Architecture

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Painting the Town

Along with all the new road surfaces, sidewalks, sidewalk uplights, street lights, and flower baskets there is a project downtown to beautify the homes in Centro Historico as well. The city is doing some of the painting and lots of us homeowners are doing our part to go along with the beautifying, too!  In the pictures above you can also see some of the new lighting, flower baskets, and trees along Sixto Osuna. Above you can page through the pictures...

Triplets in Mazatlán

I love the old buildings in Mazatlán. Many of the old ones in Centro started life as much larger houses and have been divided over the years. Some were probably built as row houses. I’ve written about these look-aliketwins and triplets before, but I couldn’t resist another go around. I hope you enjoy a look at the gemelos y trillizos de Mazatlán!...

How about a Centro update ?

There’s been a lot of activity in various buildings  around Centro lately – some good and some bad. About a week ago there was a bit of a furor with several properties being remodeled or razed without the authority of INAH. (INAH is the historic preservation organization) There was a building demolished in Centro.  (above) The historic Haas home is being redone partially to become the new home of the Carnaval Museum, and they started to break a hole in...

Close relations

I love all the old houses in Centro.  Many of them have close relatives on the same street.  Some look like twins, or even triplets. Some probably started life as  a much larger house, and now we notice the similarities, even though the paint may be a different color! Some, like the buildings below, appear to have always been twins.   And it looks like another set of twins below:     The ones below appear to be siblings only....

Progress is a good thing…

BEFORE DURING It’s worth scrolling up and down a little bit to see the difference between the before photo and the during photo.  There is a little more than a month separating these two photos, and you can see they are making progress on the exterior. A lot of the wrought iron is sanded and painted with the orange rust resistant primer, and most of the lintels, the fascia, and the corbels have been repaired.  I think it looks great!...

Random post

Every time I go by this bougainvillea (above) I think about taking a picture of it.  Last time I asked Paul to use his cell phone camera, so now you can see my favorite bougainvillea in town!  (one block west of Belisario Dominguez on Calle Libertad) The picture below reminded us of San Francisco’s Painted Ladies.  Aren’t they adorable? These houses share the block with the actual house where Pedro Infante lived.   (Constitución over near Rosales I think) Then, just...

I’m cautiously optimistic…

I love all the old buildings in Centro Historico.  Some of them are really in bad shape, but you can tell they were beauties at one time.  At the top of the post is one I’ve written about before, located at Mariano Escobedo and Niños Heroes.  It is the Mansion of the Garcías, and was constructed in 1870. I had seen people working in there, but I had also been told that it was “just a cleanup.”  Sometimes the city orders...

Old buildings need love, too…

You can’t live in Centro without being interested in what is going on with regard to restoring the many crumbling old buildings.  Having lived through our two courtyard projects I have nothing but respect for people who can take on the restoration of a building that is missing its roof, needs all new systems, is situated on our small, congested streets, and where the restoration is governed by INAH.  If you’re doing one of these restorations, you get a hearty...

Buyer beware

I am usually a pretty positive person.  I won’t and don’t use this blog as a way to grumble publicly about things in Mexico that aggravate me.  But I’ve had a recurring thought that just wouldn’t go away so I thought I’d blog about it. Here goes: Some people seem to think that the rules here are the same as the rules where they came from.  Not true.  An acquaintance of ours had an out of scale building being constructed...

Fifteen days…..

Our 120 year old home has some wonderful old features, and four sets of these lovely cedar doors are some of my favorites.  When we bought the house they had been cleaned and restored, but had no hardware!  And since three bedrooms need their privacy, we had been looking for the appropriate type of hardware. It’s hard to find hardware that would look right on these doors.  We didn’t want to use normal locksets & handles since we didn’t want...

Rejas or Bars or Protections, whatever you call them

In most of Mexico, bars on the windows are a fact of life. I love them! What a sense of freedom there is to be able to have any and all windows in your house open whenever you want! In the summertime here in Mazatlán, it is hot and muggy. The thing that saves us is air movement. We get some from the ceiling fans but we really count on the breeze we get through our open windows and doors,...

Oldies but goodies

  The historic center of Mazatlán has many beautiful homes. Some have been restored to modern standards with new plumbing and updated electrical and some have been maintained by their original families. There is a historic commission that oversees the district and there has been a pretty successful effort to make Centro an appealing place with a program for placing utilities underground and installing curb cuts for wheelchairs and lighting in the sidewalks. I love living here. There are a...

A Tree Grows in Mazatlán

  I am reading (it is amazing to me that I hadn’t read it before) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. It is a wonderful book, set in Brooklyn in the early 1900’s. I am loving it. The tree referred to in the title is one they called the Tree of Heaven. It grew in the worst possible soil and was the only tree that would even grow out of cement. I think México has a number of...

They aren’t ruins, they are projects….

Mazatlan has a wonderful colonial city center – Centro. It is a mish mash of houses, retail, parks, home businesses, and the various entrepreneurs that gather in any Mexican city. (Car washers, carts selling food, street sweepers, etc) It can be messy and loud and incredibly joyful. Last night we sat on our patio and listened to people passing by with a background of live jazz being played somewhere not far away. Across the street from us and also kitty...