The market began modestly. In 1888 the Devoto brothers proposed a supply market on land they had bought in the Balvanera neighbourhood, conveniently set beside the Sarmiento railway and midway between the produce-growing zones at either end of the city. The first covered section opened in 1893 - a mere 1,300 square meters. But Buenos Aires was swelling with European immigrants by the hundreds of thousands, and the market grew with the hunger of the city, adding refrigerated storage, an ice factory, stables, and retail annexes. By the early 1930s the old halls could no longer cope. The answer was the building that still stands: a soaring Art Deco market completed in 1934, its great vaulted bays of reinforced concrete among the boldest engineering in Argentina at the time. The architects - José Luis Delpini, Viktor Sulčič, and Raúl Bes - were the same team that designed La Bombonera, the legendary home stadium of Boca Juniors. They built for the masses, whether the crowd came for cabbages or for football.

No story of this neighborhood survives contact with Carlos Gardel for long, because his presence is everywhere in it. He grew up around the market, absorbed its working-class swagger, and rose to become the defining performer of tango-canción - the tango as song - his recordings and films carrying the genre across the world before his death in a 1935 plane crash. Argentines crowned him with nicknames: El Morocho del Abasto and El Zorzal Criollo, the Creole Songbird. In 1927 he bought a house nearby on Jean Jaurès street for his mother, Berta Gardés, and lived there until 1933; today that house is a museum devoted to his life. On the Zelaya passage close by, the facades of houses are painted with his lyrics and his portrait, and the underground station that serves the area carries his name. To walk the Abasto is to walk through a permanent, open-air homage to a single voice.

Markets, like songs, can end. On 14 October 1984 the city moved its central produce trade to a new Mercado Central beyond the city limits, and the great hall fell quiet. For more than a decade the building stood abandoned - a monumental Art Deco shell in the middle of a living neighborhood, too grand to demolish and too costly to use. It was a strange, suspended period: the engine that had organized the rhythms of an entire district, from the pre-dawn deliveries to the cafés that served the market workers, simply switched off. The neighborhood around it carried on, still called Abasto by everyone, still haunted by Gardel, but its namesake heart sat empty behind locked doors.

Rescue came in 1996, when the real estate company IRSA, led by Eduardo Elsztain, bought the derelict landmark. Rather than tear it down, the developers preserved its historic Art Deco facade and rebuilt the interior as a modern shopping center, which opened in 1998. Today escalators climb through the soaring concrete vaults the architects raised for produce wholesalers, past cinemas and Argentine brands. Some travelers find the transformation bittersweet - a temple of commerce reborn as a temple of commerce of a very different kind. But the building endures, and so does the neighborhood's identity. Step out of the mall and the Abasto is still Gardel's barrio: his house museum a few blocks away, his lyrics on the walls, his name on the station below. The crates are long gone. The song never left.