On Buenos Aires's reading street and the city that operates after dark
At midnight on Corrientes, the bookshops are still open. This is not unusual. The street has been operating this way since the 1930s.
At midnight on Corrientes, the bookshops are still open. This is not unusual. The street has been operating this way since the 1930s, when the avenue became the centre of the city's publishing and theatre economy and established the habit of late-night commerce that Buenos Aires then generalised to most of its commercial life. The bookshop that closes at midnight is considered to be keeping reasonable hours.
The block between Callao and Uruguay concentrates the highest density of secondhand and remainder booksellers — the kind of shops where the stock is a combination of the deliberately curated and the accidentally accumulative, where a first edition sits next to a 1980s cookbook and both are priced by someone who knows what they're doing. The Buenos Aires secondhand book market is one of the more functional in the world because the city's economic volatility has produced a continuous supply of private libraries being broken up, which means the stock turns over and the good material surfaces regularly.
The theatre marquees along Corrientes illuminate the street in a way that the architectural lighting doesn't: the Teatro Astral, the Teatro Metropolitan, the Teatro El Nacional — all operational, all lit, all announcing productions that will run on Tuesday nights as seriously as Saturday nights because Buenos Aires has the culture of attending the theatre on weekdays that most cities have lost. The playbills in the display cases outside each theatre are worth reading even if you don't plan to attend.
Walk the length of Corrientes at midnight on a Wednesday. Buy something you hadn't planned to buy. Eat at one of the 24-hour parrillas on the side streets. Return the following night if you have the time. This is the city that people who live in Buenos Aires miss most acutely when they leave it.