El Zanjón de Granados

This guide to El Zanjon de Granados in Buenos Aires traces the stone water channel built in 1787 beneath a San Telmo mansion, filled with rubble and abandoned as an embarrassment once the city got modern sewage pipes in 1892. It follows the wealthy family who once lived upstairs with no idea what sat beneath their floor, the mansion's slide into a crowded immigrant tenement, and its collapse into ruin by the 1980s. The chemical engineer Jorge Eckstein bought the wreck in 1985 and broke through a wall in 1986, beginning thirty-eight years of piecing the colonial channel back together by hand.