Colonel William C. Gorgas
Street Before
Street After
Street Before
Street After
A Short Video of
Dr. Gorgas in Colón
The Americans Take Over
"It is all unspeakably loathsome," concluded a New York reporter who was among the earliest to arrive at Colón. Colón was troubling. The Negroes lived in the most appalling fashion in rotting shanties propped on stilts in a swamp, "a morass, a vast expanse of black water covered with green scum," There was no plumbing, not one sewer. The stench was like nothing in his experience; the nights were made "hideous" by the interminable din of thousands of frogs.
He described the poisonous mists rising over the Chagres River, mists quite visible from Colón in the early morning; and not wishing to appear ignorant of advanced medical theory, he wrote also of the mosquitoes. What conceivable chance, he asked, was there to make so vile a place safe for white men?
In Marie Gorgas' published reminiscences we find some of the earliest first impressions of Panama: Colón was "unspeakably dirty," swarming with naked children, ugly, dilapidated, and terribly depressing.
But conditions changed rapidly with the arrival of the Canal Commission. Colonel William C. Gorgas, in charge of sanitation during the canal construction, gave it a new system of waterworks and sewerage and drained the surrounding swamps. The City of Colón was raised, drained, sanitated; large areas raised, streets paved, the morass in the heart of the city filled in and converted into a park. Since then it never has lost nor will it lose a true international importance.
Willis J. Abbot described the town as it was in 1913:
We reach Colón where lie the docks of the Royal Mail in the early morning. To the right as we steam into Limon Bay is the long breakwater of Toro Point extending three miles into the Caribbean, the very first Atlantic outpost of the canal. For it was necessary to create here a largely articial harbor, as Limon Bay affords no safe anchorage when the fierce northers sweep gown along the coast. ln the early days of Colón, when it was the starting point of the gold seekers' trail to Panama, ships in its harbor were compelled to cut and run for the safer, though now abandoned, harbor of Porto Bello some twenty miles down the coast. That condition the great breakwater corrects.
From the ship one sees a line af low hills forming the horizon with no break or indentation to suggest that here man is cutting the narrow gate between the oceans for the commerce of the nations to pass. The town at a distance is not unprepossessing. White houses with red roofs cluster together on a flat island scarcely above the water, and along the sea front lines of cocoanut palms bend before the breeze. No other tree seems so fitly to blend with a white beach and blue sea as this palm. Its natural curves are graceful and characteristic and in a stiff breeze it bows and sways and rustles with a grace and a music all its own.
But the picturesqueness of Colón does not long survive a closer approach. The white houses are seen to be mere frame buildings of the lightest construction which along the seafront stand out, over the water on stilts. No building of any distinction meets the eye, undess it be the new Washington Hotel, a good bit of Moorish architecture, owned and conducted by the Panama Railroad which in turn is owned by the United States. The activities of Uncle Sam as a hotel keeper on the Isthmus will be worth further attention.
The town which greets the voyager emerging from the cool recesses of the steamship freight house looks something like the landward side of Atlantic City's famous board walk with the upper stories of the hotels sliced off. The buildings are almost without exception wood, two stories high, and with wooden galleries reaching to the curb and there supported by slender posts. It does not look foreign - merely cheap and tawdry. Block after block the lines of business follow each other in almost unvarying sequence. A saloon, a Chinese shop selling dry goods and curios, a kodak shop with curios, a saloon, a lottery agency, another saloon, a money-changer's booth, another saloon and so on for what seems about the hottest and smelliest half mile one ever walked. There is no "other side" to the street, for there run the tracks of the Panama rail-road, beyond them the bay, and further along lies the American town of Cristobal where there are no stores, but only the residences and work shops of Canal workers.
Between Cristobal and tinder box Colón is a wide space kept clear of houses as a fire guard. Colón's population is as mixed as the conplexions of its people. It must be admitted with regret that pure American names are most in evidence on the sideboards of its saloons, and well-equipped students of the social life of the town remark that. the American vernacular is the one usually proceeding from the lips of the professional gamblers. Merchandising is in the main in the hands of the Chinese, who compel one's admiration in the tropics by the intelligent way in which they have taken advantage of the laziness of the natives to capture for themselves the best places in the business community.
Most of the people in Colón live over their stores and other places of business, though back from the, business section are a few comfortable looking residences, and I noticed others being built on made land, as though the.beginnings of a mild "boom", were apparent. The newer houses are of concrete, as is the municipal building and chief public school. The Panama Railroad owns most of the land on which the town stands, and to which it is practically limited, and the road is said to be encouraging the use of cement or concrete by builders - an exceedingly wise policy, as the town has suffered from repeated fires, in one of which, in 1911, ten blocks were swept away and 1200 people left homeless. The Isthmian Canal Commission maintains excellent fire-fighting forces both in Cristobal and Ancon, and when the local fire departments proved impotent to cope with the flames both of these forces were called into play, the Ancon engines and men being rushed by special train over the forty-five miles of railroad. Of course the fire was in foreign territory, but the Republic of Panama did not resent the invasion. Since that day many of the new buildings have been of concrete, but the prevailing type of architecture may be described as a modified renaissance of the mining shack.
