Old City Turns on Its Tradition : Olympics: Barcelona used the Games to modernize itself, destroying homes and businesses of its workers.

The Barcelona Games have come and gone, leaving both impressions and scars on this city. It used to be a city with its back to the sea, but now, according to seaside residents adjacent to the Olympic village, it has turned its back on the traditional backbone of Barcelona--the working class.

Palm trees have replaced smokestacks along the Barcelona waterfront. Sandy beaches have replaced train tracks. And there is more sand where more than two dozen seafood restaurants once stood.

It’s all part of a plan to turn the city’s dirty seaside, industry’s back yard and garbage dump for more than 100 years, into an upscale development.

But big cities such as Barcelona step heavily, and two seaside neighborhoods got caught underfoot.

“The poor have always lived on the waterfront near the ports in Barcelona,” restaurant owner Camilo Costa said. “The rich were on the surrounding hillsides, but now they’re coming down from their perches and pushing the working class out.”

Lower-income residents in La Barceloneta and Poblenou, waterfront barrios immediately north of Barcelona’s main port, are clearly Olympic victims, according to sociologist Elisabet Tejero of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. They are paying dearly--with their businesses and homes--for the city’s efforts to sit pretty in the international eye.

Twenty-seven seafood restaurants, famous for their shack-like appearances and beautiful views of the Mediterranean, were demolished this year in La Barceloneta, the fishermen’s barrio, to make way for a beach and palm trees.

Orphaned by demolition of its neighbors and sitting uncomfortably next to a glaring patch of new sand, Costa’s restaurant is the lone survivor. Eminent domain proceedings against the restaurant have bogged down, and its lease on life has been extended for maybe a few months more.

“It makes me so sad, so mad,” said Costa, 54. “I grew up here as a boy, lived in what is now the pantry and worked in the restaurant my whole life. My father started the restaurant out as a shack on the beach during the summer of 1930, and it grew into a Barcelona tradition.”

This humble barrio is sandwiched between the Olympic village to the north and the new port where the cruise ships for VIP Olympic guests were stationed to the south.

Although La Barceloneta always has been located close to Barcelona’s center, until recently the barrio was treated as a poor relative.

The demolition of restaurant row, however, has cleaned up La Barceloneta’s image and opened access to the central city. The improvements are having the effect of “soap in a hot bath,” Costas said. The economic climate is “foaming” with activity.

Under the burden of rising property taxes and strict rent-control laws that hold apartment rents to as little as $5 a month, landlords are eager to cash in on the boom.

Economic pressure is on, and residents in La Barceloneta see a tide of change coming to their traditional fishing neighborhood.

Change is even more dramatic in the industrial barrio of Poblenou, which was built in the mid-1800s when workers came to join Barcelona’s industrial revolution.

These days, Poblenou’s layout looks like a crazy quilt under repair--mismatched, old and new fabric scraps pieced together in an irregular pattern. Balconies sag on old apartment buildings.

Poblenou was cut off from Barcelona’s center, physically and spiritually, until pre-Olympic revitalization projects began. For more than 100 years, Poblenou was boxed in by a river, a major highway and two sets of train tracks, one cutting between the barrio and the seaside.

“Poblenou was the armpit of Barcelona,” said Javier Roca, who has lived there for 33 years. “The beach was filled with industrial waste, empty oil barrels, metal pipes, chunks of concrete, animal parts from the slaughterhouse. It was so bad that you couldn’t even walk down here. Now my dog and I come every morning and night to take a stroll and see friends. It’s beautiful.”

The tracks have been moved, the beach cleaned and a seaside greenbelt has been planted. Residents have taken quickly to their new seaside. On Sunday evenings, the boardwalks are crowded with ambling senior citizens and stroller-pushing families.

Roca appreciates the beautiful changes but is fearful for his future.

“Everyone wants to live in Poblenou now,” the 63-year-old retiree said. He has been paying only $60 a month for the three-bedroom apartment he rents in one of the high-rises facing the Mediterranean, but city plans call for the demolition of his building and a half-dozen more to make way for upscale apartment complexes.

Roca has friends who were forced out. The city took the land and compensated renters, based on their rental costs, for the hardship. Land owners made out OK, Roca said, but renters, many of them senior citizens with fixed incomes who planned to live out their days in the cheap shacks with fixed rents, had to move out of the city to find affordable housing.

Roca doesn’t want to move, but staying won’t be possible if the city tears down his building and compensates him based on his $60 rent.

Said Joaquim Colomina, 33, leader of the Poblenou neighborhood association, “We’re being forced out. City Hall is turning our working class barrio into a rich man’s home. The new beach is beautiful, but how much longer will we be around to enjoy it? This has always been a popular neighborhood, and we want it to continue that way. Civic renovations should be to help existing residents, not shove them out and attract richer ones.”

The Olympic village, for example, started as a joint venture between the city, which acquired land formerly used by industry, then handed over construction rights to a private firm. The $1.88-billion project was intended to include apartments with a range of prices, including middle-class housing, but pressures from industry and unexpected construction costs changed that. Now the Olympic village apartments are being promoted and sold as housing for elite families who want to live seaside, but close to the city center.

Neighborhood groups in Poblenou tried to work with the city but said they were brushed off in the pre-Olympic haste to complete everything. Local newspapers have given almost no coverage to the woes of residents caught in the gears of revitalization.

“The media show the pretty face of Barcelona, but the poor one always remains hidden,” said Xavier Giro, journalist and media professor of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “We are in a society with two parts. One is presented as the Olympic face and the other side, which can’t clean its face, is hidden. But it still exists.”

Census studies show that Barcelona is suffering an exodus as a result of urban renewal. In the last 10 years, Barcelona’s population of about 1.6 million has fallen by more than 124,000, and most of the decline is in young working people.

Locals worry that the dramatic changes and look-good plans may conceal unsteady financial foundations and unresolved social problems.

Olympic visitors would not have known, for example, of the absence of the transvestites at the bottom of Las Ramblas promenade, or the dead palm trees at the airport that are pumped with green fluid to make them look alive.

But residents do, and they hope that now, with most of the tourists gone, their city isn’t just pretty on the outside and rotten on the inside, like the palm trees.

And where are the sellers of sex, who earn mentions in tourist guides for their outlandish outfits and presence at the end of Las Ramblas? They have returned to Las Ramblas. By order of City Hall, they were temporarily relocated to the Zona Franca industrial park outside the city center.

“There’s no room for the poor and the ugly in Barcelona anymore,” Tejero added. “It makes the people very sad to see that their socialist government is not paying attention to their needs.”

Many Barcelona residents--poor and not so poor--were eager for the Games to end. The city, which began to lobby for them in 1981, has been torn up with construction projects for more than 10 years in preparation for 16 days of competition. More than $7.2 billion of public and private funds were spent on the airport, the Olympic village, interlocking ring roads, the Olympic stadium, the beachfront, the sandblasting of 9,000 building facades and much more.

“What happens after the Games? That’s the big question,” said Manuel Pares, professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “Are the public and private initiatives going to be able to continue this impulse? The stock market of Barcelona is losing force already and I’m worried.”

Added Prof. Fausto Migueles of the university, who is studying the economic effects of the recent Games, “Barcelona has borrowed from future funds to pull this party off, and it’s clear that the city will have to cut back severely from now on to make ends meet.”

Fed up with the constant Olympic hype, many residents left for their usual, monthlong summer vacation in August to get away from the tourists, journalists and athletes who took over their city. As they return, they hope pre-1981 normality returns as well.