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Elements to bear in mind on Ponce architecture

Jorge Ortiz Colom, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquea, Ponce office / November 2007 PONCES BUILT FORM city and buildings - reflect multiculturalism and an open, progressive view of the world. This is particularly important in the mixture of vernacular and cultivated forms and details and the blending of local and imported materials. Ponce was Puerto Ricos commercial center for the important export industry of semi-processed agricultural products: dry coffee beans (shipped raw or roasted) and brown or muscovado sugar. It is climatically appropriate, with a use of lowtemperature-burned brick masonry and wood, both native mostly in structure and imported in sheathing. The use of balconies and enclosed galleries, high ceilings with an airspace between it and the (generally tin) roofs and the design of doors and windows are all specific responses to a hot, semidry climate at a time of lack of easily tappable energy sources.

Representative buildings and types


Ponce architecture is characterized by elements like:
Vernacular gingerbread house in the northern part of the city center

Vernacular predominance between 1825 approx. to 1900, using mostly local wood, mampostera or brick, generally rectangular or Lshapes, high hip or side gable roofs (the latter with distinct ventilating grilles in wood slats). This style continued as a subordinate tendency up to ca. 1920. Usually the interior is 3 rooms wide with a central living space flanked by bedrooms, or 2 wide with one side for public space and the other one for bedrooms. Some of these are absorbed great houses of estates that were cultivated hard up against the town. Cultured tradition by several known architects and engineers, in many cases designing upon the vernacular interior schemes. Neoclassical was the prevalent language and its exuberance is evident for example in Manuel Domnechs Carlos Armstrong House (1899). Some designers like engineer Blas Silva and architect Alfredo Wiechers however develop alternate plan distributions. Wiechers was greatly influenced by Catalan modernisme (many wealthy residents of the city were in fact of Catalan origin), and other architects also used modernista-inspired detailing specially in faades, balconies and mediopuntos (ornamental interior screens subdividing the main living space). This type of building prevailed between 1880 and 1920 in the more central locations. Pattern-book plans using American models and inspiration in bungalows and Anglo-American arts and crafts details. Usually built in imported wood and concrete. Some are visible in residential sectors of downtown and others in sections like the Mariani residential subdivision (inner suburb) southwest of downtown. This was prevalent between 1920-1950. Art Deco and Art Moderne in many areas used in all genera of building. Simultaneous use of Spanish Revival mostly for residential. (1930-1960) Monumental traditions, mostly neoclassical, for the significant buildings in town. As Ponce grew, many stylistic traditions were tried. There is no stylistic uniformity in Ponce comparable with that of San Juan and its overriding colonial-neoclassical theme.

2 Spatial traits:
Though the houses define street walls with great effect, they are in fact detached and party walls between interior spaces are rare unlike the case of Old San Juan. The most common spatial distribution in older Creole houses (up to 1920) is access from the street by a wide faade-length veranda to a central living room. This center-hall organization, probably derived from vernacular European origins was modified for the tropics. This hall became a large living space, often two with a more private and familiar one on the back (known usually as the antesala or anteroom because

Mediopunto type partition in former beach house (ca. 1915) moved to the La Alhambra inner suburb later

it used to be the access in 2-story houses once the horizontal throw of the stairs was factored in). These living rooms were separated first by a wall and later on by a sometimes exuberant wooden partition known as a mediopunto (halfway point), made with different details of lathed, molded, or jig sawed pieces, sometimes also hiding cupboards and other storage. Flanking on one or both sides, enfilade, the bedrooms, normally interconnected among themselves for more privacy. These had no built-in closets: clothing was Criollo house in brick and wood-metal roof behind parapet: stored in so-called roperos, i.e. cabinets the two center doors on balcony open to the living space with perches for hanging clothes inside. Ceilings were very high to allow hot air to move up outside the comfort zone of occupants. Narrower houses will be two rooms wide with one side dedicated to bedrooms and the other to public living spaces. Two-room width houses are arranged on the lot to attempt to orient the bedrooms to the east. This reduces solar gain on them so theyre fresher in the evenings and also helps by using the early sunlight as a means to wake up the residents. There were several twin (duplex) houses too. Most of these houses will have an utilitarian extension to the back known as a martillo or hammer, where in many cases the kitchen, pantry, servants quarters, laundry and other working spaces of the house are located, conveniently placed next to the rear yard. Rear yards in houses are in most cases utilitarian, and they normally house herb gardens, fruit trees, clotheslines and implements. Few are conceived as ornamental and decorative though some have been converted to the latter functions after renovations. Later houses have a decisive influence of Anglo-American pattern books and bungalow forms possibly brought from the Lesser Antilles. They may be either asymmetrical or rectangular in plan. Many will have center aisles with rooms on either side; these aisles would connect the living space with dining and

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kitchen oriented to the back of the house. These houses of the 1890-1940 period would coexist with architect-designed models, though even the latter would respect in many cases vernacular floor plan organization and others like many by Alfredo Wiechers and some houses by Blas Silva would organize the spaces around a longitudinal circulation space running through the rear of the house. The presence of substantial verandas (balcones) is a common denominator of Ponces domestic landscape making it present in the city. Essential to the balcn's success is its relation and transition to inside space. The balcn on criollo houses is above all a living space, occupable for extended periods. Its regular and rhythmic composition reinforced the symmetry of traditional center-hall houses, and on one-story versions, it was part of a spatial sequence from the public to the intimate, culminating in the sala or main living room. On upper stories, balcones were widened - they were no longer mere lookouts like the Mediterranean-style galleries that exist in Old San Juan, Gallery with fixed wood louvers in but usable platforms where life could go on with a view to the martillo (ell) extension of house world beneath. In Ponce, these works of architectural art were built with molded/lathed hardwood, cast iron (sometimes imported) or brick or concrete pillars, with a shed roof covering. Trim could be cast iron, molded or jig sawed wood; often fancily decorative. In any case, the separation between verandas and interiors was effected with double doors with operable shutter panels, which could be placed in several positions to control visibility and ventilation, substituting the more elementary plank doors used beforehand. Operable shutters were incorporated inside the panels, and the postigo (a small hinged panel covering the shutters) retained to access them. Doors were almost always set in pairs and small panes of glass for lighting, or additional holes for ventilation, or both, were incorporated. In many cases, they now ornamented facades. Transoms on top of these doors took on decorative qualities - there were versions in operable glass, wood slats, and fancy jigsawed fretwork. Galleries to the side and rear patios were also ample, and a particular characteristic of the ones in Ponce is the presence of fixed wooden louvers to control the regions intense sunlight. (In many other towns even in the South these galleries to the back were open.) The public/private transition expressed by verandas (balcones), with its clear outside wall articulation, would survive the introduction of reinforced concrete, standardized North American softwood and even the importation of new architectural Balcony details with operable transom, slats on double doors and shiplap facing of front walls styles like Art Deco/Moderne and Spanish Revival between 1925 and 1950. Concrete solutions timidly realized the new forms of plastic expression that this material could render. In most early cases, brick was retranslated into the new material: adding new details such as decorative glass mosaic

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inlays or the use of more abstract geometries, or decorative Spanish tiles. After 1910, the main access door to the living room was frequently encased in a surround of geometrical wood-and-frosted-glass designs, following presumably new domestic designs derived from American pattern books. Cottages with hip or gable or complex roofs broke the staid symmetry of precedent center-living-room schemes. Prefabricated ornamental concrete balusters and railings were used not only on these new houses, and also were refitted on more traditional designs. There is also a proletarian vernacular seen in small imported-pine wooden houses (1900 onwards) with balconies facing the street and a rectangular plan. Common in the western, northern and southeastern edges of the city, their front- or side-gable roofs and columned concrete balconies sometimes give these the appearance of small temples, which raised from the sidewalk and multiplied along the street fronts create a particular and unique landscape of elegant transparency.
This part of Molina Street is a row of pine-wood houses for workers and artisans fringed with verandas and raised on concrete bases, defining a very special urban form.

To get privacy virtually all houses are lifted at least 1 m (3 ft) from the street,

so both privacy and street borne dust were controlled. Besides the rest of the house was lifted from the ground to improve ventilation and avoid vermin. This was done with hardwood or brick-pillar stilts, or with brick or rubble walls. At the front faade, this elevation was sealed off by a wall, almost always of hard material and sometimes decorated with moldings and ventilation holes. In some situations, these bases acquired considerable height and could become veritable basements. Many of the smaller, rectangular houses were jacked up to create a new ground floor beneath that could be used for commerce, accessory apartments, or storage of vehicles. House moving, according to many chronicles and oral histories, was also quite common.

Mixture of residential and commercial buildings on Cristina Street showing the diversity of Ponces urban building. Note how the large verandas consolidate a peculiar streetscape.

Ponce also had commercial buildings of wood, brick or (later) concrete frame, the latter two types made similar to the ordered, austerely detailed structures in San Juan, with regularly spaced double doors of solid wood planks or metal plate, but the proportions, detailing and roofs were different. Many had geometric or neoclassical details sometimes with some flair, and roofs were frequently of wood frame. On the upper portions of the wall, the use of

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oculi for ventilation even when closed, often detailed with moldings and decoration, helped move stale air out of the storage space. Imported cast-iron internal columns were used in some of the larger buildings, but more common were arched interior structural walls or hardwood frames jointed with complex mortises and pegs. Mixed buildings are quite common on several sections of the city: a Creole house riding on top of a commercial space. Access stairs to the houses were mostly to the side, some covered and others open in roughly equal proportions. Many buildings in central Ponce were hotels, a major building use seen in late 19th century Puerto Rican towns. Since any intercity trip could be an all-day ordeal on rutty roads or sailing along the shore, visitors, even casual, stayed at these hostelries, some purpose-built with individual rooms, others converted residences. Basic, cheap rooming with no extra amenities was the offer. These small hotels withered away after the 1950s and the improvement of land transport. Only a few like the (extensively rebuilt) Meli and the Blgica remain, this time around catering to tourists from outside Puerto Rico or locals that want a short change of venue. Ponce has its share of landmarks and open spaces: the three-nave, vaulted, twin-towered Cathedral was begun in the 1830s and the present neoclassical faade Hotel on Marina Street, one of many built for housing dates from a refurbishment by Francisco itinerant travelers when transport was difficult. Porrata-Doria in 1930. The City Hall, in austere colonial-neoclassical form, originally was begun in the mid-19th century and like many others of its type; it had a jail on the ground floor. Near the river there is an 1849 Infantry Barracks, a massive 2-story courtyard building that later on was the citys second jail. Northward from the plaza stand the Marketplace with a Finnish-made iron structure in the inside and nowadays surrounded with a brick gallery, originally in neoclassical style, later rendered in 1937 with the present Art Deco idiom by architect Pedro Mndez and the institutionally neoclassic Tricoche Hospital (1880s). The La Perla Theater was originally built in 1864 as an elegant venue with a Corinthian-porticoed faade and a horseshoe configuration: it was wrecked in the October 1918 earthquake. The present building, with the recycled column capitals, dates from 1941 and was also designed by Porrata-Doria. The Cathedral splits the main plaza in two; the northern side known as Las Delicias The Delights was a rectangular fenced esplanade, used for social promenades, courting eligible young ladies, and meeting friends; the southern side was less defined and used for military drills and civic exercises. In 1882 a major fair and exposition was held inside the square: behind the Cathedral a wooden exhibition pavilion, a Moorish fancy in red and black (the citys colors) was designed by military engineer Mximo Meana; and an Arab Kiosk in iron was installed in the southern plaza. The following year, the wooden pavilion was converted into a firehouse
Art Deco theater possibly by Pedro Mndez on Victoria Street.

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and used by Ponces volunteer firemen for decades. It still stands as a major attraction to the city it is a museum about Ponces fire brigades - and a distinct symbol of its identity. Firemen in Ponce are an indelible part of city lore: on January 25, 1899, several of them, disobeying orders not to go there, entered an American gunpowder warehouse which was burning and stamped out the flames in time to avoid much of the city blowing up! Though firstly punished, the sanctions were later lifted and the brave firemen honored. A small obelisk on the southern square remembers the saga. (And there is a group of vernacular houses painted in the city colors west of downtown, assigned to retired firemen. This area known as 25 de Enero has been primorously restored.) Alas, the Arab Kiosk was pulled down in the 1930s and substituted with the Fountain of the Lions, honoring the citys symbolic animal. A replica was built in 1993 further to the south in the site of the Damas Hospital, a 19th century building Las Delicias square in its heyday as a promenade: the inconsiderately razed in 1975. band used to play in the middle while gentlemen and ladies
looped around in opposite directions.

To the south on the beginning of busy Hostos Avenue stands the Holy Trinity Episcopal (Anglican) Church, authorized in 1873 and for many years the only non-Roman Catholic temple under the Spanish flag. The original structure (1874) was a prefabricated iron building supposedly donated by Queen Victoria of England. It was replaced in 1926 by the present Mission-revival building. After American occupation, and freedom of worship, a slew of Protestant churches were erected. Antonin Nechodomas two Methodist temples in a Mission-Gothic mixture show impressive wood roofs and compo stone (site-formed concrete stone ashlars) walls. Other landmarks were built following American occupation: Francisco Porrata-Dorias two banks on the main square (1924), with Egyptian colossal orders and a neo-Mannerist attitude to faade composition; the Roman-temple-inspired Aurora No. 7 Masonic Lodge (1916) on a design by Alfredo Wiechers; several 1930s abandoned theaters in the Art Deco form by Pedro Mendez and others; and the schools. Though a school building had been built in Vives Street in 1894, only after 1900 would these educational structures become a significant part of the landscape. Possibly the most magnificent is Adrian Finlaysons Ponce High School of 1918, with an impressive monumental portico of Doric columns. It boasts its own theater and it has been rehabilitated in quite acceptable form. Smaller Neoclassical and Mission style schools dot the town but most are not as well kept.

The city form


The historic area is all built up as a grid with extensions up to 1960. Expansion began in earnest around 1860 when the blocks north of the plaza, where the marketplace was sited, were built up by expansion plans devised by Felix Vidal dOrs, which was of Catalan origin. By the late 19th century the city again expanded several blocks west and northwestward, engulfing the original cemetery located six blocks northwest of the plaza. The cemetery was moved over a kilometer westward, opening the former Molina estate (whose house still stands on the corner of the Simon de la Torre Street with Reina Street). Additional expansions occurred in this manner up to the eve of the Second World War with the Mariani district which meshes with the older parts of town and La Alhambra, a collection of Spanish Revival, Art

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Deco and Art Moderne houses across the river. The frequent use of chamfered corners, mandated since the 1880s, is noteworthy within the historic district. This improved traffic flow and visibility at corners but also gave emphasis to the intersection as a locus of social interchange as usually chamfers were the main entrances to houses and above all commercial buildings located there. The harborside settlement known as the Playa was built as an outlet for import-export trade. The city proper was safely ensconced inland, out of foreign navies easy reach. It has two main sectors: the warehouses large, rectangular and high-ceilinged - made mostly in brick dating from 18451900 and the vernacular houses of the dock workers. The warehouses have mampostera and brick exteriors with large, double doors of wood plank often covered with iron sheeting; and usually open interiors punctuated by wood, iron, brick or concrete columns. There is a neoclassical customhouse, still used for this purpose; and adjacent to it the brick footings of a large open pavilion used as a temporary deposit for recently disembarked products where they were revised by customs agents. Many warehouses opened towards the sandy, irregular seashore punctuated by short wooden docks where small boats and tenders would transfer cargo and passengers to the ships that had to wait offshore because the harbor was undredged.

1898 map of the urban area showing the center, the Playa and the cane fields between them.

Offshore on two islands the harbor had two lighthouses: one at the flat Cardona islet that directed ships in the inner harbor; and another (visible from the coast) at Caja de Muertos (Coffin) Island, an impressive limestone outcropping in the Caribbean waters, Interior of a warehouse in the Playa harborside settlement which was indispensable to guide coastal with a braced hardwood internal structure. This particular steamers and sailing vessels around the example is now an artists atelier. southern coasts treacherous reefs and banks. These lighthouses were square buildings made in brick and mampostera with tall brick towers accessible from the inside of the keepers residence, thus protected from the foul weather of the hurricane season. The French-made brass housings for the Fresnel-lens lamps have been lost or severely vandalized, though. (There is a lamp in relatively good shape at the Maunabo lighthouse, on the mainland 60 miles to the east; the lens and tower are, however, still off-limits to visitors as of this writing.)

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Between harbor and town two miles inland, the road now known as Hostos Avenue was a heavily trafficked umbilical cord, traversed by a horse (later electric) trolley and which passed through a brief landscape of cane fields and estates which presented the importance of sugarcane to the citys prosperity. Lastly the hill behind the citys center, named El Viga (The Sentry) was barely populated with some shanties on the lower reaches and further on top, a wooden mast with a cross brace that permitted stringing flags of the nations of visiting ships. A sentry would scan the harbor from there with glasses and raise the appropriate flags: though mostly Spanish and American, there were British, French, Dutch, Hanseatic (pre-Bismarckian Germany) and South American, too. After 1920 the Viga hill would feature an access road from downtown and large houses in Bungalow and Spanish Revival styles would grace the mountain as a privileged habitat for the upper crust. Shortly after 1960 the International Style Ponce Inter-Continental Hotel would be the first luxurious modern hostelry in town. Other places to see with enough time on historic Ponce include the remains of the first urban aqueduct built in Puerto Rico ca. 1880 (nearly two decades before San Juans), the Old Adjuntas road, graced with many early 20th century bungalow-style summer houses, and which runs past the restored Buena Vista Hacienda coffee estate (itself worth its own trip); several rectangular brick road keeper houses; remains of coffee and sugar estates, some of them neglected and wistful ruins; traces of the cultural landscape of sugarcane (rail track rights-of-way, the Mercedita sugarmill complex, dry irrigation channels some as majestic as Roman aqueducts) and that of coffee.

About 7 kilometers northeast of the center, this arched bridge takes a 19th-century abandoned irrigation channel over a creek. Remains of the cultural landscape of agriculture are to be found abundantly near Ponce.

Many important Pre-Columbian sites have been uncovered in the last 30 years in Ponces immediate vicinity. One of them, the Tibes Ceremonial Center, a complex of stone-flanked ceremonial courts for the ritual ballgame of batey - barely 5 kilometers north of town and dated from 500 AD onwards - is a historic park. It was discovered by accident after a severe flood in 1980. Ponce boasts the oldest site in Puerto Rico, Maruca (ca. 3000 BC) now covered after mitigation with a standard-issue shopping mall; while the recently reevaluated PO29 (Jcana) site on the foothills to the north seems to be the first ever that reunites all the places and accoutrements, ritual and quotidian, of Pre-Columbian life. (PO29 is a bone of contention between government regulatory agencies and currently is not open to visitors.) To sum up, Ponce offers many diverse historical surprises: a true cross section of Puerto Rican society as a complex mix of cultures and traditions that await further research to interpret the book of its rich heritage. Ponces material culture represents the Caribbean as a cultural crossroads of the world.

jo / Revised Oct. 31, 2007 by Jorge Ortiz Colom (author)

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