Rio de Janeiro neighborhood blooms

Over the past decade and a half when she visited her nephew in Lapa, Geni Aparecida Martins saw little change in the downtown Rio de Janeiro neighborhood.
''No one came around here,'' she said on a recent January afternoon.

But since the Sao Paulo native set up a small thrift shop here more than a year ago, she has watched the neighborhood boom. A few blocks down from her shop, the immense Cores da Lapa development dwarfs nearby colonial facades. Still under construction, its 688 units sold out in two hours, according to the developer's website, and the smooth brick-and-stucco structure sports a pool inside its gates and palm trees planted into the sidewalks outside of them.

The neighborhood is rising with it; since the launch of the project in the end of 2006, real estate prices in the rest of the neighborhood have risen between 10 to 20 percent, according to the newspaper O Globo.

The next block tells a different story.

POLICE RAIDS

Municipal guards with batons and shields recently heaped dollies and drink coolers into a garbage truck; residents heaped curses onto them from broken windows in the graffiti-covered high-rise above them.

The apartment building, occupied by the Movement of Roofless Workers, housed supplies for unauthorized street vendors, which the new city government has been cracking down on as part of its ''shock of order'' actions in city that began with the new year.

''Now [Lapa] is in a phase of transformation,'' said Caví Borges, co-director of the 2007 documentary L.A.P.A., about the area's rap scene.

The neighborhood sits next to the skyscrapers of Rio's downtown and has a central role in the city by linking the wealthy beachside South Zone to the more residential, economically depressed North Zone. The area attracts both international tourists and local samba street musicians.

It's ''the most democratic place in Rio,'' said Borges, 33. ``[It's] as though it were the beach.''

At the beginning of the 20th century, Lapa's reputation was unsavory; many Rio residents still won't visit the area. Though it is the musical heart of the city, it remains a low-income neighborhood, according to local businessman Leonardo Feijó, who owns several commercial properties in the area.

Still, in recent years, Lapa has become an established nightlife favorite of tourists and a ubiquitous entry in the online guide and book Rio for Partiers.

OPTIMISTIC FUTURE

Feijó, 34, thinks the neighborhood could be rebounding, fueled by the growing club scene and the new economic development.

''It could be that in 10 years you have people from the middle class [living here],'' he said.

Stoking this notion of an economic boom, Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes recently announced details for a neighborhood improvement project called ''Lapa Legal'' -- ''legal'' in Portuguese meaning both ''lawful'' and, colloquially, ``great.''

The goal is to develop Lapa's tourism, cultural and economic potential and includes measures to organize street vendors and regulate the hours of shows in open spaces.

But informality and disorder are characteristic of the neighborhood, and having the state step in could destroy that, said Micael Herschmann, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

''It was the society, the businessmen, the artists, that drove the history of Lapa,'' said Herschmann, who published in 2007 Lapa, Cidade da Musica, a history of the neighborhood's development. But he said certain aspects of the neighborhood, like its parking, could be improved by state assistance.

He said the neighborhood's revitalization to the mid-1990s, when the first of several new show venues, Arco da Velha, opened.

The entrance of these high-price music venues and bars is changing the scene of the Brazilian Bohemia. It used to be a place where people partied in the street and spent little money, according to filmmaker Borges.

But now it is becoming more elite, he said, and it brings ``people from the South Zone to there to pay 30 to 40 reais ($17-$23) for a show.

THREE-FLOOR CLUB

The popular Rio Scenarium, a three-floor dance club, bar and show venue in Lapa, costs 25 reais ($14) on weekends -- a cover charge that in Rio would buy at least four pratos feitos, the beans, rice and meat plates that are a standard dinner for many.

Entrepreneur Feijó says that when he set up Teatro Odessia in 2004, it was before the boom and risky to invest there. Feijó now owns four bars and show venues in Lapa, though he says its two main problems are street vendors who sell drinks for cheaper than the established clubs and the lacking infrastructure in the area.

''The new city government, I think it's going to solve it,'' said Feijó, adding that the streets needed cleaning and the street vendors needed to be removed. ``It's not possible for [the businesses] to do it all.''

But Elza Francisca da Cruz, 85, was born on the same street in Lapa, where she now sells sodas and water from a cooler, She wants to see more security around her to suppress crime, but she sayscracking down on vendors leaves them without livelihoods.

''If I don't work, I don't eat,'' da Cruz said.

Martins, 52, has seen business grow in her small thrift shop since setting it up a year and a half ago, and said she is of two minds concerning the efforts at urban cleaning.

When she sees the street vendors losing their jobs, her side that thinks with her heart ''is dying of pity,'' she said. But, she added, her ''side of reason'' thinks that it is better to clean up and secure the area.

``For my business, my thrift shop, it makes it more valuable.''


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