[Illustration: JOCKEY CLUB’S GRANDSTAND AT THE RACE TRACK.]
There is a prodigality about the _Porteño_ in his pleasures that staggers the visitor from the North. Backed by an almost limitless wealth from cattle ranch or plantation, he scatters his _pesos_ with a princely hand. And, of course, there is the obverse of the picture. There is the under world here, peopled largely by immigration from the centers of European unrest, in which there is to be found an extreme of destitution. This is the breeding place of anarchistic ideas, that frequently find expression in violence and that are surely becoming one of the city’s most serious problems.
The zest for amusement among all classes finds many outlets. Strolling along the Calle Florida, or the Calles Cangallo, Esmeralda, Cuyo, Maipó, and other well-paved, brilliantly illuminated streets of the theater district, after the fever of the business day has subsided, one drops in at the “English Bar,” the “Bierhalle,” “Confiteria,” or “Café Parisien,” and is sure to find a compatriot to join him in the refreshment of his predilection. Or, for the more solid enjoyment of dinner, the visitor, whether French, North American, Briton, or Turk, can find his favorite national dishes excellently served—at the Restaurant Charpentier, where an orchestra, really good, will for the moment take the homesick Parisian back to his native boulevards; or at the “Sportsman,” where the North American is beguiled from his nostalgia by Sousa’s marches, perhaps, or by biograph pictures of steeple-chasers and Oriental dancers; or at Monsch’s Restaurant, which specializes in the Briton’s needs—where, with a look of acute understanding, the head waiter will permit the guest to select his own English mutton chop or steak from the glass-doored ice chest.
The outdoor café life is not as well known, so narrow are the streets; even Calle Florida, which is the essentially fashionable shopping street of the central town, is lamentably narrow. With the exception of the Avenida de Mayo, which runs from the plaza containing the Cathedral and President’s palace to the new chambers of Congress, and divides the city into its northern and southern sections, and the Avenida Alvear, which leads from the main part of the city to Palermo Park, flanked with costly homes and interspersed with gardens and plazas that lend a wealth of verdure and flowers to the broad avenue, the streets are so narrow that in the business section vehicles are required by city ordinances to move in the same direction, down one street and up the next. But in this splendid, stately Avenida de Mayo of hers, which, except in appearance, has the characteristics of the business part of New York’s Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to the Park, Buenos Aires has a thoroughfare that rivals Rio’s Avenida Central in beauty, and, with its finer hotels and cafés and French architecture, possesses even more of the attractions of a Parisian boulevard.