Calle del Comercio
A functional place name describing the economic character of the area. The street arose with the growth of the Pacífico district under the Castro Expansion, approved in 1860 and carried out in its southern zone around the 1880s, in an area where the closeness of Atocha and the industrial activity of the MZA railway company’s workshops shaped a mercantile and railway fabric. The name describes that generic function rather than honoring any institution or person.
Calle del Comercio was born hugging the railway, and almost everything that gave it its name has to do with goods waiting their turn. It lies in the Pacífico district of the Retiro borough, and runs a little over a kilometer between Calle de Téllez and the Avenida de la Ciudad de Barcelona.
The neighborhood began to take shape with the Castro Expansion, approved in 1860, but its southern half was slow to fill: by the 1880s, alongside the Atocha tracks, it was still nearly open ground. What marked its industrial character was the Docks and Customs Company of Madrid, founded in 1861, whose warehouses held iron, timber and food waiting to be distributed across the city. The company went bankrupt a few years later and the State turned the buildings into the Daoíz y Velarde barracks.
Right beside it the MZA company had its General Workshops, and from there come the street’s most concrete anecdotes: a plan for an underpass to reach the workshops, processed between 1903 and 1912, or a 1908 permit to set up a coffee stand there. Of the name itself no documentary record survives: no earlier name appears. The chroniclers who walked old Madrid never reached this far, because this southern expansion was built up after their time.