Calle de los Artistas

Before the street there was the snack stop. On this land on the city’s edge, in the late nineteenth century, stood an open-air tavern known as “de los Artistas” for the trade workers who came to cool off between shifts at the building sites. When the street opened, it inherited the name of a place that no longer exists. The word “artistas” carried a meaning here that puzzles walkers today. In the building trade the architect was the “artist” and the bricklayer the “artisan,” the hand subordinate to someone else’s plan. So this is no street of painters or musicians, but of those who built Madrid as the city spilled northward. Artistas runs from the old carretera de Francia —⁠today Bravo Murillo⁠— toward the Cuatro Caminos junction. That quiet corner of mid-twentieth-century photos, with the Titanic building rising behind, has become a traffic-heavy thoroughfare. Of the tavern, not even the sign.