Praça Mauá

This guide to Praca Maua in Rio de Janeiro opens with the exact moment in April 2014 when 250 kilograms of explosives brought down a slab of the elevated Perimetral highway that had shadowed this port-district square for four decades. It traces how the demolition and everything that followed were financed: a 2011 auction of over six million building-rights certificates, bought almost entirely by a fund investing ordinary Brazilians' mandatory severance savings. The square is named for the Viscount of Maua, the nineteenth-century railway and banking tycoon whose bronze statue stands at its center facing the water.