The Cathedral That Was Levelled by Sinking — Epoche B1
I went back to the Zócalo this morning. I always stand too long in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral, but today I did not look up at the towers. I looked down, because the floor is where this building tells the truth. I walked down the nave and felt it: the far end is lower than the door. The floor is not level, and it never will be. The reason is under the street. The whole city stands on the soft clay bed of a lake that was drained, and as the city pumps drinking water from the ground, the clay packs down. Everything above sinks with it. The cathedral took two hundred and forty years to build, from 1573 to the towers of 1813, and it was sinking while the builders were still at work. Worse, it has never sunk evenly. The clay is softer under some parts than others — under part of the site lie remains of far older structures, from when this ground was the centre of the Aztec city — so one side always went down faster. By the late twentieth century the cracks were serious, and engineers spent most of the 1990s under the building. What they did there sounds backwards until you think about it. They did not lift the sunken side. They dug narrow shafts and removed soil from under the side that had sunk least, so the high side came slowly down to meet the low one. The cathedral was levelled by letting it sink — evenly, on purpose. An old man was selling candles, three for twenty pesos. In the twenty minutes I stood there he did not once look up. He does not need to. The part of the cathedral that is still moving is under his feet. References Toussaint, M. (1948). Arte colonial en México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Ortiz, A. (2001). Mexico City's Zocalo: A History of the Main Square. Editorial Clío.