Calle Belleza
The street takes its name from an abstract concept proposed by the Postmen’s Cooperative Society of Affordable Housing while developing the Postmen’s Colony in La Guindalera. The cooperative suggested “Maximum Beauty,” a name that lost its adjective when it was entered in the municipal street registry in 1934.
The Postmen’s Cooperative Society of Affordable Housing was formed in 1922 to provide affordable homes for its members. It bought the old Huerta del Catalán, in La Guindalera, and built a hundred or so single-storey houses with gardens, in exposed brick and whitewashed walls, topped with Flemish-style stepped gables.
For years its streets remained unpaved. When development finally arrived, the cooperative proposed names for two of them that said what the postmen wanted their neighbourhood to be: “Maximum Kindness” and “Maximum Beauty.” The Council kept only the nouns, so in 1934 calle de la Bondad and calle de la Belleza entered the street map plain and unadorned. Anyone who reads them in sequence can still reassemble the original wish.
The same cluster holds other nods to the trade: calle del Doctor Thebussem, for Spain’s first honorary postman, and calle de Orcasitas, bearing the surname of that market garden’s owner.
Sources (7)
- Colonias históricas madrileñas — Arte en Madrid
- La Colonia de los Carteros — Por las calles de Madrid
- ¿Sabías que? Colonia de los Carteros — El salón de Cris
- La Colonia de los Carteros — Secretos de Madrid
- Enrique Martí Perla — Wikipedia
- Mariano Pardo de Figueroa. Doctor Thebussem. Cartero Honorario — Museo Postal y Telegráfico
- La Colonia de los Carteros — Gato por Madrid