MAZATLAN, Mexico
-- At 9:30 a.m., Mazatlans Plazuela Machado is coming alive. A
slim, middle-aged man is bringing out wooden tables and chairs from
the Altazor restaurant and coffee bar, a university-run enterprise
with great breakfasts at good prices.
Students carrying
tubas and trombones walk across the plaza, heading toward a stately
19th-century building at the northeast tip of the square that
houses an opera house and the municipal arts college.
At the edges of
the plaza, other restaurants and bars -- such as Pedro y Lola and
the Pacific Cafe -- are popping up, along with a handful of art
galleries like NidArt, just down the block from the opera
house.
In fact, the
whole area has a brand new look: Expensive architectural lighting
was turned on for the first time in the square this summer, just in
time for the crush of U.S. and Canadian snowbirds who flock to the
area each fall and winter.
Downtown Old
Mazatlan is being gentrified, but much of the effort is being
guided by a forward-thinking group of volunteer engineers,
architects and entrepreneurs calling themselves the Centro Proyecto
Historico, or Historical Project Center.
As a Mexico
travel veteran who first visited Mazatlan in 1973, I didnt find it
hard to like the renaissance going on around this little plaza, or
plazuela, which was built by European immigrants, a fact that makes
many Mazatlan residents very proud.
A busy
seaport
Mazatlans history
is quite different from the rest of Mexicos. A small seaport town
in the early 19th century, it had a population of just 2,000 back
in 1820.
But that soon
changed, thanks to its location as the last harbor before San
Francisco for ships coming from New York. In those days, ships had
to sail around the tip of South America to reach
California.
The ships were
mostly laden with men from Germany, Ireland and Italy. Revolutions
in Europe kept them coming to New York, and the gold rush enticed
them west. Some hopped ship in Mazatlan, tired of the long journey,
while others returned once Californias gold rush had sputtered
out.
As a result,
Mazatlan was booming by the 1850s, with five opera houses, one for
the German population alone. The Old Mazatlan we know today,
including the grand circa-1875 city cathedral with its twin yellow
belltowers, dates from that era.
The oldest
building on Plazuela Machado, the Portales de Canobbio -- the width
of a block, 
with an impressive row of arches
-was built in 1846 by an Italian family named Canobbio who lived
upstairs and ran a general store below.
Today, it houses
the Museo Casa Machado, which features a 19th-century collection of
French and Austrian furniture, home decorations and antiques
brought over by Mazatlans soon-to-be-wealthier families.
Mazatlans
French heritage
Mazatlans French
heritage stems from Frenchmen who served in the army of Mexicos
short-term, Austrian-born Hapsburg emperor, Maximilian, in the
mid-1860s.
Mazatlecos take
great pride in an 1864 battle -- on a beach not far from the
Plazuela Machado -- in which residents firing cannons repelled an
attack from the French battleship La Cordierre, sending most of the
foreign forces packing.
Each year, on the
Saturday before Ash Wednesday, the battle is re-created as part of
pre-Lenten Carnival celebrations. Fireworks are shot from a ship at
sea, and a response is fired from the hillside where rusty cannons
from the battle still stand.
Other reminders
of Mazatlans French heritage are in the Hotel Playa Mazatlan, where
many of the wait staff hail from a mountain town called Macias.
Many of the 19th-century French troops took up residence in the
countryside there when the call for withdrawal came from
Paris.
The architecture
of the Centro district around Plazuela Machado has a definite
French accent. According to Don Antonio Haas, a respected town
elder and the first Mexican to attend Harvard, the style could be
described as neoclassical or what he calls neotropical
architecture. For me, it evoked the French Quarter of New
Orleans.
Don Antonio is
credited with saving the citys French-inspired opera house through
his writings and oration.
Now, Mazatlans
newest generation of movers and shakers has turned to the U.S. for
help in preserving the 50-square-block district, with 479 buildings
of historical interest, around Plazuela Machado, which in 2001 was
declared a national monument by Mexicos federal
government.
Preserving the past
Alfredo Gomez
Rubio, director of the Historical Project Center, spent the fall of
2002 in Washington at the Main Street Institute, an organization
responsible for the makeover and revitalization of more than 400
town centers in the U.S. and Canada.
There, Rubio
attended classes on the arts of community building, working with
the media and fund-raising. Upon his return to Mazatlan, he helped
establish an association with a board of directors and a host of
volunteer committees.
Although the
Historical Project Center is new, citizens like Elaine Kemp have
been struggling for a long time to bring pride back to the historic
neighborhood.
Kemp, born in Los
Angeles but a Mazatlan resident since she was a young girl, is the
editor and founder of Viejo Mazatlan, a free monthly newspaper.
Written in Spanish but also translated into English, every article
is about historical aspects of old town, the Plaza Machado Square
and the people who once lived there.
For more on
Plazuela Machado and Mazatlan, contact the Mexico Tourism Board at
(800) 44-MEXICO or (800) 446-3942, or go to www.visitmexico.com.
To contact
the reporter who wrote this article, send e-mail to [email protected].