Buenos Aires and the world on 1916

In 1916 the world was convulsed by the Great War - as it was called The World War I at that age- and Buenos Aires lived a relaxed prosperity. Europe already had lost more of a million soldiers in the war, and the Germans decided that year to attack Verdun, in the northeast of France, which was a long and bloody battle. In France women worked in the factories, in the ways, in the harbors. My grandmother Suzanne, in fact, had to go to work at a factory of howitzers in Paris, what left her burns in her arms that never got erased. Meanwhile, in that year, Hipólito Yrigoyen assumes the presidency in Argentina and declares the country as neutral in front to the world-wide conflict. Argentina had been developed quickly at the beginning of XX Century and the wage of an industrial laborer in Buenos Aires was superior to those of the United States. In those circumstances, European immigration towards Argentina was one of the greater ones than we can find registered in history.

With its impressive architectonic development, and its economic prosperity, Buenos Aires had been transformed at that age into the "Paris of South America", competing  in luxury with the main European cities. In the photo at the right, the Avenue of  May, near 1920, where a station of the Subway, inaugurated in 1913, can be observed; it was the first one in Latin America and one of the firsts in all the world.

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