Calle Luis Calvo

When La Guindalera ceased to be a suburb and filled with blocks between the late nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth, the City Council named the streets of the eastern expansion after Madrid’s theatre world. Into that landscape of actors and playwrights fits Calle Luis Calvo. The surname comes with company. The nearby Calle de Rafael Calvo has recalled the famous actor since 1888. That kinship explains whom this street honours: Luis Calvo y Revilla, the actor’s brother, a playwright and journalist in his own right. He wrote for the theatre and filled newspaper pages, and in 1920 left his best-remembered book, a portrait of the famous actors of the nineteenth-century Teatro Príncipe. He should not be confused with a later Luis Calvo, the journalist Luis Calvo Andaluz, editor of ABC between 1954 and 1962. Neither Répide nor the municipal registers left any record of the naming resolution, so the name arrived without a certificate of baptism.