A Ten Step Plan To Repave Old San Juan

We need to repave Old San Juan. It’s over­due and the city is falling apart. We also need to con­vert Old San Juan into a pedes­tri­an city. So here’s a 10 step plan to do just that.

Orlan­do Mergal

My name is Orlan­do Mer­gal. Think of me as a guy with a cam­era, a com­put­er and the Inter­net. I’ve been vis­it­ing Old San Juan since the ear­ly 70’s… and I’d like to see it repaved. Not in cheap con­crete bricks but in its orig­i­nal blue slag pavers. Old San Juan is the old­est city in Puer­to Rico and the third old­est in the West­ern Hemi­sphere. It’s also the old­est con­tin­u­ous­ly oper­at­ing city in the Unit­ed States and parts of it are rec­og­nized as a UNESCO World Her­itage Site. Oh, and did I men­tion that it’s beautiful?

Vis­it­ing Old San Juan is like step­ping back in his­to­ry. The archi­tec­ture, the streets and the old forts, the church­es all trans­port you to the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th cen­turies. It’s like Dis­ney­land but with­out the ani­ma­tron­ics. It’s also full of restau­rants, bars and small hotels. It’s a cos­mopoli­tan city like no oth­er in America.

But vehic­u­lar traf­fic is killing Old San Juan. Some­how, in some twist­ed way, Puer­to Ricans picked up the notion that its fun to sit in a car —some­times for hours at a time— dri­ve over pot­holes in the blis­ter­ing trop­i­cal sun, and pol­lute every­thing around them. It’s sheer idio­cy if you ask me, but it hap­pens day in and day out.

Just think of it. Find­ing a park­ing spot in Old San Juan is mur­der, you can’t bring your car with you into restau­rants and muse­ums, so why dri­ve at all? Why not walk?

Res­i­dents have it a lit­tle eas­i­er. They can park on the streets. How­ev­er, being able to do some­thing and actu­al­ly get­ting to do it are two dif­fer­ent things. Most of the time they end up park­ing far from home and expos­ing their vehi­cles to poten­tial haz­ards. To avoid these per­ils many of them end up pay­ing for park­ing at one of sev­er­al pri­vate garages.

There are bet­ter ways to deal with these prob­lems and most of them aren’t new. This kind of prob­lem has plagued small cities in Europe for decades. And what they’ve found is that solv­ing it is a mat­ter of leav­ing child­ish atti­tudes behind and cre­at­ing the infra­struc­ture to make things happen.

The ideas that I’m about to pro­pose in this arti­cle aren’t new. Hell, most of them aren’t even mine. I’ve seen them all before in Europe and in the Unit­ed States. You prob­a­bly have too. And believe me, THEY WORK!!! Some peo­ple might con­sid­er them hair brain. But hey, I’m not an urban plan­ner. I’m just a con­cerned cit­i­zen. We’re destroy­ing Old San Juan!!! So if you don’t like my ideas, “NO PROBLEMO”. Feel free to bring up your own. Let’s dis­cuss them and repave Old San Juan.  And if your ideas are bet­ter we’ll use them. Let’s actu­al­ly solve a prob­lem.  Lets repave Old San Juan.

1. “Departamento De Hacienda”, a building in the wrong place

Puer­to Rico’s Trea­sury Depart­ment is locat­ed across the street from Pier 4 in Old San Juan. Why? In my view a Trea­sury Depart­ment is noth­ing but a giant account­ing office, so it could work just as well in Hato Rey (where there are plen­ty of under­uti­lized build­ings), at Metro Office Park or any­where else —for that mat­ter— where there’s ade­quate space, pow­er and data facil­i­ties. The only rea­son why “Hacien­da” is in Old San Juan is because that’s where it was when most of Puer­to Rico’s com­mer­cial ship­ping and whole­sal­ing oper­a­tions took place in Old San Juan. That was back in the 50’s and 60’s. This is 2024.

So step one would be mov­ing the Trea­sury Depart­ment some­where else, demol­ish­ing the build­ing and erect­ing a park­ing struc­ture large enough to accom­mo­date all the cars belong­ing to Old San Juan res­i­dents and tourists. The build­ing would need to be attrac­tive enough to sit in front of the tourism peers, although late­ly gov­ern­ment has been doing every­thing in its pow­er to scare off every imag­in­able cruise ship com­pa­ny (but that’s a sto­ry for anoth­er day). It would also need to be archi­tec­tural­ly com­pat­i­ble. Oth­er­wise it will stick out like a sore thumb!

2. Micro Buses, the only viable way to get around Old San Juan

Elec­tric Microbus Used In Madrid, Spain. Click on image to see it larger.

The oth­er day an idiot tried to dri­ve a full-sized school bus down “Calle Del Sol” and “Cale­ta De Las Mon­jas”. Need­less to say, he made a fool of him­self, messed up the bus and destroyed a great amount of gov­ern­ment prop­er­ty. And who’ll pick up the tab? Prob­a­bly you and I.

Sim­ply put, Old San Juan wasn’t built for large vehi­cles. In fact, it wasn’t built for gas vehi­cles at all. Back in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th cen­turies peo­ple got around on foot, on horse­back or on horse drawn car­riages. That’s why the streets in Old San Juan are so nar­row and the hous­es have no garages.

Small Euro­pean cities have had sim­i­lar dilem­mas but they found a solu­tion. They call them “micro bus­es”, or at least that’s what they call them in Spain, where I saw them for the first time.

Once again, they’re noth­ing new. I rode the first one back in 1984. They’re sim­ply small vans like the ones used by car rental com­pa­nies to shut­tle tourists from and to the air­port. They’re also great to shut­tle res­i­dents from a cen­tral park­ing area to their des­ti­na­tion and back. Rid­ing these shut­tle bus­es is gen­er­al­ly free since any­one using them will be either a res­i­dent, a tourist or a vis­i­tor con­duct­ing some kind of busi­ness in the city.

Anoth­er option would be to make them free for res­i­dents car­ry­ing some sort of mag­net­ic card and charge a small fee to tourists and vis­i­tors. How­ev­er, that would make the sys­tem less attrac­tive for the lat­er groups.

Okla­homa City Street Car. Click on image to see it larger.

Last year I saw a shut­tle sys­tem like this in Okla­homa City. The shut­tles are a lit­tle larg­er, and they charge you a dol­lar for the ride, but they are sleek, mod­ern, and clean. Oh, and did I men­tion that the ones in Madrid run on bat­ter­ies? That’s right. No gas!

3. Slag Pavers, the best option to repave Old San Juan

Orig­i­nal Slag Pavers In Old San Juan. Click on image to see it larger.

The orig­i­nal blue pavers found in Old San Juan today were import­ed from Eng­land start­ing in the late 19th Cen­tu­ry. They were made of slag, a stony waste mat­ter sep­a­rat­ed from met­als dur­ing the smelt­ing or refin­ing of ore. They were placed over a sand base and lat­er locked togeth­er with even more sand.

Through­out the years some have been paved over with black top and oth­ers were just removed alto­geth­er and thrown in San Juan Bay. It’s actu­al­ly a mir­a­cle that so many have sur­vived amid so many numb skull politicians.

To pro­duce slag you have to have met­al­lur­gy going on, and Puer­to Rico aban­doned this indus­try decades ago. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be brought back for this spe­cif­ic pur­pose. God knows that we have more than enough scrap lay­ing around from past indus­tri­al exper­i­ments. Add to that the dev­as­ta­tion brought on by the past two hur­ri­canes, and the destruc­tion pro­duced by Jan­u­ary 2020’s earth­quakes, and you’d have plen­ty of raw mate­r­i­al. We also have plen­ty of capa­ble per­son­nel and emp­ty fac­to­ry space of every size and shape.

So why not start a local met­al­lur­gy oper­a­tion just to pro­duce slag pavers? I don’t know if this is even viable, or how much it would pol­lute, but it’s cer­tain­ly an idea worth explor­ing. If not, we could always have them made some­where else.

4. Money… without it we can’t repave Old San Juan

I was going to dis­cuss this aspect of the project last, but I can already hear the col­lec­tive yelling out there: “how is this guy propos­ing to pay for all this”? Well, here are a cou­ple of ideas. And, by the way, they aren’t new either. Have you ever been to Dis­ney World in Orlan­do? Have you seen the thou­sands of pavers that cov­er the square before enter­ing Main Street USA? Have you noticed that each and every one of those pavers is per­son­al­ized? That’s right!!! They all say some­thing like “The Rivera Fam­i­ly, 1988”.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the pavers used at Dis­ney World were made of tile, and they’re slow­ly falling apart, so Dis­ney man­age­ment has announced that they will soon be removed. But what if they were made of slag? Slag is actu­al­ly met­al that could be laser etched. It could also last way longer than tile if you don’t dri­ve motor vehi­cles over them.

I hon­est­ly have no idea how many pavers it would take to repave Old San Juan. That’s the kind of ques­tion that maybe my friend Dr. Fer­nan­do Abruña could answer. But let’s guess a num­ber. Let’s guess that it would take half a mil­lion (500,000). Maybe that’s too much or too lit­tle. Once again, I don’t know. But it’s a nice round num­ber and we have to start somewhere.

Now imag­ine sell­ing each paver as a per­son­al­ized item. You could sell per­son­al pavers, fam­i­ly pavers and cor­po­rate pavers and place them accord­ing­ly through­out the city. To keep things afford­able per­son­al pavers could cost $25, fam­i­ly pavers $100 and cor­po­rate pavers $250. No one could buy more than 100 pavers. That way you wouldn’t have entire streets hogged up by cor­po­rate greed.

Now let’s look at the num­bers. 300,000 per­son­al pavers sold at $25 a paver would bring in 7.5 mil­lion dol­lars. Anoth­er 100,000 fam­i­ly pavers sold at $100 would bring in an addi­tion­al 10 mil­lion. And 100,000 pavers at $250 would bring in 25 mil­lion dol­lars. All togeth­er per­son­al­ized pavers alone could bring in over 42.5 mil­lion dol­lars. Chang­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion could make the final num­ber even larg­er, so would more pavers if I under­es­ti­mat­ed my ini­tial figures.

But wait, there’s more! What if you could sell adver­tis­ing inside the micro bus­es, on the out­side of the micro bus­es, on the microbus cards, inside the park­ing struc­ture ele­va­tors and maybe even sell the nam­ing of the struc­ture like they do with are­nas in the Unit­ed States? Don’t you think that an air­line, a cruise ship com­pa­ny (if there’s still one around) or a local bank could take the city up on the offer?

5. Actually repave Old San Juan

This is what For­t­aleza Street looked like back in June, 2015, right after it was paved with poor qual­i­ty mate­ri­als. Notice the oil slick in the cen­ter already rear­ing its ugly head. Click on image to see it larger.

Once again, I’m not an engi­neer, so I can’t speak of the actu­al intri­ca­cies that a project like this might entail. But one thing I do know. Once a street is repaved it would need to be closed to vehic­u­lar traf­fic PERMANENTLY. That means that a walk­a­ble Old San Juan would be a process rather than an event.  But it would need to be a process with a dead­line; not one of those that goes on for ever. A goal with­out a date is a dream.

We have all seen what repaving and reopen­ing looks like. Albeit that the most recent repaving seems to have been done with sec­ond rate mate­ri­als. But regard­less of what type of mate­ri­als were used, it’s obvi­ous that repaving streets only to reopen them to vehic­u­lar traf­fic is sheer stu­pid­i­ty. Just take a walk in Old San Juan and you’ll see what I mean.

This is the same street in June of 2018 (only three years lat­er). Click on image to see it larger.

We have to get every­one on the same page and get them to under­stand that as a soci­ety we are destroy­ing one of Puer­to Rico’s great­est assets. Not to men­tion the fact that Old San Juan has tun­nels under­neath that criss­cross the city and could some­day cave under all that vehic­u­lar vibration.

6. Find your Paver… Another Way to Rake In The Cash

With the wave of cor­rup­tion that has smoth­ered gov­ern­men­tal cred­i­bil­i­ty in Puer­to Rico, it’s hard to get peo­ple to believe any­thing that our “hon­or­ables” say. Sim­ply put, in the minds of the peo­ple, if it comes from a gov­ern­ment fig­ure it must be a lie! So why not use that as an advan­tage to repave Old San Juan. Huh?

Once the repaving starts the city could invite peo­ple over to find their paver. That way they’d be sure that it’s there. Chances are that they’d bring their fam­i­lies, spend the day in the city, pay for park­ing, spend in the shops, vis­it attrac­tions and maybe even eat at a local restau­rant. It would cre­ate a syphon effect that would fun­nel dol­lars into the old city’s hurt­ing economy.

And how would we reach those peo­ple? Sim­ple!!! Direct mail. Every time a paver is sold the buy­er would pro­vide his/her name, address, phone num­ber and email. This would go into a data­base that could be used to send snail mail, email and text mes­sages. If not abused, a data­base of Old San Juan enthu­si­asts like this could be a gold mine to pro­mote oth­er events in the City as well.

7. When and Where To Close The City

The city could remain open as long as the main streets lead­ing in and out were not paved. This would include streets like Norza­garay, For­t­aleza, San Fran­cis­co, Com­er­cio, Tetuán, Recin­to Sur and the water­front. Once these streets are paved the city would be per­ma­nent­ly closed to vehic­u­lar traf­fic.

Clos­ing could take place right before Fort San Cristóbal, where oncom­ing traf­fic could turn left and return through road 26. The same could be done in front of Peer 7 next to the Puer­to Rico Capi­tol build­ing.  If the repaving were extend­ed all the way to the capi­tol build­ing (which would be beau­ti­ful) traf­fic could be closed off right before the capi­tol building.

I would be the first to admit that urban plan­ning is not my thing, so these check­points could vary great­ly, but some­thing needs to be done and quick. There are plen­ty of peo­ple smarter than me on the Island so this would be a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for all those experts to chip in.

Anoth­er aspect of clos­ing down a city is what to do with all the ven­dors, sup­pli­ers and pro­fes­sion­als that need to vis­it the city peri­od­i­cal­ly. Well, why not give them elec­tron­ic per­mits that would allow them to enter the city for a cou­ple of hours hours at a time. Those that exceed the allowed time lim­it would be fined.  Cards would also need to be pro­grammed to avoid a revolv­ing door effect (that’s when you go in, out and back in for an addi­tion­al two hours).

Peo­ple that work in the city could be grant­ed spe­cial per­mits, but they would need to park in one of the many pri­vate park­ing garages.

Sim­i­lar­ly, vis­i­tors would need to com­ply with vehi­cle size and weight reg­u­la­tions. Noth­ing larg­er or heav­ier than a micro bus should be allowed inside the closed perimeter.

Absolute­ly no one would be allowed to park on the street except for deliv­ery vehi­cles. And even those would have time lim­its. Every­one else would have to use a park­ing garage or face stiff fines.

8. Using technology to close the city

Every vehi­cle enter­ing Old San Juan would need to have some kind of pass. This could be some­thing sim­i­lar to the Easy­Pass like stick­ers that are used on toll roads. That way they could be pro­grammed dif­fer­ent­ly for ven­dors, sup­pli­ers, work­ers and residents.

Ven­dors and sup­pli­ers could have a two-hour win­dow to get in and out. Exceed­ing that time would result in stiff fines that would appear on their Easy­Pass month­ly state­ment. Fail­ure to pay those fines would result in pass can­cel­la­tion and los­ing the abil­i­ty to enter the city alto­geth­er. Hack­ing the sys­tem in any way could entail stiffer fines and even jail time.

Res­i­dents would have an hour to dri­ve up to their homes, unload any gro­ceries or pack­ages, exit the city and park at the res­i­dent park­ing structure.

Mov­ing com­pa­nies and oth­er oca­sion­al vis­i­tors could be issued a tem­po­rary pass com­men­su­rate with their par­tic­u­lar needs. Every check­point would have at least one guard in charge of these spe­cial situations.

None of this is new. The tech­nol­o­gy is basi­cal­ly the same one used for toll roads, in gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties and at coun­try clubs around the world. It would just be pro­grammed differently.

Access to the city for pedes­tri­ans would be unrestricted.

9. Local and International Promotion

A walk­a­ble Old San Juan would be world­wide news. Many tourists that hate Old San Juan because of the pol­lu­tion, noise and traf­fic would glad­ly vis­it an all-new city pep­pered with side­walk cafes, chil­dren run­ning freely, peo­ple walk­ing and bik­ing on the streets and a clean­er all-around environment.

A new sense of com­mu­ni­ty would flour­ish where traf­fic jams and honk­ing horns made life mis­er­able before. Prop­er­ty prices would go sky high due to improved liv­ing and busi­ness con­di­tions. Our gov­ern­ment offi­cials could col­lect more prop­er­ty tax­es, and God knows they love that!

More events could take place where cars used to park. Nar­row streets would seem wide again. The entire city would “breath” like it hasn’t in over 100 years.

And believe me, inter­na­tion­al media would eat it all up, like they’ve tak­en notice in Madrid, Seville, Tole­do, and so many oth­er Euro­pean and Amer­i­can cities.

10. A Governing Board To Make It All Work

When I worked in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sec­tor we used to joke that a camel was a horse cre­at­ed by a com­mit­tee. But in this case it would be a nec­es­sary evil. You need rep­re­sen­ta­tives from all walks of soci­ety to arrive at a meet­ing of the minds to assure that everybody’s happy.

The gov­ern­ing board for a walk­a­ble Old San Juan should be very dif­fer­ent from tra­di­tion­al gov­ern­ing boards that are usu­al­ly full of politi­cians and bureau­crats. It should be diverse and every mem­ber should have an equal voice. It should include politi­cians from the local and state gov­ern­ment, police­men, fire­men, emer­gency work­ers, busi­ness peo­ple, pro­fes­sion­als, restau­ran­teurs, hote­liers, bar own­ers, the San Juan His­toric Site (the forts), res­i­dents, media rep­re­sen­ta­tives, cler­gy, peo­ple involved in the tourism indus­try and just reg­u­lar con­cerned cit­i­zens. Any­one affect­ed should have a voice and a vote. And it should change at least every two years.

One mis­take that many Old San Juan res­i­dents make is think­ing that just because they live in the Old City it means that they own it. Well guess what? They don’t, and liv­ing there has its own chal­lenges. Old San Juan belongs to all Puer­to Ricans. That’s why we can’t con­tin­ue abus­ing it. That’s why we have to pre­serve it for our chil­dren, for our children’s chil­dren and for the rest of the world to enjoy. Just like with glob­al warm­ing and cli­mate change the time to do some­thing mean­ing­ful was YESTERDAY!!!

If it were up to me I would­n’t only repave Old San Juan, I’d demol­ish every­thing built dur­ing the 20th Cen­tu­ry along the south­east­ern quad­rant of the city, rebuild the south­ern por­tion of Fort San Cristóbal (includ­ing San­ti­a­go Gate) and put back the por­tion of the wall that went between San Cristo­bal and San Jus­to Street (includ­ing the San Justo/España gate). Of course, that’s just the dream­er in me speak­ing, but can you imag­ing what hav­ing the “only walled city in Amer­i­ca” would do for Puer­to Rico’s tourism? It would go through the roof!

How­ev­er, it’s a lit­tle late for that; about 130 years too late. I know. But it’s not too late to restore Old San Juan to its for­mer splen­dor. In fact, I don’t know of any oth­er city in Amer­i­ca (and maybe the world) (don’t quote me on that last state­ment) that is ful­ly paved in 19th Cen­tu­ry style slag pavers. That in itself would be a tremen­dous draw for tourists from every cor­ner of the globe.

Still not convinced? Watch the following video.

In my pre­vi­ous arti­cle I wrote about our nature pre­serves in the town of Cabo Rojo and how they all leave much to be desired with one notable excep­tion: the Cabo Rojo Nation­al Wildlife Refuge. Why can’t we set an exam­ple with Old San Juan? God knows that noth­ing can stop us when we put our col­lec­tive minds to it. It just seems so hard a thing to come about.

Tell your friends about this arti­cle. Let’s start a con­ver­sa­tion. I don’t claim own­er­ship for any of the ideas in expressed here. The truth of the mat­ter is that most of what I men­tion already exists some­where else. I just put them all togeth­er in a cohe­sive and easy to digest fash­ion (if you’re still with me).  I just want to repave Old San Juan and close it to vehic­u­lar traf­fic.  So all you brain­dead politi­cians out there, look­ing for bright ideas to call your own, here’s your oppor­tu­ni­ty. I’ll be more than hap­py to applaud your “for­ward think­ing”. I won’t even men­tion that I saw some­thing sim­i­lar some­where in Europe, or in the Unit­ed States, 20, 30 or even. 40 years ago. I’ll just be hap­py to final­ly see our “San Juan Peatonal”.

©2020,Orlando Mer­gal, MA
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Author, Pho­tog­ra­ph­er and New Media Expert
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