Jardín Balbuena

Jorge Pedro Uribe Llamas

Someone says they live “by the airport”, and it is impossible not to think of Balbuena. How do so many people manage to fall asleep, night or day? A plane two or three minutes after the last one, almost never stopping. The same in Moctezuma, Peñón de los Baños and the other surrounding neighborhoods. Another question for the outsider: how do they put up with the crushing traffic on Calzada Ignacio Zaragoza or Fray Servando? “Here we get used to everything”, admits a resident who would rather tell us about the virtues of his neighborhood: “It's close to the Centro, we have green areas and we can use the Ciudad Deportiva”. And the Velódromo. And the baseball stadium. On top of that, he does not have to travel far going to or coming back from a concert at the Palacio de los Deportes. We never got around to asking, but we infer that as a child he was taken to mass at the parish of San Felipe Neri, of notable modernist architecture. Perhaps his parents were among the first residents of the neighborhood — mostly merchants from the Merced district — which began to be subdivided in the first half of the 1950s along a modern, functional urban layout, on land then known as “los llanos de Balbuena” (named after the poet Bernardo de Balbuena), exactly where in January 1910 Alberto Braniff made the first flight in the country with the help of a Farman biplane. Hydraulic concrete was used for the streets of the new neighborhood, and a modest neocolonial architecture came to flourish on them that can still be admired. Soon the famous architect Mario Pani would design the Kennedy housing unit. Hugo Sánchez and former president Zedillo are said to have lived in Jardín Balbuena. We are talking, then, about an unquestionable protagonist of the Venustiano Carranza borough, which measures 34 square kilometers and which many of us nonetheless overlook. Let's not be ungrateful — let's not brush off our friends from Balbuena.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018.