Calle Cuarta

The name hides no figure or anniversary. It is an order number, inherited from the layout of a workers' colony from the 1920s. Calle Cuarta was part of the group of streets that the Unión Eléctrica Madrileña opened to house its employees, one of the pieces of the Ciudad Jardín Alfonso XIII that grew on the former lands of Chamartín de la Rosa. The colony went up between 1920 and 1927 under the Cheap Housing Act. The model was the garden city: low, single-family homes surrounded by gardens and laid out on an orthogonal grid. On that chequerboard, the streets were labelled in sequence —⁠First, Second, Third, Fourth⁠— rather than given names of their own. Fragments of those villas survive among the blocks that later development added around them: a street still known by the place it held on a plan from a century ago.