Casa do Porco or cracolândia: who wins the battle for the center of SP? – 05/12/2023 – Gross Kitchen

My mother called the center of São Paulo “the city”. The metropolis was already a huge monster in the 1970s, but the notion of a city separated from the neighborhoods by vacant areas persisted in the speech of São Paulo residents.

I took the “tram” (trolleybus) to go to the city with my mother at least twice a week. She was fanatical about looking for discounts and sales, and the center concentrated such bargains.

We ate the sausage sandwich at Casa California, on Rua São Bento. When it was time for a real lunch, the old lady took me to Churrasqueto, which is still on 24 de Maio today.

The center was experiencing a decline that would only accelerate. It was filthy and chaotic. Adults complained about the “trombadinhas”, as the smallest pickpockets were called.

In the following decade, I spent my afternoons downtown looking for records, sheet music and guitar stuff. In the 90s, I started working at Notícias Populares, in the Sheeton Alameda Barão de Limeira.

I followed the whole thing because I’m old. The decline of the central region followed the expected course, the gradual and somewhat cruel degeneration of the ancient city of the coffee barons. Until something new happened.

Cracolândia emerged and grew at the speed of an aggressive tumor, destroying what was left of the center once and for all. We skipped a few years to get to the current stage.

The attacks on Sunday (3/12) and Monday (4), respectively on Bar Brahma and McDonald’s on Avenida Ipiranga, could be the first attacks in an apocalyptic battle that will define the fate of the center of São Paulo for many decades forward.

It doesn’t matter if the perpetrators are a cell phone theft gang, the usual crackpots or angry delivery men. Whoever it is, there is an imminent risk that we will reach – if we haven’t already – a point where there is no possible regression to the abandonment of the center of São Paulo.

Without any passion for the targets of the attacks (Brahma is the zombie carcass of a bar that should have closed 30 years ago), it is impossible not to see the symbolic meaning of the acts. Avenida Ipiranga, the corner of São João, the place that Caetano Veloso made Instagrammable before there was Instagram.

Will tourists continue to fall for the scam? Bad with them, worse without them.

Since the center went into free fall, there have been attempts to react with undeniable success. Living in Copan became cool, and some areas were retaken: Santa Cecília, part of República and part of Vila Buarque. Luz, Sé and Santa Ifigênia, in turn, have lost cause status.

When it comes to restaurants and bars, there is a post-cracolândia generation that holds quite a bar in the center: Cuia, Divina Increnca, Bia Hoi, Escarcéu, Z-Deli, Cora, Regô.

Within this group, the enclave of chefs Janaína Torres Rueda and Jefferson Rueda leads the resistance, especially Casa do Porco – if you believe in awards, it is the best and most important restaurant in São Paulo.

It is not possible to trust that Casa do Porco, alone, will contain the destruction of the center and the metastasis to the vibrant Bom Retiro, Barra Funda and Liberdade,

The public authorities, which allowed what is happening to happen, remain immobilized. The municipal elections – in which you can vote to change this abandonment policy – ​​take place in less than a year,

Can the city last all this time?

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