Urban renewal Mexico City tries to rescue 700-year-old historic

MEXICO CITY -- An adult movie theater sits on the remains of North America's first convent, where construction workers regularly turn up piles of ancient bones. Fast-food restaurants snuggle in centuries-old buildings and outdoor vendors hawk computer chips from wooden tables in a 16th century alleyway.

This is Mexico City's 700-year-old historic district, a 2-square-mile amalgam of ancient and new that is proving a challenge for historical conservationists. Government and civic groups will unveil a plan Monday to save the district, but the obstacles are daunting -- and range from the mundane to the surreal.

To begin with, the area -- a maze of narrow streets clogged with traffic and street vendors -- is sinking into the swampy terrain of a former lake bed.

And crumbling buildings are built atop even older structures. Should workers restore a 17th century building whose masonry walls are buckling -- or the Aztec pyramid buried underneath, which is responsible for the damage? (One researcher calls the damage "a real case of Montezuma's revenge.")

Then there are the modern-day quandaries.

Should the center be closed to cars, whose exhaust is eating away at the stone structures? "The automobile is a predator here. The pedestrian should be king," says Rene Couloumb, an urban designer and former head of the Historic District Trust.

Cramped quarters

The situation can sometimes edge into the bizarre. At the San Francisco Convent, founded in 1524, two Franciscan friars and five priests share cramped quarters with an adult movie theater.

"We'd like a little more room, and if it's not much of a bother, to get our convent back," says Fray Albino Mesa, 86, wearing a brown habit.

The convent was taken over and split up by anti-Catholic politicians in the 1860s. Part of its four-block area was used to house a circus and stables, another was given over to a pool hall, and the cloister was given to the Methodist church, which still holds services there.

Those areas remain the best preserved. Most of the rest of the convent was demolished entirely -- to make way for office buildings, stores and movie theaters.

Workers continue to dig below the convent to lay electrical cables and water pipes. Leaving an interview with the priests, a reporter steps onto the street and -- crack -- onto a human femur.

"Hey! We were going to save that," says construction worker Luis Jimenez as he heaves a hip bone onto the sidewalk.

Peering into his four-foot pit where more bones stick out from the walls, Jimenez offers his archaeological expertise: "I think there are more bodies down there."