have discussed.

There are other major cities as suburbs, like São Bernardo do Campo to the south, home of the current President Lula, an industrial, working-class city with facilities for car and truck manufacture, including Mercedes-Benz, Scania, and General Motors, among others. Similarly to the north is Campinas, another industrial city where business travelers may be required to visit and stay. I know both cities and like neither, but Campinas has a reputation for danger that may or may not be well deserved. It also has many clubs that advertise in São Paulo, and in all fairness, I did not explore Campinas. I spent more time in Jundiaí, a city between São Paulo and Campinas with a reputation for being more upscale and urbane than Campinas itself.

Neighborhoods are essential in understanding the city. Streets can change names or character. Rua Augusta is lovely in Jardins but a dangerous place in Consolacão, near Centro and Bela Vista, where it is haunted by prostitutes of all genders, including half and half. Look for the neighborhood in the address before you choose a place to stay.

Jim Chaffee

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