Valparaiso wraps its harbor like a north-facing amphitheater. Ridges of hills, historically dominated by European immigrant communities, radiate from the bay and its wedge of flat land. Their orientation is reinforced by the city’s near-utter lack of bridges. While the flat land (El Plan) consists of more-or-less straight gridded streets, paths and roadways in the hills follow labyrinthine, ravine-skirting switchbacks that would quickly lead to disorientation were it not for the fact that the slope and the ocean always lead north. A beltway tracing the 100’ contour gathers what was once the periphery. Businesses claim the flats while houses climb the hills. Ancient inclined elevators called ascensores...that function now either miraculously or not at all...connect the two realms.
Situated at the interface of culture and nature, the ascensores were as much about the ground as its defiance, as much about constructing the site as creating the object, as much about topography as technology, as much about tradition as innovation. Fascinating as objects in themselves, the ascensores were part of a more complex spatial, social, and technological matrix, both more complex and more fundamental, that transcends their appeal as objects. --Rene Davids
Valparaiso’s resemblance to San Francisco is striking, replete with devastating 1906 earthquake. In fact, sailors refer to it as Pancho, the name Francisco's affectionate diminutive. Climate is comparable, Victorian architecture abounds, and hills strike out from the bay with equal drama. The other day the city’s new metro system played “are you going to San Francisco” musak-style and the surreality almost overwhelmed me. However, Valparaiso takes the San Francisco analogy only so far. Unlike San Fransisco, it rarely presses its orthogonality into the hills. The city is more like Lisbon in this sense.
And the city has not followed San Francisco into modernity. It remains a panoply of mottled tin and rusted cast iron that began sinking into decay from the time the Panama Canal rendered its circumnavigatory position obsolete. The result is a pedestrian scale preserved through salutary neglect, pock-marked with half-collapsed houses and gutted interiors.
*map image at top taken from Prof. Rene David's article, "City Limits: topography and invention"
