A hotel with a past

The Hotel Roosevelt, which abuts the Colonia Condesa on Avenida Insurgentes and Avenida Veracruz, opened its doors in  1938. Anecdotes about its past proliferate. Until the mid-1940s, there was a bullfight stadium located in walking distance. An arrangement was made in which the toreros were allowed to change into their bullfighting gear at the Roosevelt, and then march through the streets, parade-style, to the arena. Cubans swear that this is where Fidel and Che stayed while planning the revolution in the late 1950s. Actor Ignacio López Tarso recalled a friendly manager who allowed him to sleep on the roof in the 1950s, before he became a star of Mexican cinema.

By the early 1990s, the Roosevelt had acquired a seedy reputation. Some women who worked at a couple of notorious night spots in spitting distance, the Bar Jemma and Cherry's Bar, would take their clients to the hotel to exercise the world's oldest profession. Soon after, the clubs closed down and a new management took over. Rooms were renovated and the facade was changed (as was the hotel's reptuation). Over the summer, the facade was repainted -- how long will it remain that white? Today it is one of the very few modestly priced hotels in the area, a decidedly expensive neighborhood by Mexico City standards.

Stompin' at the Savoy

Prior to World War II, Mexico's greatest cultural influence came from France rather than the United States. In the early 20th century, many office buildings in the historic center of Mexico City were designed with commercial arcades that cut through the ground floor, an architectural innovation from the 1800s in Paris. Such arcades inspired an unfinished book of some thousand pages by Walter Benjamin, and were part of what inspired him to call Paris "the capital of the 19th century. "

This is one of the few such arcades that still survives downtown, on calle 16 de septiembre #6, almost at the corner of the Eje Central. Its offerings include a men's haberdashery, a cafe and, in the right-hand foreground, a branch of Mazapanes Toledo, which has prepared and sold marzipan candies since 1939.

In the back of the arcade is a movie theatre known as the Cine Savoy, which has been there since 1943. These days it caters to the sort of clientele, exclusively male, that tends to go to the cinema clad in raincoats, regardless of the weather. One of my favorite Mexican writers, J.M. Servín, has a chronicle about his visit to the Savoy in his delightful new book, D.F. Confidencial.

Making his bones

"La catrina" is the nickname name for the skeleton of a cadaver in Mexico, and I am not the first to notice that association between death in Mexico and "Katrina," the name of the hurricane that broke the levees in New Orleans. The well dressed gent above walked through the streets of the French Quarter Festival not long ago. But don't you think he would have been right at home in Mexico?

I get my favorite dish - fish

Soon after I arrived in Mexico City I was tipped off that the freshest and least expensive way to eat seafood was at marisquerías, informal fish restaurants that are often attached to markets. Among their specialties are oysters on the half shell, a mixed seafood cocktail called vuelve a la vida (back to life), and mojarras (a kind of sea bream, either whole or fileted) in garlic sauce or in a Veracruz sauce of olives, tomatoes, onions and capers.

But perhaps the nicest thing about marisquerías is their shamelessly gaudy decoration. This photo was taken at one in the San Ángel market on Avenida Revolución.

Viva

Independence Day is coming -- at 11 pm on September 15th, in various plazas around the country, politicians and citizens will gather for "el grito" -- the nationalistic rallying cry of "¡Viva México!" The next day, which is the actual independence day, no one goes to work.

What makes this year different from any other year? It is the 200th anniversary of Mexico's independence from Spain, and the 100th anniversary of the Revolution.

To mark the anniversary, President Calderón has used public funds to send every single Mexican household a flag like the one pictured in the above photo. As a result, people who sell Independence Day paraphernalia (like those in the first photo above), who tend to live pretty close to the margin, are selling a lot fewer flags than usual.

In the absence of reliable sources, this country is a rumor mill. With the idea that something big and bloody has to happen every hundred years or so, I have been hearing for a long time that armed guerrilla groups are going to make a big noise (or worse) during the public ceremonies. Somewhere. Maybe in Juárez, maybe in Monterrey, maybe in Morelia (in President Calderón's home state of Michoacán, where a grenade was thrown into Independence Day celebrations a couple of years ago, and a few people died). Perhaps in Mexico City's Zócalo, where President Calderón leads the festivities. Last year in San Francisco I met a man who claimed to be a Zapatista, who said they have "plans" for this year.

I wonder whether or not it's a mistake to wait for the 16th. Perhaps the hundred-year annual mess has already happened. When you think of the 28,000 or so dead as a result of Calderón's drug war, and the absolute chaos and lack of rule as a result of this violence, I would posit that we are already living through our hundredth annual bloody mess.