Calle Décima
“Tenth” because it was the tenth of the streets the electricity company numbered, from First to Eleventh, in its garden colony of small houses for employees.
The name says what it is: the tenth street of a grid that someone decided to number rather than christen. The Calle Décima was born inside the Colonia Unión Eléctrica Madrileña, a group of dwellings that the electricity company itself built in the 1920s for its employees, on the grounds of the old Marea Alta estate, in the municipality of Chamartín de la Rosa.
The colony was laid out as an orthogonal board around a square plaza, and its streets were labelled with running ordinals, from Primera to Undécima, in the manner of New York’s numbered streets. Anyone walking here today passes from Novena to Décima and from Décima to Undécima with no explanation beyond arithmetic.
The result was one- and two-storey single-family houses with gardens, which still survive as an island of calm in the Hispanoamérica quarter.