Calle del Mármol

This street’s sign names a stone: marble, the rock that polishing turns into a mirror and that for centuries dressed church façades, shop counters, and the baseboards of Madrid’s houses. Why that name was chosen for this street in the Imperial neighborhood is undocumented. No trace remains of a quarry, a stonemason’s workshop, or a stone warehouse to justify the christening. What is known is where it lies: barely a hundred and twenty-five meters dropping from Calle de Toledo toward the Manzanares, in an Arganzuela that was a Madrid of factories, warehouses, and slaughterhouses before it turned residential. In that landscape of trades, a name like Mármol fits effortlessly, though the street never boasts the stone that names it. Today it is a discreet street of plain façades, far from the gleam its sign promises.