Home Away from Home.

• Author: Friedman, Robert
• Position: LITERARY SCENE

"Like diamonds, [Puerto Rico's] Old San Juan is forever."

FOR THE EXPATS, it was Greenwich Village South. For the nouveau well-to-do, it was a chance to gentrify in their newly restored colonial homes. For the majority of others, it was a living, vibrant community where life had a distinctive style, high and low; where rich and poor lived side by side in pastel-colored houses and cultural activities abounded: where the painters, poets, pugilists, laborers, lawyers, storekeepers, students, unemployed, and uninhibited spent their days and nights mostly walking (few residents drove) along the blue cobblestone streets, in and out of the many bars and restaurants and artist haunts, in the hilly seven-block-square area.

The streets opened to tree-shaded plazas and closed with views of the ocean above and the bay below. There were museums and schools and newly restored homes and old Spanish fortresses and very old city walls and, especially for the tourists, jewelry shops and schlocky souvenir stores. There also were the homeless sleeping in doorways and junkies nodding on street corners--and late, late night, there were scores of cats who came out to claim the silent streets and passageways. That was Old San Juan in the decades of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Much of the island art world lived in those blocks at that time, painters such as Rafael Tufifio, Manuel Hernandez Acevedo, Carlos Irizarry, Domingo Garcia; writers Emilio Diaz Valcarcel and Rene Marques. There were wonderful museums, such as one dedicated to the music of Pablo Casals and La Casa del Libro, where you could see how books were made and view such samples as a page of a Gutenberg Bible and an early printing of Don Quixote from 16th-century Spain.

In the plazas, fruit vendors sold oranges peeled in a machine that looked like a vise, the skin curling off like paper streamers. Domino players slapped tiles on cement tables; horse players sat along a wall with pink racing forms in their laps, figuring their fortunes for the day.

One of my favorite places for a refreshing drink was La Vida en Broma (Life as a Joke), where you could get a juicy glass of tamarindo, guanabana, or ajonjoli. You also could buy single cigarettes there or a shot of rum in a paper cup--and, of course, many breakfasts were consumed at La Bombonera, the cafe con leche and mallorca capital of the hemisphere. Behind the counter was a wonderful decadesold big shiny silver Cuban coffee-making machine giving off steam...