From its founding, Buenos Aires had a humiliating problem for a port city: the river was too shallow for big ships to dock. Cargo and passengers had to be ferried ashore on barges. In 1882 the national government hired the businessman Eduardo Madero to fix it, and construction of his enclosed system of docks ran from 1887 to 1897. It was an engineering landmark and an expensive one. It was also obsolete almost immediately. Within roughly ten years of completion, cargo ships had grown too large for Madero's basins, and the government turned to the engineer Luis Huergo, whose rejected earlier design for open, staggered docks now became the Puerto Nuevo that still works the river today. Madero's brand-new port slid into irrelevance before it had truly aged.

What followed was one of the great urban stalemates. By 1926 the new port had made Madero's docks redundant, and the zone decayed into one of the most degraded patches of the city, a no-man's-land of empty lots and crumbling warehouses pressed up against downtown. Planners could not leave it alone, yet could not agree what to do with it either. Proposals to redevelop or simply demolish the old port were floated in 1925, 1940, 1960, 1969, 1971, 1981, and 1985. Every one of them failed. For sixty years the most valuable undeveloped land in Buenos Aires sat in plain sight of the financial district, tangled in overlapping claims from the ports authority, the railways, and the national grain board, while nobody could break the deadlock.

The break finally came in November 1989, when the national and city governments signed the old port over to a single corporation charged with one job: urbanize it. Through the 1990s, foreign and local money poured in. The handsome brick warehouses along the west side were not torn down but recycled into lofts, offices, universities, and restaurants, their iron cranes left standing as ornaments. The 2000 opening of the Hilton anchored a wave of hotels and towers on the east side. Architects and designers of international stature, Norman Foster, Cesar Pelli, Philippe Starck, Calatrava, attached their names to the district. In barely a decade a derelict dockland had become one of the most successful waterfront revivals anywhere in the world.

Puerto Madero today is a forest of glass rising straight from the water, with residential and office towers reaching up to fifty stories along Dock 3. The tallest, the Alvear Tower, climbs 239 meters and ranks among the highest buildings in Argentina. Calatrava's white Puente de la Mujer stitches the east and west docks together, and the Fortabat art collection, opened in 2008 by the woman once reckoned the wealthiest in the country, sits among the wharves. One detail gives the neighborhood its particular character: every single street here is named after a woman, from the activist Azucena Villaflor to the Mapuche rights advocate Aime Paine. A district that spent a lifetime as the city's forgotten edge now carries, on every corner, the names of women Argentina had often overlooked too.