Calle de Francisco Navacerrada

In the late 1880s, developer Mariano Santos Pinela and architect Julián Marín began building a colony of terraced Neo-Mudéjar houses on Madrid’s eastern outskirts. They called it Madrid Moderno and set it beside La Guindalera, then almost open country. The project soon foundered: lawsuits with the council over missing permits dragged the venture into bankruptcy. Here the man who names the street enters. In 1893, the contractor Francisco Navacerrada Sánchez bought the 62 houses already standing, paid the outstanding municipal fines and commissioned the completion and expansion of the complex. That investor-contractor turned an urban failure into the first experiment in housing for workers and the lower middle class on the city’s eastern edge. The speculation of the 1970s razed nearly all the original villas, but anyone passing numbers 3 and 5 of the calle de Francisco Navacerrada still sees two survivors standing, with their exposed brick and their jutting glazed balcony leaning out over the pavement.