Lima Club Faces Urban Blight : Andean Cities See Their Downtowns Go Downhill

Come and watch, a friend had said, come and watch the venerable Phoenix Club grapple with tradition and seamy reality in modern, big city Latin America.

“It’s like watching history die,” he said.

About 50 members turned up for the extraordinary general meeting to decide the fate of the club, a Peruvian institution plagued by falling membership and urban blight.

Proud, conservative men, silver-haired and wearing business suits, they masked desperation with urbanity, speaking the English of Queen Elizabeth, whose portrait looked down from a wall in need of fresh paint. Eisenhower was there too, and Montgomery, and a stern FDR and a defiant Churchill, above a bookcase with a broken-spined copy of J. B. Priestley’s “Lost Empires.”

Blue-jacketed Luis Sotelo silently fueled the deliberations with pink gin and tankards of beer, just as he had as a boy one night 69 years ago when, in jubilation at the end of the “war to end all wars,” members of the Phoenix Club spilled a piano off the balcony and followed it with a shower of gold sovereigns. A polished brass plaque honors 11 Phoenix Club members who did not return from that war.

Since October, 1879, the Phoenix Club, elite and alluring, has occupied the third floor of an office building overlooking the Plaza San Martin in the heart of Lima.

In character and temperament, it has not changed a whit in the years since, but Lima has exploded all around it.

An oasis wrapped warmly in the aromas of yesterday, the Phoenix Club is an anachronism now, a dogged but feeble survivor of other days, another city. Its troubles are symptomatic of the decline of graceful and historic city centers throughout the Andean countries of South America.

Visitors, shoppers and businessmen who once flocked to monumental centers awash in commerce and history now shun them for new centers in safer and more savory suburbs.

Pell-mell growth since World War II, stoked by the flight of millions from country despair to city squalor, has etched deep scars on colonial facades throughout the Andean countries. City cores built by hand in the days of viceroys and mules have weathered poorly the assault of mushrooming populations in a mechanized century.

Downtowns Fare Poorly

Today in Bogota, Colombia, and Caracas, Venezuela, there are many better places to work, shop and stroll than downtown. Quito, Ecuador, is battling valiantly to protect its colonial heritage. Santiago, Chile, and La Paz, Bolivia, are exceptions that prove the rule, but it is Lima that has suffered the most.

Lima, so long the proud “City of Kings,” has probably changed more in the past 40 years than in the previous 400. Handsome suburbs near the Pacific Ocean bustle with life and order. Downtown has become a teeming poor-man’s kingdom, the realm of street people.

In a handsome, glass-fronted bookcase in the Phoenix Club library, Volume 14 of the 1957 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica puts Lima’s population at 835,468. Close to 6 million jostle for space and survival in today’s Lima.

Nobody is sure exactly how many hundreds of thousands among them scratch out an existence as sidewalk vendors, selling things to one another.

“All the plazas have fountains, statues and flowers,” the Britannica says. “Many wide avenues, paved with concrete, are favorite promenades.”

Modern Sounds Intrude

As the Phoenix Club dueled with history, the sounds of modern Lima--sirens and unmuffled buses--seeped through French doors that offer an unsurpassed view of the rump of the weathered bronze charger bearing the anti-Spanish revolutionary, Gen. Jose de San Martin, atop a monument in the center of the plaza bearing his name.

The choked plaza pulsed with its usual cast of characters, pure Fellini: tumblers, magicians, jugglers, charlatans, muggers, pickpockets, uniformed school children, prostitutes, comedians, country gawkers, barefoot Indian children and hard-eyed female traffic police in starched white blouses.

Naked beggars bathed in a fountain’s scummy waters. On the far side of the plaza, in what is ironically known as Wall Street, swift-footed young men and women ran alongside passing cars, hawking black market currency.

Like the rest of downtown Lima, the streets around the plaza reek of stale urine. No rain ever falls to flush it away.

None of this is the sort of thing one talks about at one’s club, but it is not improper to complain about the risk of “having your watch nicked on the way from the car park.”

Members Stop Coming

Trouble at the Phoenix Club, named after the Fenix Insurance Co., which owns the building, is succinctly stated: Members have stopped coming; the bills have not.

Club President Frederick C. Parker reported glumly that the other two surviving clubs in downtown Lima average 100 meals a day. The Phoenix serves 17. Only 22 of 140 members attend on a regular basis, Parker said. By dark, the club is shuttered.

“Ten--even five--years ago, at least three-quarters of the members worked in offices within an eight-block radius,” life member Donald Griffis told a visitor. “It was an inviting place to come for lunch and a drink after work. Now the proportions are reversed. Most people work in the suburbs. Coming downtown is an ordeal.”

Members of the club tend to be businessmen, pillars of Lima’s small Anglo-Peruvian community, their numbers leavened with a sprinkling of longtime American residents and of Peruvians proud of their British or American ancestry.

Friends Since Boyhood

Griffis, a publisher who is the Peruvian son of an American, has known many of his fellow members since boyhood. His company reluctantly joined the flight to the suburbs four months ago, but he himself is no more willing to sacrifice his club than the Peruvian government is prepared to surrender the center of its capital.

In recent years, a vigorous Marxist mayor has repaired downtown streets and sidewalks, improved the lighting, reclaimed the plazas and expanded police protection. A city hall campaign has repainted downtown buildings in the colors that they wore in colonial times. Around the Plaza San Martin they are ocher.

Many people like the effect. Some don’t. A lawyer safe in his suburban bunker sneers that this is “undertakers’ work--painting a corpse.”

Whatever its artistic merit, the campaign has had a modest impact. Central Lima is less gritty and forbidding than it was a few years ago.

For the Phoenix Club, the issue is not beauty but survival. At the free-wheeling general meeting, even radical solutions were welcome. One member suggested waiving a requirement that members speak English. Another, more daring, said it might be time to trifle with heritage and admit women.

“We waived the language requirement two years ago, the last time we voted on the women question,” President Parker reminded them.

Unwilling to Disband

No one wanted to disband the club, or affiliate with another. For 107 years, membership in the Phoenix Club has had a particular cachet.

Moving to the suburbs is the logical solution, but the cost is prohibitive.

“How could we compete with all the clubs out there already?” a member asked. “They have pools, saunas.”

Another put in, “I’d like to go to the suburbs, but only if we could take the wood paneling with us.”

The debate wore on through the noisy afternoon, through a savage attack by Maoist guerrillas on a restaurant a couple of miles away that killed six people.

In the end, a predictable consensus emerged. Gentlemen of the sort that the club has welcomed over the years are not the sort who are easily run off. Vowing to seek new members, the Phoenix Club voted, 28 to 12, to stay, and perhaps to die, in downtown Lima.

William D. Montalbano, chief of The Times’ bureau in Buenos Aires, was recently on assignment in Peru.