São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production

4. Downtown in São Paulo with Hildegard Rosenthal’s Camera

55 4 Downtown in São Paulo with Hildegard Rosenthal’s Camera Por diversas circunstâncias, o acervo de fotografias de Hildegard Rosenthal constitui-se num instrumento utilíssimo para pesquisadores preocupados em conhecer a forma com que a cidade de São Paulo era utilizada por seus protagonistas, os cidadãos comuns. • Benedito Lima de Toledo, “Um olhar” (13) One of the best known images created by Hildegard Rosenthal (1913–90), the Swiss-born (but registered as a German national) photographer who produced some three thousand images in São Paulo in the ten-year period beginning with her arrival in Brazil in the late 1930s, is that of the camarão, the shrimp-colored tram that carried passengers in and out of the financial and commercial center of São Paulo. Tosta has examined the recurring image of the tram in the poetry of São Paulo—although he does not pick up the reference specifically to the camarão in the 1933 proletarian novel by Patrícia Galvão, Parque industrial. In the 1920s, São Paulo began to undergo a process of enormous expansion that converted it from the modest seat São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production 56 of the coffee and other agricultural interests of the beginning of the century into the financial and industrial center, first of Brazil, and then of all Latin America. By the time of the much-fabled Semana de Arte Moderna in early 1922, which provided the ab quo for an assertively national and cosmopolitan cultural production,1 and the arrival of foreign intellectuals who provided an impetus for the emerging sophistication of the city (the most famous was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who arrived in 1934 and began in Brazil the work that became so important for the development of contemporary anthropology; see chapter 5), São Paulo had undergone many significant transformations. Certainly, the most representative was the emergence of a central urban core that anchored the growth of the city, with industrialization to the east, the concentration of immigrant masses to the north and east, and the construction of elegant residential satellites to the west and south. The development of the Universidade de São Paulo, which was crucial to the modernization of the city (and as part of which project Lévi-Strauss arrived in Brazil, although his relationship with the administration was not amiable and he accordingly did not long remain on the faculty), was first developed out of facilities of the preexisting Faculdade de Direito (Law School) in the downtown area, then moved in 1949 to a large and quite sumptuous site southwest of the urban center. The urban center of the city has historically been identified as the Praça da Sé (Cathedral Plaza), where the metropolitan cathedral is situated, although other points, such as the Praça da República (Plaza of the Republic), the Viaduto do Chá (The Tea Viaduct, one of the symbols of the city), and the Avenida Paulista (site of branches of over fifty international banking houses) are equally predominant in the urban imaginary of São Paulo. It is in and out of this central core that the trams function, among them the colorful camarão that Rosenthal so notably photographed. Indeed, the tram or trolley car—and the motorized bus—appear in nine of the forty-six images gathered in the 1998 catalog of Rosenthal’s photography, Cenas urbanas (Urban Scenes), published by São Paulo’s Instituto Moreia Salles, which is now the repository of her monumental work. But what is particularly noteworthy about this image is the way in which it captures the utilization of this vehicle of modern transportation to enhance its urban iconicity by having it serve as the billboard for a slogan of São Paulo’s urban growth. Long before such public forms of transportation were converted into dense texts of commercial and public service 57 information, with advertisements and announcements plastered all over the vehicle’s exterior, interior, and strategically at the stops and stations of its run, such that passengers can often read only a portion of these texts at each step in their itinerary, the São Paulo camarão prominently displayed the slogan reflecting the city’s self-consciousness regarding its important growth. The slogan reads: “SÃO PAULO É O MAIOR CENTRO INDUSTRIAL DA AMÉRICA LATINA.” The capital letters...