Pereira Passos’s Great Reform: A “Paris of the Tropics” and Its Human Cost
Gustavo Luís de Aguiar Vasconcellos
When people speak of historic tangible cultural heritage, what often comes to mind—in the European context—are city walls, castles, fortified towns, and magnificent churches, many of them raised by the labor of enslaved people and serfs under Roman and feudal orders. Human blood was spilled behind many of the beautiful postcard images admired today.
In Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s Federal District, a similar process unfolded at the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time, Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos was determined to rid the territory under his administration of diseases associated, in the public imagination, with tropical and medieval scourges, such as yellow fever, bubonic plague, and smallpox, a disease then present throughout the world. Because of these afflictions, Rio de Janeiro was sadly known as the “City of Death” (Cidade da Morte).
Having studied in Paris, Pereira Passos had been deeply impressed by the works carried out by Baron Haussmann, who, in the mid-nineteenth century, revolutionized the architecture and urban design of the French capital. A civil engineer by training, Pereira Passos was determined to transform Rio de Janeiro, especially its commercial and economic center, into a “Paris of the Tropics,” free from the diseases that had stigmatized it.
Thus, in addition to supporting the public health physician Oswaldo Cruz in the compulsory smallpox vaccination campaign, Pereira Passos directed attention toward the tenements, old mansions, and colonial buildings where such diseases were believed to spread most easily, and where former enslaved people and a predominantly working-class population lived. These dwellings dominated the landscape of the city center.
In this way, Pereira Passos also began a large-scale demolition campaign against those buildings, in what may have been one of the largest episodes of mass displacement in the history of the Brazilian Republic. Around 1,600 structures were torn down to make way for an urbanization project defined by wide, airy, and clean avenues, such as Avenida Central, today Avenida Rio Branco.
At the heart of this process was the redevelopment of the Cinelândia area, where several buildings were erected, all in an eclectic architectural style. Among them were the Monroe Palace, a demountable structure that had won a pavilion competition in St. Louis, in the United States, and was reassembled in Rio in 1906, later serving as the headquarters of various political institutions until its demolition—considered by many a crime against cultural heritage—under the military dictatorship in 1976; the National Museum of Fine Arts, built between 1906 and 1908, originally to house the National School of Fine Arts, heir to the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, and later transformed, under Getúlio Vargas in 1937, into an actual museum inspired by the Louvre; the building that houses the National Library, constructed between 1905 and 1910 and home to the largest library in Latin America; and the Theatro Municipal, built between 1905 and 1909, modeled after Paris’s Palais Garnier and regarded as one of the most luxurious opera houses in the Americas.
Beyond these works, Rio de Janeiro has many other monumental buildings which, taken together, truly helped make—and still help make—the city a “Paris of the Tropics,” while the areas affected by the reforms underwent sanitation campaigns against the diseases that had plagued them. Around that time, Rio de Janeiro began to leave behind the nickname “City of Death” and to become celebrated as the “Marvelous City” (Cidade Maravilhosa).
But the human cost was high. The former residents, forcibly evicted from their homes by the Federal District police, had no public housing program to support them—or, if any such program existed, it was wholly insufficient. Most were forced to move in with relatives or to swell the ranks of the still-small favela population that was beginning to spread across the surrounding hills, giving rise to serious social problems that, unfortunately, persist to this day. Even now, many of these communities face public health problems and social vulnerabilities that reveal the lasting consequences of that model of urban modernization.
If monuments exist, they exist so that we may learn from them—not only chronology and architecture, but also humanity. The city center is beautiful. Yet behind that beauty lie stories of pain that must not be forgotten, even when we look upon it in all its splendor.