When Av. Bucareli is mentioned, a series of monuments and buildings comes immediately to mind: the Reloj Chino, El Caballito, the Edificio Gaona, the Edificio Vizcaya, and the Edificio Mascota. The latter has a very meaningful history: at one point this site was home to the most important cigarette factory in Mexico, El Buen Tono. In the late 19th century, businessman Ernesto Pugibet bought the land where the Convent of San Juan de la Penitenciaría had stood. At the time, a law required businesses to provide housing so that workers lived close to the workplace — and that is what gave rise to the Edificio Mascota.
Beyond being one of the most representative structures in Mexico City, this building is the first apartment building documented in the area, and one of the first constructions to use prefabricated structures. The idea was for the building to feel similar to Parisian complexes, with apartments grouped along streets that emulated alleyways or passages. Its location also marked the boundary of the most French-inspired neighborhood of the time — the Colonia Americana, today known as Juárez.
It was created in 1913 by engineer Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, with a reported cost of 2.5 million pesos at the time. Inside there are three streets or passages running from Abraham González to Bucareli. Spanning 100 meters per side, it has three modules totaling 173 apartments of two or three bedrooms with space for living and dining rooms, a TV or game room, one or two interior patios, and even basements. It has remained continuously occupied.
Edificio Mascota stands as an example of architecture that endures — still functional and, in some ways, more efficient than today's housing complexes set apart from the city, with expensive services and crowded into small lots, even when offered with sufficient urban services and connected by transit (Páramo, 2012).
A distinctive feature is the “GPP” letters on the wrought-iron gates — said to be the initials of Guadalupe Portilla de Pugibet, the wife of El Buen Tono's founder. So if you'd like to see it, remember it's just steps from Edificio Dondé, and one of the few surviving buildings of the Porfirian era on Bucareli — undoubtedly a place full of history.
References:
Páramo, A. (2012, October 20). Cien años de ser un ejemplo habitacional. Excélsior. Retrieved January 17, 2023, from https://www.excelsior.com.mx/2012/10/20/comunidad/865351
Pardo, F. (2013, June 13). Vivienda y tabaco. Arquine. Retrieved January 17, 2023, from https://arquine.com/vivienda-y-tabaco/
