Calle del Jardín de San Federico

A private garden occupied this corner of the Goya neighbourhood before or during the area’s development. It had a religious dedication, and from it the saint passed to the street sign. Frederick of Utrecht was born around the year 781 in Frisia. He reformed the customs of the clergy and travelled his diocese preaching until he died on 18 July 838, stabbed while giving thanks after Mass. Tradition laid the crime on Judith, the second wife of Louis the Pious, whom the bishop had rebuked; today’s historians point instead to a nobleman of Walcheren who could not tolerate his missionary work. In Madrid the devotion has a known date from 1929, when the Congregation of San Federico settled in the church of El Carmen. No trace of the garden that named the street survives on the maps; it vanished before the neighbourhood was finished, and the name stayed fossilised on the corner.

The Congregation of San Federico, canonically established in 1929 in the church of El Carmen in Madrid, placed in one of its chapels an image of the saint by the Valencian sculptor Enrique Bellido. Linked to that same church was the so-called Club de los Federicos —⁠made up exclusively of men bearing that name, active since the postwar years⁠—⁠, which every 18 July celebrated a solemn Mass there and carried on with a meal at a restaurant on the nearby Calle de San Alberto.