Calle Octava
Ordinal name of one of the eleven numbered streets of the Colonia Unión Eléctrica Madrileña, the garden city the power company built in the 1920s for its workers, where the streets were numbered instead of named.
The name hides no mystery beyond its number. Calle Octava is the eighth in a grid of streets laid out without names, identified only by their order, when the Unión Eléctrica Madrileña power company built a colony of cheap housing for its workers in the 1920s on former land in Chamartín de la Rosa.
It was built on the garden-city model: single-family houses with gardens, quiet streets, a domestic scale against the closed-block Madrid. On that chessboard, the developers preferred the practical to the poetic and numbered the streets, eleven in all, from the First to the Eleventh. While the neighboring colonies drew on flowers, this one stuck with arithmetic.
The ensemble survives as a protected historic quarter, its rows of low houses tucked among the tall buildings of Hispanoamérica. To walk along Calle Octava is to cross all at once from a 1970s block to a village from the 1920s.