In Panama City's old quarter, a rebirth takes place
American helping restore buildings
PANAMA CITY -- As the fast-talking, big-money barons of a full-throttle property boom noisily transform Panama City's bayfront skyline into a shiny facsimile of Miami's, a different sort of developer is quietly revitalizing the city's crumbling, charming old quarter nearby.
Panama City's casco antiguo, as the old quarter is known, is home to 780 historic but mostly dilapidated buildings, from Spanish colonial dungeons and churches to French and American townhouses with wrought-iron balconies built a century ago during the construction of the Panama Canal.
Its narrow streets and cobbled plazas evoke Panama's storied past and present -- the conquistadors and missionaries, the engineers, money-launderers, and spies. The casco's palpable history of intrigue has lured Hollywood for such atmospheric productions as John le Carré's "The Tailor of Panama." Today, ordinary working people live here amid genteel decline and know their neighbors on a first-name basis.
That magic captured the imagination of K.C. Hardin, an entrepreneurial young American. Hardin, 33, is a leading player in giving the mildewed old quarter a long-overdue facelift, while making sure it retains its local flavor and its longtime residents.
There are few places in Latin America where the push-and-pull between urban modernization and historical preservation, and between high-priced developments and affordable housing, is as stark as in Panama City. Many developers would eagerly raze the casco's decaying properties to make way for more luxury skyscrapers with prime water views.
The area's 100 acres are protected by zoning laws and building restrictions that are practically nonexistent elsewhere in the city, and the casco was named a world heritage site by UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations. But next to nothing was being done to restore disintegrating private properties.
Hardin, then a corporate lawyer in his 20s with a top New York firm, came to Panama in 2003 to surf. He liked it so much, he bought what he called the "grungy surfer s hostel" where he was staying and remained behind to run it.
Yearning to start a business to "make good money, do no harm, and be creative," he saw his chance when he visited the old quarter. Hardin's family owned a major real estate brokerage in south Florida, and he had seen "Miami transformed from a ghetto to what it is today."
Amid the casco's crumbling facades, he saw a real estate opportunity. He fell in love with the eclectic architecture and the neighborhood's strong sense of community -- and with a Panamanian named Patrizia Pinzón.
A business school graduate who worked in Panama with the Smithsonian in public outreach, Pinzón had previously danced with the national ballet at the neoclassical Teatro Nacional in the heart of the old quarter, and shared Hardin's vision to see the neighborhood restored. Now 30, she runs the brokerage arm of the property development company Hardin founded two years ago, Grupo Archipelago .
Once the domain of the elite, old quarters throughout Latin America began to decline in the 1930s, as the popularity of cars made navigating narrow streets impractical. The rich began to move into suburbs, and their city homes fell into disrepair.
Panama's casco is slightly smaller than the heavily commercialized old town in San Juan and half the size of the colonial walled city in Cartagena, Colombia, which is also enjoying a renaissance and restoration.
As he purchases and rehabilitates properties, Hardin's guiding philosophy is to be "environmentally and socially responsible" to create low-income housing for casco residents at the same time that he makes luxury condos to turn a profit. Hardin lived through the gentrification of old neighborhoods in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York, and shuddered at the thought of pricing locals out of their homes. When gentrification forces out the locals, " you lose human memory and feeling," he said, sipping mineral water at a renovated restaurant around the corner from the home of salsa singer Rubén Blades, now Panama's minister of tourism.
Hardin converted the old National Music Conservatory into lofts for artists and scientists on limited incomes. He recently finished a building of two-bedroom, 500- to 600-square-foot apartments with sea views for $36,000, available to low-income residents of the old quarter being forced out by other developers.
Now backed by a group of investors, his new company, Conservatorio S.A. , is converting an old sweatshop into 10 luxury apartments with a pool, Italian kitchens, bamboo floors, high-speed Internet -- and sale prices of between $300,000 and $800,000.
The upward and outward urban sprawl underway in the rest of Panama City distresses Hardin.
"Fortunately, the old city is not the Wild, Wild West; there are regulations. The buildings here are at a perfectly human scale," he said. Best of all, "everyone knows each other by name and we look out for each other." 