Calle de Marcelina

A first name alone, with no surname to dignify it, is enough to fill the sign. Behind it is Marcelina Sánchez, who ran a street stall in this corner of old Tetuán and who, for reasons no one can now pin down, became well known among those living around her. The street has borne her name since 1929, when these plots were not yet part of Madrid and the district grew on its own terms. That familiarity explains an oddity of the map. Across the whole city there are barely forty streets bearing only a person’s first name, and almost all cluster in the old outskirts: Tetuán, Carabanchel, Puente de Vallecas. Districts that named themselves in everyday speech. To call a street Marcelina, nothing more, was a way of addressing the neighbor by her first name. Today it runs a step from Plaza de Castilla. From its side streets the Cuatro Torres skyscrapers rise in the distance, watching from afar the woman of the stall who gave her name to the ground her customers walked.