page_title: Plaza del Vapor, Havana
section_title: Vendors
hierarchical_section_title: Plaza del Vapor, Havana / Vendors
caption_attribution_description: English: Plaza del Vapor.11. Havana, Cuba. 1904
context_page_description: The Plaza del Vapor was a covered market in Havana. Its name derives from its builder Francisco Martí who was the impresario of the Tacón Theatre and who had a monopoly of fish in the city. Martí had an image in his office of Neptuno, the first vapor that made regular round trips between Havana and Matanzas. "It was the image of that ship that ended up naming the building." From the Plaza del Vapor, Martí sold 50% of all the lottery tickets in Cuba.
context_section_description: Sergio R. San Pedro del Valle says in his book Lived Yesterday (Miami, 2008), that there were more than 160 shops that opened their doors in the Plaza del Vapor. There were more than 160 businesses in the Plaza del vapor. Carlos Rodríguez Búa writing about the nearby "El Barrio Chino" notes: "...the Plaza del Vapor occupied la manzana (the entire block) between Galiano, Reina, Dragones and Águila streets and about 1824 there were established without any order and with the most petty irregularity the vendors of daily supplies for that part new of the population, so that the best of those positions were uneven wooden blocks that belonged to different owners.
  I knew the Plaza del Vapor already in its decline, at the end of the 50s and it was incredible the amount of small businesses that were piled up there. I'll talk about it again because it was located in the neighborhood of Chinatown and there were a few of them there. I used to go there every week to buy the discs with 45 revolutions per minute that on the site were obtained at a third of the official price in nightclubs (thirty-five cents against a peso and ten cents that normally cost), as well as to the bookstores of use in which you took me masterpieces for a few cents, as well as the expensive National Geographic magazines already used."
caption: Plaza del Vapor vendors. 1904
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