Mexico City: Ring Around the Alameda

What?  Back in Mexico City?  Didn’t I finally leave in my last post?

Yes, but what with travel plans, travel, and sundry Internet outages this blog has fallen way behind, and I would be doing Mexico City and my local friend Brett Duel an injustice if I didn’t go back and fill in the excellent day we spent together knocking off a grand slam of further museums around the Alameda.

The Alameda is a large rectangular “park” downtown near the Historical Center; I put “park” in quotes because it’s so overly-interlaced with paths, missiled about with tall statues, colonized with happy parents and their multiplying spawn, and overshadowed by mighty and portentous buildings on all sides that it seems a mere frizz of pale green in the urban flux.  I met Brett at its largest feature, the pillared white marble semicircle devoted to Benito Juarez, who in death has risen even higher from his peasant origins to sit a lofty plinth, flanked by marble lions at the base, in company with two Gibson girls from the kind of Art Nouveau afterlife that makes me wish I’d been a famous statesman.

I’m such a sucker for allegorical Art Nouveau Gibson Girls

The Semicircle below

From eternal posthumous grandeur we went straight to eternal posthumous grieving.  We started with the Memory and Tolerance museum, the institution devoted to human genocides.  (I had been there before but bought the wrong ticket and missed the main exhibits; Brett had never been.)  The main exhibit was about the Holocaust, and the museum’s presentation was very...I suppose the right word is effective.  I would encourage anyone to go.  Photographs were permitted and I had my camera ready, but I took no shots, partly because the rooms were deliberately dark, partly because the most powerful elements of the display were already photographs.  Some you’ve seen, many you haven’t.  These precious documents of heartlessness beyond comprehension were such that Brett and I wondered whether the photographers themselves had to be equally heartless to press the shutter, or great-hearted beyond consequence.  At any rate we can only thank them.

The museum then had rooms for other genocides, from Armenia to Rwanda to Nicaragua, driving home a message that we’ve learned nothing, a message emphasized by the final “Tolerance” section which was decidedly weak, we agreed, basically paintings of smiling faces.

Emerging back into the sun, at least, of our tainted world, we recovered with lunch at a local Mexican landmark, the “first Sanborn’s store,” whose café fills the courtyard of a 16th Century mansion.  I had an excellent Monte Cristo sandwich between the oddly dissonant murals of peacock gardens from circa 1900.

From there we turned another corner of the Alameda and went to the Franz Meyer art museum.  They had an exhibit on the parallels of 16th Century Japanese and Mexican art, which featured a rank of Japanese suits of armor, plus permanent exhibits of colonial-era furniture, ceramics, silverworks and (entertainingly) snuffboxes.

One enters the museum from a courtyard shared by the Parroquia de la Santa Veracruz, a colonial church rather dramatically affected by Mexico City’s swampy subsoil.

We had rounded another corner of the Alameda en route to our next stop, the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, when we stumbled across a church hosting an exhibit of Theo Jansen’s “strandbeests!"  I knew these well from the Internet but had never seen one.  Jansen himself wasn’t present, but they had two of his “beests” set up indoors with a wide gallery to “walk” in and an air compressor to animate them.  Alas we had missed the last demonstration by twenty minutes, and had to be satisfied with the one outdoors that walked when pushed by happy children.  It went a long way to salvaging the notion of moral progress.

The Diego Rivera Mural Museum is a gallery literally constructed to hold a single artwork, Rivera’s mural titled “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central,” an everybody-into-the-pool kind of mural with hundreds of figures from throughout history (and Rivera’s family), explained by a helpful numbered guide on a console at the back of the room.  The gallery was hosting a classical pianist as we entered, and we spent a few relaxing minutes enjoying the music and identifying the painted heads.

That completed our four-square circuit of the Alameda.  To cap off our afternoon Brett led me to a coffehouse called Café of the Great City, on the 9th floor of the Torre Latinoamerica skyscraper, where we sipped our drinks in the sun on the balcony in the wind-howling defile between skyscrapers, trying to keep our napkins on the table and admiring the view of the Palacio Belles Artes building below. 

The Palacio Belles Artes

Café of the Great City

It was a superb way to cap off my Mexico City month with sun, culture, profundity and friendship (not to mention coffee).  Thanks to Brett for escorting me through her town!