Calle de Ricardo Damas

The street honors a Ricardo Damas, but who he was and why Madrid chose to remember him here is not documented. No trace remains of his trade, his dates or his tie to the neighborhood. For years, what the locals linked to the name “Ricardo Damas” was not a person but an amateur football pitch. On that same ground Madrid is now raising a municipal sports center, with an indoor pool, that keeps the name. This is Legazpi, the far south of Arganzuela marked for a century by the Slaughterhouse. Nearby stands the Pico del Pañuelo estate, the yellow triangular-plan houses built for the slaughterhouse workers. In that landscape of laborers, the Calle de Ricardo Damas keeps a surname with no written story.