RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The year was 1956, and two of the founding fathers of bossa nova, Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, had just met at a Rio de Janeiro bar called the Casa Villarino.
The friendship that started that day would change the history of music, as the pianist and the poet helped reinvent Brazilian samba to give the world a silky-smooth new genre that would come to define modernity and cool.
The meeting also sealed the Villarino’s place in history. But 64 years on, the iconic bar and restaurant in the city center has closed, the latest victim of the coronavirus pandemic.
Rio’s downtown business district has all but emptied as companies have switched to home office in Brazil. Social distancing measures have taken a heavy toll on the restaurants, bars and shops that catered to the now-vanished business set — the list now includes the Villarino, which closed indefinitely on November 16th.
“The city’s downtown is empty. It’s like a ghost town,” said owner Rita Nava, 79. “We used to serve 80 to 100 meals a day on average. The day we closed, there was one customer.”
Nava’s late husband, Antonio Vazquez, was the last remaining member of a group of Spanish partners who had run the bar almost since its founding in 1953.
They turned it into a hangout for artists, intellectuals and politicians in the 1950s. The bar still has the mosaic tiles, marble tables and red-leather chairs from that era.
Regular clients in those days included Vinicius de Moraes, a diplomat and poet who used to jet into Rio’s nearby Santos Dumont airport and immediately head to the Villarino to install himself at his favorite corner table.
It was there that he was introduced to the young pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim, whom he soon enlisted to score his work “Orfeu da Conceição,” the play that became the basis for the Oscar-winning film “Black Orpheus” (1959).
The pair would collaborate on some of the greatest bossa nova hits of all time, including “The Girl from Ipanema,” “A Felicidade” and “Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar.”
Faded heyday
Back then, Rio was still Brazil’s capital, not yet supplanted by Brasilia, the ultra-modernist planned city inaugurated in 1960.
Downtown Rio is still home to a huge number of historic buildings, though many have fallen into decay. The district has been in failing health for decades, even before the pandemic. Buzzing with activity during business hours, it emptied on evenings and weekends except for homeless people and drug addicts.
Since the pandemic, its streets are largely deserted even in the middle of working days. “It was already a problem before. The pandemic has just accelerated things,” said Claudio Hermolin, head of the Association of Real Estate Managers (ADEMI).
A recent report by the association identified 14,000 abandoned, empty or nearly unused properties in the city center, up from 8,000 before the pandemic.
Hermolin argues Rio needs to overhaul its zoning regulations to make it easier to convert business properties into residential ones and bring life back to the city center.
Brazil’s second city tried to revitalize the center with a series of infrastructure projects when it hosted the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. But it largely failed to attract major employers to the district.
‘Stalled economy’
Former Mayor Eduardo Paes (2008-2016), who won a new term in elections last month, promises to attract investment to save the “soul of the city” when he takes office again in January.
Small business owners hope he will deliver. “The economy has stalled here. Offices closed, stores closed and those of us who are open aren’t making ends meet,” said newsstand owner Derisvaldo Pereira.
He closed shop for three months when the pandemic arrived, and says sales are down 60 percent since he reopened.
The Brazilian Bar and Restaurant Association says 30 percent of those businesses have closed nationwide since the new coronavirus arrived.
Villarino’s owner Nava hopes she will be able to reopen someday, and see the city center make a come-back. “The culture of every city in the world is in the center. That’s where everything starts,” she said. “We can’t just leave it to oblivion.”