Qualla: Florida Street

Florida Street: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Goldberg, CC BY 2.0. Stand at the corner of Florida and Lavalle on a weekday afternoon and the crowd never quite stops moving. Shoppers, office workers, vendors, and a knot of onlookers around a tango couple dancing on the paving stones all share a street with no cars, just a river of people flowing the kilometer from the Plaza de Mayo to the parkland of Plaza San Martin. Florida Street has been a pedestrian thoroughfare in name since 1971, with stretches closed to traffic as far back as 1913, but the truth is older than that. People have been walking this exact line since 1580, when the founders of Buenos Aires cut a primitive path up the slope from the banks of the Rio de la Plata. The street has changed its name and its fortunes many times since. It has never stopped being where the city walks.

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Image: Chris Goldberg | CC BY 2.0

Florida Street: A Street With Many Names

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roberto Fiadone, CC BY-SA 3.0. Florida has been called many things. Its first official name, fixed by Governor Miguel de Salcedo in 1734, was San Jose. Locals knew it as the Calle del Correo, Post Street, for the post office at its southern end, and later as the Empedrado, the Cobbled Street, after boulders sh...

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Image: Roberto Fiadone | CC BY-SA 3.0

Florida Street: The Age of the Grand Stores

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richie Diesterheft, CC BY 2.0. The street became a shopping street in 1872, and in the decades that followed it dressed itself in the latest European fashion. Pharmacies, jewelers, and haberdashers gave way to something grander when the Parisian-inspired Bon Marche opened in 1889 as Florida's first large shopp...

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Image: Richie Diesterheft | CC BY 2.0

Florida Street: Frescoes and Famous Tables

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit popejon2 from Paddington, Australia, CC BY 2.0. The street's masterpiece survives at its northern end. Galerias Pacifico fills nearly an entire block, a monumental building raised in 1888 to house the Au Bon Marche shops and modeled on Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, with its cross-shaped passages and central glass dome...

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Image: popejon2 from Paddington, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Florida Street: Decline, Crowds, and Survival

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, CC BY 2.0. Florida has endured shocks that would have killed a lesser street. In 1953 a Peronist mob burned the aristocratic Jockey Club building that stood on the 500 block, which they saw as a fortress of anti-Peronism; the lot lay empty for more than two decades. The city's wealth drifte...

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Image: Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina | CC BY 2.0