Gabi On The Go: September 16 - A stroll downtown Concrete Jungle

Good morning, São Paulo!

Mike and I started the day visiting São Paulo's famous Japan Town, called LIBERDADE, or Freedom.

Not too many people know this, but São Paulo has the biggest Japanese community outside of Japan.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberdade_(district_of_São_Paulo)

The Japanese presence in the neighborhood began in 1912. One of the reasons for this was that almost every property had a basement, and the rents were incredibly cheap. In these rooms groups of people lived. Being a central neighborhood, from there they could easily get around to workplaces. By this time, commercial activities began to emerge: a hostel, a market, a house that made tofu, another that made manjū (a Japanese confection), and also job-creating firms, thus resulting in the label of "the Japanese street". In 1915, the Taisho Shogakko (Taisho Primary School) was founded, which helped educate the children of Japanese immigrants, then approximately 300 people. In 1932, there were about 2,000 Japanese people in the city of São Paulo. They came directly from Japan and also from the interior of São Paulo, after concluding their work contracts on plantations, in search of an opportunity in the city. They worked in more than 60 activities, but almost all the establishments worked to serve the Japanese Brazilian collective.

The Japanese Garden.

Thousands of visitors and locals take over the sidewalks and some streets on weekends.

There are all kinds of Japanese stores and street vendors: from kids toys made in China to art crafts made by hippies.

Although this neighbourhood is famous from its Japanese culture and contributions, it has a sad story attached to is as well. Before the Japanese arrived, this area was a place to execute African slaves.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberdade_(district_of_São_Paulo)

Liberdade was known as Campo da Forca (Field of the Gallows) until the late 19th century, and was an area reserved for the execution of slaves and convicts. Death was considered the only path to liberty (liberdade) for slaves. The condemned were led to the Igreja Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte (Church of Our Lady of Good Death) to perform a final prayer for a rapid and painless death. The church remains on Rua do Carmo at the corner of Rua Tabatinguera. Slaves and other convicts were executed in the Largo da Forca (Gallows Square), the public square now known as Praça da Liberdade. Cemitério dos Aflitos (Cemetery of the Afflicted) was created in 1774 to bury executed slaves, those who had committed suicide, and others who could not be interred elsewhere. The cemetery was replaced by housing development in the 20th century, and the simple Capela dos Aflitos on Rua dos Estudantes is a remnant of the era. Igreja da Santa Cruz das Almas dos Enforcados (Church of Santa Cruz of the Souls of the Hanged), prominently located to the south of the public square, commemorates the dead of Campo da Forca. Executions were carried out in Campo da Forca until 1891, and the square was renamed Liberdade.

From Liberdade District we walked about 800 meters to the historical center of the city, where the São Paulo Cathedral is located. It's also know as Catedral da Sé.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/São_Paulo_Cathedral

The existing cathedral's construction, in a Gothic revival style, began in 1913 and ended four decades later. It was ready for its dedication on the 400th anniversary of the foundation of the then humble villa of São Paulo by Chief or Cacique Tibiriçá and the Jesuit priests Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta. Despite its Renaissance-style dome, the São Paulo Metropolitan Cathedral is considered by some to be the fourth largest neo-Gothic cathedral in the world.

The Cathedral is huge and totally worthy a visit, even if you are not religious.

Neo Pentecostal Preachers. Everywhere.

From there we kept walking on the direction of the Municipal Theatre crossing the famous Viaduto do Chá.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaduto_do_Chá

It was the first viaduct built in the city, and was instigated by Jules Martin, a French immigrant to the city. The 240-metre (790 ft) span crosses the Vale do Anhangabaú. Originally conceived in 1877, construction started in 1888 before being stopped one month later by a court case brought by local residents. Construction resumed in 1889, and the iron bridge was completed in 1892. The original viaduct was replaced in 1938 with a new concrete span. It often appears in TV interviews, as well as films and telenovelas set in São Paulo.

The majestic Municipal Theatre.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatro_Municipal_(São_Paulo)

It is regarded as one of the landmarks of the city, significant both for its architectural value as well as for its historical importance, having been the venue for the Week of Modern Art in 1922, which revolutionised the arts in Brazil. The building now houses the São Paulo Municipal Symphonic Orchestra, the Coral Lírico (Lyric Choir) and the City Ballet of São Paulo.

Visitors can take an one hour free guided tour in the Theatre. Since we were running out of time, we chose to visit the restaurant inside the building, the Salão Dourado (Golden Hall).

A delicious cocktail made with local cachaça and guava.

I recommend a brunch in here: https://bardosarcos.com.br/salao-dourado/

A little bit further is Praça da Republica, or the Republic Square.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praça_da_República_(São_Paulo)

Praça da República is a park and public square in the República neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil. The park covers several city blocks between Rua Pedro Américo, Rua Vinte e Quatro de Maio, Avenida Ipiranga, and Avenida São João in the historic center of the city. Praça da República had many names before 1889, including Largo dos Curros, Largo da Palha, Praça das Milícias, Largo Sete de Abril, and Praça 15 de Novembro.

On Sundays, there is an open-air market on the Praça da República with many food carts and vendors selling art, clothing, jewelry, and handicrafts. Artisans come from the North and Northeast regions of Brazil as well as neighboring countries in Latin America to sell their goods.

Edifício Italia (Italy Building).

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edif%C3%ADcio_Itália

Edifício Itália is a 165 m (541 ft) tall 46-story skyscraper located in the República district, Central Zone of São Paulo, Brazil. Built from 1956 to 1965, it has a rooftop observation deck, open for tourists.

Edifício Itália was designed by Brazilian architect Franz Heep. It is the 4th tallest building in São Paulo.

Finally one of our most anticipated destination: Edificio Copan.

This beauty was designed by Brazil's most famous architect - Oscar Niemeyer - and has more than one thousand units. It is also famous for its shape, like a wave.

Today, the Copan building is a tourist attraction, with many Airbnb units, mostly rented by young people, aka hipsters.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edif%C3%ADcio_Copan

The Edifício Copan (Copan Building) is a 118.44-metre (459 ft.) tall, 38-story residential building in downtown São Paulo, Brazil. It has 1,160 apartments, 70 commercial establishments^[1] and is one of the largest buildings in Brazil.

The building was designed by Oscar Niemeyer's office in São Paulo; Niemeyer was personally responsible for the building's famous sinuous façade. The idea was a building open to a mixed cross-section of Brazilian society. The original project envisioned two buildings, the other being a hotel, but in the end only the residential building was built.

Construction began in 1952 and, following some interruptions, was completed in 1966. It is one of the largest buildings in Brazil.

The building's name is an acronym for its original developer, Companhia Pan-Americana de Hotéis e Turismo (Portuguese for "Pan-American Hotels and Tourism Company").

Copan's crazy numbers:

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edif%C3%ADcio_Copan

Currently, the building has 1,160 apartments, ranging from small studios to large three-bedroom units, and 2,038 residents, served by 20 elevators and 221 underground parking spaces. The ground floor is home to 72 businesses and establishments including (since the 1990s) an evangelical church, a travel agency, a bookstore, and 4 restaurants. Its site is 10,572.80 square meters (113,805 square feet) in area.

Due to the large number of residents, the Brazilian postal service assigned the building its own postal code ("CEP"): 01046-925. The current condominium has over 100 employees to serve residents and to conduct maintenance.

Niemeyer's original design contained a park outside the building, a second park in an open area of the first floor, and a roof-deck. The park outside is now used by a bank building; the first floor park and roof-deck are closed.

This art gallery is one of Copan's hidden gem.

Local bars and restaurants around it are packet with cool looking young people.

Us @ Copan

Another fantastic piece of architecture in São Paulo's old downtown is the Galeria do Rock, an old style shopping mall. It has this name because it used to have many rock related musical stores. Now it sells mostly sports clothing and accessories.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galeria_do_Rock

Galeria do Rock is a shopping mall located in the city of São Paulo. It was established in 1963, with the name of Shopping Center Grandes Galerias. Located between Rua 24 de Maio, 62 and Largo do Paissandu (Avenida São João), it has 450 shopping facilities, with predominance of rock, hip hop and other music-related stores, which sell records, apparel and tattoo studios. Galeria do Rock is also a musical performance venue, being a meeting place for urban tribes or subcultures in São Paulo.

A pause for lunch and a selfie with our lovely friend - and an amazing tour guide here - Fabricio.

It was very special do reconnect with him and relive our trip to São Paulo as journalist students back in the end of the last century! Thank you, Fa, for such a great day.

Another special and delicious place was the restaurant Leiteria Itá (Rua Do Boticário 31, São Paulo).

This PF (Prato Feito or Served Plate) was established in 1953 and serves the best homemade food in the city. It has a working class feel to it, with busy servers. It was a fantastic - and yummy - experience!

Mike enjoying his Feijoada Carioca and making friends with the local ladies.

Check out his big smile!

Another beautiful destination downtown is the train station Estação da Luz (Station of the Light).

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luz_Station

The station was built in the late 19th century with the purpose of being the headquartersof the newly founded São Paulo Railway. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was the main entrance to the city, a fact that gave it a major economic relevance, because the majority of the coffee from Santos was delivered in the station, along with the imported supplies. At the time of the station's construction in the mid-nineteenth century, the Luz neighborhood was characterized by a large embankment that connected the city's downtown area to the Grande Bridge. It also had a botanical garden, which was enlarged by the Governor João Teodoro Xavier de Matos, and would serve as the future home of Luz station.

Right beside Luz Station is the amazing Pinacoteca of São Paulo.

Beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful!

This was probably my favourite, with a amazing selection of Brazilian art, displayed by subject.

Fantastic!

The building itself is another breathtaking art piece.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinacoteca_do_Estado_de_São_Paulo

The Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (Portuguese for "pinacotheca (picture gallery) of the state of São Paulo") is one of the most important art museums in Brazil. It is housed in a 1900 building in Jardim da Luz, Downtown São Paulo, designed by Ramos de Azevedo and Domiziano Rossi to be the headquarters of the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts. It is the oldest art museum in São Paulo, founded on December 24, 1905, and established as a public state museum since 1911.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinacoteca_do_Estado_de_São_Paulo

The Pinacoteca houses one of the largest and most representatives Brazilian art collections, mainly noted for its vast assemblage with more than ten thousand pieces of art covering mostly the history of Brazilian painting in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is also noteworthy the Brasiliana Collection, a collection composed by foreign artists actives in Brazil or inspired by the country iconography, the Nemirovsky Collection, with an ample and expressive collection of masterpieces of Brazilian modernism and, recently, the Roger Wright Collection, received by the institute in January 2015.

Familia, 1935

Candido Portinari

WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candido_Portinari

Candido Portinari (December 29, 1903 – February 6, 1962) was a Brazilian painter. He is considered one of the most important Brazilian painters as well as a prominent and influential practitioner of the neo-realism style in painting.
Portinari painted more than five thousand canvases, from small sketches to monumental works such as the Guerra e Paz panels, which were donated to the United Nations Headquarters in 1956. Portinari developed a social preoccupation throughout his oeuvre and maintained an active life in the Brazilian cultural and political worlds.

Portinari again. I am obsessed by his work!

Candido Portinari

Retirantes (Migrants), 1958

Tarsila do Amaral

Antropofagia, 1929

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/tarsila-do-amaral-anthropophagy-antropofagia

A pioneer of Brazilian modernism and a trailblazing figure in Latin America, Tarsila do Amaral is acclaimed for her richly colored paintings that fused European avant-garde aesthetics with local iconography. Her work has been celebrated around the world, and received a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2018. Tarsila left her native São Paulo for Paris in 1920, studying under cubist figures like Fernand Léger and André Lhote in the French capital. The following decade marked a prolific period of production as she returned to Brazil to explore her heritage. During this period, Tarsila painted her iconic Abaporu (1928), which inspired the Manifesto Antropófago, a call for Brazil to break from its colonial past and assert its own cultural identity; it sold for $1.4 million in 1995. Tasila’s early works have since been auctioned for as much as $20 million, as paid by the MoMA to acquire A Lua (1928). A 1931 trip to the Soviet Union inspired a turn to more sociopolitical works, but Tarsila returned to her signature landscapes in the 1950s.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinacoteca_do_Estado_de_São_Paulo

The Pinacoteca origins takes you back to the criation of the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts of São Paulo. This one is a result of a context of intense social, political and economic changes that took place in São Paulo at the second half of the 19th century. The then province, which remained quite discreet until the 1870s, was transmuting, boosted by the coffee cycle expansion and the rail transport settlement. The country was receiving extensive flow of immigrants (intensified after the slavery abolitionism), that allowed meaningful transformations, embracing from the material culture and eating habits to the recently developed forms of socialization. The urban centers were becoming more modern and denser. In the city of São Paulo, the net worth accumulated by the coffee producers were reinvested in the newly industry. Brand new buildings were built and the rammed earth technique was taking the brickwork place. Noble neighborhoods were built to house the manor houses and palaces of the coffee barons, following the European architectural standards, marked by eclecticism. More numerous were the working-class neighborhoods that emerged, rapidly expanding the urban core.

Fa and I going for an Instagram moment (haha) at Parque da Luz (Light Park).

The Pinacoteca has expanded in the last year and inaugurated the Pina Contemporrânea across from the main building. The new space has two galleries created to exhibit contemporary art. just cross the street, through the beautiful Luz Park and visitors can use the same ticket as the Pinacoteca.

Artwork: Tríade Trindade

Artista: Tunga

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunga_(artist)

Antonio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão (February 8, 1952 – June 6, 2016), known professionally as Tunga, was a Brazilian sculptor and performance artist. Tunga was born in Palmares, Pernambuco, Brazil.

He died in Rio de Janeiro on June 6, 2016, at the age of 64 after battling cancer for several years.

The Art Newspaper called him "One of Brazil's best-known contemporary artists." As early as he knew the Brazilian modernism he began his career in 1970 by making sculptures and drawings.

In 1974 he completed a course in architecture and urbanism at Santa Ursula University, in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2005, Tunga became the first contemporary artist to exhibit his work at the Louvre in the museum's history during an installation called "A la Lumiere des Deux Mondes" ("The Meeting of Two Worlds"). One of Tunga's favorite practices was drawing, and he made his first solo show in 1974 at Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro entirely dedicated to this medium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSPfpmb_xOE

Minhocão by sunset.

What a great idea!

Nothing more São Paulo than reclaiming urban spaces and turn it into entertainment.

This overpass turn into a big playground on evenings and weekends for locals who have to put up with loud cars, pollution and stress due to traffic otherwise.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minhocão_(São_Paulo)

The Minhocão, officially "Via Elevada Presidente João Goulart", is a 3.5-kilometre (2.2-mile) elevated highway in São Paulo, Brazil. The highway was inaugurated in 1971 as Elevado Presidente Costa e Silva; its name was changed in 2016 after a law was passed changing names of all streets honoring people involved with the Brazilian military dictatorship. The road is named after the minhocão, a quasi-fictitious earthworm-like creature.

The highway is closed to car traffic between 20:00 and 07:00 on weekdays and all day on Saturdays/Sundays, allowing dedicated use by pedestrians and cyclists. Local urban planners have long advocated tearing down the road in order to promote urban renewal.

I love this couple at the window, watching life goes by in what would've been a depressing setting for many people in developed countries.

Here, this is what they've got. This is what they have to work with. This is their option. And they take this with pride, with beauty, with melancholy - and why not? - with love.

Enjoying the sunset together in the concrete jungle.