Calle Novena

The name is the number nine, nothing more. Calle Novena belongs to the Unión Eléctrica Madrileña estate, built between 1920 and 1927 on the grounds of the old Marea Alta property, in what is today the Hispanoamérica neighborhood. It was promoted by Valentín Ruiz Senén, managing director of the electricity company, as a housing cooperative for the firm’s employees, under the Low-Cost Housing Act. The layout adopted an orthogonal grid of small houses with gardens, and its eleven streets were named in the New York style: from First to Eleventh, with no saints or worthies, just consecutive numbers. Calling a street by its number then evoked Manhattan, far from the Madrid custom of dedicating streets to figures and cities. A century later, the estate keeps its tidy checkerboard of houses with gardens, today among the best protected in the Chamartín district.