The other day I left my office and drove a mile to a grocery store. I’ve done it a thousand times. Along the way, I crossed a railroad track, just one track but with at least a dozen long freight trains daily. The crossing has automatic gates, but I’m old enough to look up and down the track anyway. There was no train in sight. The rails are highly polished from millions of wheels, and it was a sunny afternoon, so in the half second I spent looking to the left I saw two bright lines stretching to infinity.
There were no other vehicles on the road, and I caught myself thinking that I liked the track. Then I thought, “What? Why would you like a railroad track?” I can imagine laughter and jokes like, “Maybe for Christmas we should get him a fire hydrant!”
Set this aside and come with me to Panama City. I mean the real Panama City, not the place in the Florida panhandle that happens to be on a straight line between Chicago and Panama. A Florida community adopted the name in 1906, when Americans were as enthralled by the Panama Canal, which was then under construction, as millions today are about flights to the moon and Mars and–yes!--the stars. If you think I’m exaggerating, you haven’t spent time looking at books about the Panama Canal. There are dozens, overwhelmingly published between 1900 and 1914, when the Canal opened and when–talk about bad timing–readers were suddenly distracted by news from Sarajevo.
I had never been to Panama and as usual was on my own. It was dark, though not late. I got a rental car and put myself in the not always reliable hands of Google Maps. She–she is feminine, isn’t she?--she said it was about 20 miles or a little over a half-hour to one of the two hotels that actually have a view of ships in the Canal.
She worked. I even stopped at a grocery store to buy some UHT milk so I could make some coffee in my room the next morning. You’re learning all my secrets.
The Panama Canal doesn’t work at night, but the next morning I woke and saw a cruise ship, a Cunard Queen, moving like a monstrous amphibian taking its first, painfully slow steps on dry land. The ship moved almost imperceptibly slowly, but half an hour later a Chinese container ship repeated the trick. If I hadn’t known where I was, I would have called home and asked about drug reactions.
As always, I skipped the hotel breakfast (another of my secrets) and drove to the Casco Antiguo. That’s the old section of Panama City. It’s a tiny place, roughly six blocks by six and built on a squarish peninsula sticking into the ocean. Once, the land side was protected by a wall with a drawbridge over a saltwater moat. Only a few bits of that wall made it past the 1880s, but the peninsula’s waterfront was also walled, and most of that wall is intact and impressive. It apparently was made of stones hauled about six miles from the ruins of the first Panama City, Panama Viejo, which the pirate Henry Morgan attacked in 1671. He was subsequently knighted by Charles II and named governor of Jamaica. That’s what I call rehabilitation.
Despite the wall, I’m not sure if the Casco Antiguo deserves its UNESCO World Heritage status, because most of its buildings are from the 19th century. The churches are an exception, but–call me a barbarian–I skated through the cathedral and skipped the rest, except for the ruins of the Santo Domingo church, almost absurdly renowned for one wide and very flat arch that has withstood the centuries.
Early in the 19th century, the Casco Antiguo had an estimated population of only a thousand people. Then, in 1849, tens of thousands of men and a few women descended. They had landed at the mouth of the Chagres River on the other side of the isthmus. They had looked for anything that could carry them upstream 30 miles to the village of Cruces. (Don’t bother looking for that village. To build the Panama Canal, the Chagres was dammed, and the reservoir–it’s called Gatun Lake–reached upstream and flooded the village.) From Cruces, the 49ers walked, or rode a mule if they could get one, another 20 miles or so to Panama City. Most of them got out of town as soon as they could, but finding a ship going to California wasn’t always easy.
Some of the people who crossed the isthmus swore it was no big deal. A young Bayard Taylor, sent west by Horace Greeley to report on the news from California, wrote of the crossing that there was “nothing that I could exactly call hardship.” Others told different stories. A young Lt. Ulysses S. Grant, quartermaster of his regiment, got stuck in Cruces in 1852. Waiting for mules to carry supplies, a third of Grant’s men died of cholera. He mentions this in his memoirs. You may remember that they were published with the help of Mark Twain, who himself had gone West, but he went in the 1860s. Things were easier then, and Twain travelled by stagecoach from Missouri. He wrote about it and had the nerve to call the book Roughing It.
Maxime Huertematte, a Frenchman, decided to stay in Panama and open a store. Fifty years later, the Huertemattes owned the Bazar Frances, a department store opulent with a hanging display of Oriental rugs. Julio Huertematte, who ran the store in the 1930s, quit in 1945 and emigrated to the United States, where he held senior positions in the Organization of American States and then in the World Bank. I learned this only because, walking around just outside the Casco Antiguo, I came upon the store: three floors, with the family name in large letters up top. The building was in good shape but now housed craft shops. I suppose you could say that the Huertematte voyage to America took longer than most.
Equally, there was nothing Spanish about the Hotel Metropole next door. The Panama Guide, a valuable resource published in 1912, states that the hotel’s proprietor is F. P. Petersen, with a Scandinavian spelling. The hotel advertised baths and electricity and draft beer. My South American Handbook from 1928 lists the hotel, but it’s not there in the ‘49 edition. (I think I’m sharing too many secrets, but yes, I’m one of the six people on Earth who collect those things.) When I saw the building in 2025 it was derelict, with I suspect a few squatters. A sign said it was for sale.
I suppose you could argue that the Casco Antiguo deserves World Heritage status precisely because it’s a mongrel, a 17th century Spanish Colonial city taken over in the 19th by foreigners. The 1912 Guide offers plenty of supporting evidence. It has advertisements for the Emanuel Lyons hardware store, for the Cathedral Drug Store (“with competent German pharmacists”) and for a dentist licensed to practice in New York and Pennsylvania.
The city’s street addresses have been renumbered, so I couldn’t find any of these places, but I did find the cathedral, which was completed just before 1800. It faces the Central Hotel, which opened in 1874 as the Grand Central Hotel, Emil Dreyfous, proprietor. It burned a few years later, was rebuilt, and bought in 1894 by Henry Ehrman, who a decade later was exchanging telegrams with U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, who was–I will be diplomatic–helping Panama liberate itself from Colombia.
The hotel was rebuilt in 1917 and again about 2015, but it has never had anything to do with Spanish colonial architecture. The same thing is true for its neighbors, except for the cathedral. Step outside the hotel and on your left there’s another hotel, also from the 1870s but long ago converted to house the administrative offices of the French and then the American Canal builders. Panama City’s city hall stands next to it, completed in 1915 but built in the French style of the 1860s.
So what’s the most interesting thing about the Casco Antigua? Some might say it’s the number of buildings so ruined that, if you peek in the windows and look up, you see sky. Others might say it’s the investors and architects who are working to renovate many of these ruins and make them into stylish hotels and shops. Still others–and I saw banners to prove it–will go on the attack and say that the gentrification of the Casco Antiguo should be stopped and that neighborhoods without residents aren’t neighborhoods at all.
I don’t disagree with any of this, but I was most struck by something else. At the far edge of the peninsula, where ocean waves splash against the mighty wall…. But I must stop. I’m getting carried away. There’s a large tidal range in Panama City, and when the tide is out the shoreline is often a hundred feet or more from the wall, which then overlooks a shelf of solid rock. Anyway, out there at the point there’s a Panama Canal monument. What could be more appropriate? The entrance to the Canal is only five miles up the coast, and ships are almost always offshore waiting for their scheduled transit time.
The monument’s most prominent feature is a 60-foot obelisk of dark stone. Six busts sit on plinths in front of the obelisk. Most of the names are unfamiliar but one is not. It’s Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose spectacular career was brought low by his failure to repeat at Panama his success twenty years earlier at Suez.
The monument was built in 1921. The Canal had been operating by then for half a dozen years, but is there a bust of Teddy Roosevelt, who famously and perhaps apocryphally said he wanted the dirt to fly? There is not. Are there busts of John Stevens and George Goethals, the engineers in charge of planning and building the Canal? There are not. Is there any recognition of the fact that it was Americans who built the thing? There is not.
Now don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that the Panamanians are damned ungrateful. I’m saying almost the opposite, that Americans–and I’m talking about myself–who are surprised by the monument’s omission are stupid or, if you demand precision, blind. Maybe that’s too strong. Let’s go with blinkered, which at least holds out the promise of someday seeing clearly.
I’m reminded of a recent book by Marixa Lasso, who grew up in Panama when the Zone was still guarded by American troops. She writes that as a child she saw the Zone “as a place of desire and denial. Its many swimming pools, tennis courts, movie theaters, and restaurants were closed to Panamanians, unless invited by a Zone resident.” Well, put yourself in Panamanian shoes. Would you put up a monument to foreigners who move into your country and have a picnic behind a line of U.S. Marines? I bet you wouldn’t.
Forty years after the Canal Zone disappeared, you can still tell when you’ve crossed into it. I say you can, but I didn’t, not at first. You have to understand: there’s a big hill, Ancon Hill, that sits between the Casco Antiguo and the Canal Zone. On the Casco side, the traffic is slow, congested, and full of drivers impatient with newcomers who don’t know their way around. On the other side there are controlled-access highways whose signs don’t match up with the names Lady Google knows. She’ll say (I’ll make up a name) “take the Green St. ramp,” but there is no ramp labelled Green St. This is a great way to find yourself five miles out of your way and struggling for 15 minutes to get back to where you made the wrong turn.
Anyway, it’s only two miles from the cathedral to the Prado. That’s the focal point of Balboa, a planned community that once was safe within the Zone. It was built for Canal employees and their families, and it’s a different world over there, a garden suburb designed by landscape architects with direct connections to Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture.
Originally the houses were built of wood, but in the 1950s they were replaced by concrete. That, as we say or used to say, is a bummer, but these standardized and boring concrete homes offer lots of space, sensible layouts, and large lots with splendid trees. The houses line streets designed not with rulers and triangles but with French curves. If I was going to live in Panama (I wouldn’t; it’s called the “humid tropics” for a reason) I’d look for a place in one of the many old Canal Zone towns like Balboa.
By the way, they’re still mosquito free. I’m not sure it’s ecologically enlightened, but killing them rid the Canal Zone of yellow fever and malaria and more or less made it possible to build the Canal. When Americans first went to work in Panama–this was just before 1850–they came to the east coast to build a railroad across the isthmus. and the clouds of mosquitoes drove them to retreat at night to ships anchored offshore.
The Panama Canal administration building is on the north-facing slope of Ancon Hill. It took a while, but in 1954 George Goethals, the chief engineer during most of the construction period, got a monument at the very bottom of that hill. It’s a thin, wide rectangular shaft rising perhaps 30 feet with three shafts protruding from both the right and left sides. Water pours from shaft to shaft on both of those sides, and I’m probably the only person ever to look at it and fail to realize that the design symbolizes the Canal, which has three lock chambers on each side of a central reservoir, the same reservoir that flooded the village of Cruces.
I call it Art for Engineers. I’ll give you another example. I mentioned the Prado a minute ago. It’s a long, narrow lawn, planted with palms and stretching a thousand feet from the Goethels monument. The Canal’s administration building stands on the slope above and has a view over the monument and down the Prado, which, like Washington, D.C., is lined with government buildings. There’s this difference: the landscape architect who designed the Prado was told by Goethals that the lawn had to measure exactly one thousand feet long and 110 feet wide. Odd dimensions, but they are not accidental. They are the exact dimensions of the Panama Canal’s lock chambers. I imagine George Goethals up in his office, looking down, and thinking, “This lawn is perfect.”
Goethals at heart was a quartermaster. (It’s no accident that his longtime assistant went on to be the even longer-serving boss of Sears, Roebuck). Goethal’s predecessor, the volcanic Frank Stevens, is much more entertaining. In his two years as chief engineer, Stevens by force of will overwhelmed all opposition to the Canal design he wanted–and got. He would have been a shoo-in for a movie needing a charismatic lawman.
Poor Goethals wouldn’t have had a chance, but there is one admirable story about him. It is that lots of bigshots came for the Canal’s grand opening. They wanted to be on the first ship that went through, but Goethals said that the only people allowed on that ship were those who had worked on the Canal for seven years. Some men on that first transit are said to have cried. Reminds me of the time when in the late ‘50s I was walking down a street in Berkeley, California. My father leaned over and quietly said, “Did you see that old man who just walked by?” I turned to see an old, white-haired guy shuffling along. He was alone and just passing a parking meter. My father quietly said, “That’s Admiral Nimitz.”
I became a bit of a connoisseur of Canal Zone housing; my favorites are the wooden houses that for some reason survive at a Canal town called Gamboa, in the middle of the isthmus. These were the kind of homes that seventy percent of Americans would choose if they could have what they liked: lots of square footage, big lots, quiet streets. The houses are all private now, and some are air-conditioned, including the house of one owner who swore that it wasn’t necessary. He blamed his wife.
My fondness for Canal Zone towns is offset by my dislike of what most of Panama City became after World War II, which is to say a metropolis of two million people stretching 20 miles down the coast from the Casco Antiguo. In 1946, the architect Edward Durell Stone in New York had a visitor, a young Panamanian who wanted Stone to design a luxury hotel three miles east of Ancon Hill. Stone would later design Washington’s Kennedy Center and lots more–how about the American Embassy in New Delhi or (my favorite) the headquarters of the National Geographic Society.
Stone would later write that on his first visit to Panama he saw the proposed hotel’s “magnificent suburban site.” Photographs show a landscape that I’d say is closer to exurban than suburban.
LIFE Magazine in January, 1952, carried a story about the El Panama. That was its name at first, though it soon became the El Panama Hilton. It was remarkable for having no air conditioning in the guest rooms. Instead, the rooms opened onto balconies that caught breezes from the ocean, less than a mile away. The breeze blew across those balconies and through louvered doors into the rooms. There were no solid doors on the other side of the rooms, either, just more louvered doors opening onto an open-air corridor overlooking a nearly empty countryside.
Today, I can report, the balconies and louvers are gone, and the rooms are air-conditioned. It may be that guests demand it, but there are also other reasons.
If we take 100 meters as the minimum height of a skyscraper, the El Panama, with 11 floors, isn’t one. Panama City didn’t get one for another 30 years until BBVA, a Spanish bank, built a 25-story tower about a mile from the hotel and close to the water. It stood alone for a decade, but Panama in the 1970s became a magnet attracting international banks. The city had 23 of them at the beginning of the decade. Thirteen years later, in 1983, it had 125.
For reasons I don’t understand, banks like tall buildings, and by the year 2000 Panama City’s lonely skyscraper of 1979 had 10 siblings. Forty more were built in the next decade, and in the peak year, 2011, 15 were added, including the Trump Ocean Club, a combination hotel and condominium tower, which looks embarrassingly like Dubai’s Burj al Arab. Since then, Panama City has seen only about one new skyscraper annually.
The El Panama is still in business, but it is now surrounded by tall buildings. Worse, the street on the east side of the hotel is lined with a McDonald’s, a Subway, a Wendy’s, a Cinnabon, a Taco Bell, a Carl’s Jr., and a Domino’s. This is not what the young man who visited Edward Durell Stone in 1946 expected. The Hilton flag came down in 2017. There’s a Hilton Garden Inn nearby, but the real Panama City Hilton is now down by the water, close to the Spanish bank tower where the skyscraper fever began. The Spanish bank, by the way, quit Panama in 2021.
I went down to Punta Pacifica, the waterfront point with the city’s peak land values. The Trump Ocean Club is here, though I’m sorry to report that it’s now a J.W. Marriott. (I know, it’s terribly sad. Do you need a tissue?) Several other skyscrapers were built to keep it company. They include the Bahia Pacifica, the Venetian Tower, and the Bellagio. You have to admire the imagination of the developers who chose those names.
I walked to this most prestigious, which is to say, most expensive bit of Panama City. The street plan is simple: just imagine a lollipop with a bent stick. The stick is a two-lane road leading to a lollipop of a traffic circle enclosing a patch of grass maybe 100 feet across. It’s called a park, but the grass struggles in the perpetual shade cast by one tower or another.
There were no benches in the park, but I found a box. There was nobody around, except a dog walker and two childcare workers pushing a stroller. What I noticed most was the traffic. It would have been bad in any case, but a developer had built two small islands about 500 feet offshore. There was a sign over the causeway: “Welcome to your oasis in the city,” but there was a long line of cars backed up on the causeway as they tried to merge into the traffic around the circle. I felt sorry for the drivers, or at least glad I wasn’t one of them.
Guards kept me from walking over the causeway, so I just sat on my box, watched the dog on its leash, and thought that Punta Pacifica was a miserable place. I understand that the apartments–I’m sorry, I meant condos–have views of the ocean, which is very big and very blue. I see that at least one of the towers has a waterside tennis court. Another has a pool and a bit of Astroturf with palms, but still: why would anyone choose to live in such a space? I conclude that people for some reason want to live in whatever part of a city is most prestigious, which, again, is to say most expensive. I see Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull and asking him if he knows why.
I suggest that we drive an hour over to the Atlantic side of the isthmus and look at Colón, a town of about 250,000 people. I suggest it because, if the Punta is the place where people hope to live, Colón is the place where people hope not to live. Exceptions? Sure. Some people call Colón home and are sensible enough not to give a damn what anyone thinks.
En route in 1852 to that cholera disaster in Cruces, Ulysses S. Grant passed through Colón. In his memoirs he writes that he “wondered how any person could live many months” in Colón. He adds that he “wondered still more why any one tried.” Grant was being polite. An American doctor 50 years later wrote of "sultry, vile-smelling, dirty old Colón.... The town has been burned down once, but a few more first-class fires would be decidedly beneficial." A third visitor wrote of a day spent in "a pest-breeding wallow nearly a mile long, immediately back of the show street which fronts the waters of the Caribbean Sea." Here’s one more flower from this ugly bouquet. It comes from a distinguished British surgeon who later was honored for saving the life of George V. He writes: "...it is doubtful if any place is more fetid for its size than is this well-known seaport. Every city has its slums, but Colón is a slum without a city."
I should explain that Colón occupies a peninsula roughly a mile square with a generally gridded street pattern. The highways from Panama City (there are two of them, one of them a toll road) converge near the bottom of the peninsula and run straight through it for about 20 blocks along a boulevard with a wide and green median with benches shaded by mature trees. If you drive about halfway up this boulevard and then turn right, in half a mile you’ll come to saltwater and the city’s cruise-ship terminal, which opened in stages after 2000 and boasts a duty-free shopping center fit for Florida. We could stroll past Kenneth Cole, Nautica, Tommy Hilfiger, and Calvin Klein, and although you might wonder why we had come all this way for what we have at home, you couldn’t say the place was vile-smelling or pest-breeding or fetid.
If I engineered our visit carefully, we could stay at a reasonably standard Radisson hotel near the duty-free center. It’s probably the safest choice, though there’s another hotel on the edge of town. It used to be a Sheraton Four Points and, like the Radisson, it opened along with the cruise-ship terminal. The Sheraton flag has come down, but there’s still a Burger King next door.
If you insist on seeing something worthwhile, I’d take you to the Episcopal Church by the Sea, built in 1865. The Panama Railroad had opened ten years earlier and been a great financial success, so the owners could afford to give something back. The church is small and built of stone quarried from a spot deep in the isthmus, but there’s beautiful timberwork over the nave and crossing.
The architect was James Renwick, who had just completed the Smithsonian “castle” in Washington and who was working on New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I wondered at first why he undertook this small job, then I found out that William Aspinwall, the railroad’s chief investor, was Renwick’s father-in-law. I’d say that solves the mystery.
I suppose I’d take you to the monument erected to Aspinwall and two other men connected to the railroad. One of them is John Stephens, probably the most famous explorer of Maya ruins. His Incidents of Travel in Yucatan is a classic, very readable still. He was a man of prodigious energy, and he made it to 47 before malaria nailed him.
The monument stands along the boulevard just where the highway enters the city, and farther along there are other statues. The best known is a large bronze showing a paternal Columbus leading a young and fearful Indian girl forward. The statue was a gift of Eugènie, the empress of France, who probably could not conceive of the day when Columbus would no longer be universally hailed as–I’m translating the words on the plinth–“the immortal discoverer of the New World.”
I shouldn’t minimize his importance, but look around the statue and you may wonder if Columbus should have stayed home. Colón has very few single-family homes. After several major fires, it has very few wooden buildings. Almost everybody lives in three-floor apartment buildings of concrete blocks once painted but now covered with black mold. Many are abandoned. Windows are often blocked-up. Doors are missing; sometimes roofs are missing. There’s trash on the streets. Electric wires dangle, and uncovered manholes in the middle of the streets test to see if drivers are paying attention. Boys playing on those streets prove that people do live in at least some of these wrecks.
Many of the houses have deep porticoes on the sidewalks and deep balconies above. The design is especially graceful on corner buildings, where the balconies wrap around the facade in a stack of quarter-circles like buildings in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I don’t know how the style arrived here, and the railings here are of masonry, not iron, but they, too, are covered in mold. One of these corner buildings–it’s on the boulevard–was designated as a historic monument in 2002. The president of Panama 15 yeas later promised to find the funds to restore it, but as of 2025, it was still a wreck, possibly inhabited and minimally protected by a line of Jersey barriers. I wasn’t shocked, because I was already in shock from two churches built of masonry in the 1920s but looking as if they had been abandoned for centuries. New buildings? With the exception of the cruise-ship area, I don’t think I saw a dozen built after 1950.
Yet, and I still find this hard to believe, Colón has the busiest container port in all of Latin America. Mexico has 130 million people and Brazil has 240 million, but neither Mexico or Brazil have container ports as busy as Colon’s. And that’s not all. Colón’s port has often been ranked as the second biggest free port in the entire world, trailing only Hong Kong, At the southeast corner of the peninsula and just beyond it, four square miles are covered with warehouses filled with stuff imported duty-free from East Asia, Europe, and North America. Some 20 thousand people work here, and some 2,000 wholesalers and retailers come by to choose stuff to export, duty-free, to customers in South America. I often got stuck in traffic at the free-port’s gates across the street from buildings in the last stages of decrepitude. I should be able to explain this remarkable contrast, but all I know is that there’s almost no sign in Colón of the wealth it produces.
I’ve managed to get this far with barely mentioning the Panama Canal. That doesn’t seem right: nobody comes to Panama without seeing the Canal. And so, five miles outside Colón, I watched as the Pleiades Spirit, a Japanese-owned car carrier, sailed out of Gatun Lake and into the Gatun Locks. The ship moved so slowly that it left no wake. Soon, lowered 85 feet in the locks, it would be back in the Atlantic Ocean and taking its load of 5,000 motor vehicles perhaps to Baltimore, perhaps to Brunswick, Georgia, or perhaps to a port in a different country or different continent.
Over 30,000 shipping containers pass through the Panama Canal every day, and I watched the Enterprise, a container ship belonging to Mitsui, leave the locks and take 5,000 containers into Gatun Lake. They would then pass the locks on the other side, and proceed at sea level for the five miles to the Pacific. I started recording a short video of the two ships passing each other but turned it off because the action was so slow. It was more fun to watch the 20 freight trains that carry an additional 1,500 containers across the isthmus every day for ships too big to fit in the locks. The trains move a lot faster than the ships in the Canal. They slow down near Colón, but few people on the streets there will ever see what’s inside.
Oh, God, you’re thinking, here comes another call for social justice. Well, there’s something to that. If we went back 500 years, we could see pack trains carrying Inca gold and silver on the backs of mules walking on trails across the isthmus. That’s the way Spain got rich, after all, and the native peoples of the isthmus watched treasure go by, just as the people in Colón today do. But that’s not where I’m heading. I’m heading into less familiar territory that I hope will bring me back to that shiny railroad track where I started. I just need a bit of rope.
You remember Bayard Taylor, the guy who went west on Horace Greeley’s dime and who said that he found no real hardship on the isthmus. He was lucky enough to find a seat on a canoe heading upstream on the Chagres to Cruces. John Letts (spelled with a double T) wasn’t so lucky. He and a few friends gave up looking and spent three days building something. Letts says it measured 9 by 19 feet, but he doesn’t specify whether it was a raft or something more elaborate. Anyway, it got them to Cruces.
Jessie Benton Fremont, the wife of one of California’s first U.S. senators, travelled across the isthmus in 1848 without her husband John. She did have a brother-in-law with her, but in the sultry heat he grew impatient as their canoe was poled upstream inch by inch. Ignoring advice, he jumped into the water, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed from heatstroke. Jessie Fremont says he rested a few days, then went back to New York. She couldn’t turn back without disappointing her imperious father, the famous senator Thomas Hart Benton, and she says that the trail beyond Cruces went “straight up the sides of the steepest heights to the summit, then straight down them again to the base.”
Sixty years later, a Canal Zone policeman in 1912 wrote that the same trail was “a cobbled way some three feet wide… broken in places but still well marked.” There’s been some degradation since then, but I saw a bit of the trail myself. In fact there’s a Cruces Trail National Park with a visitor center half a dozen miles from the Casco Antiguo.
The policeman was Harry Francks, an inveterate traveler and one of the 30,000 men working for George Goethals. Another one of them was Henry Goldmark, a New Yorker, and a graduate of both Harvard and a German technical institute. Goldmark was the man who designed the steel gates that open and close at the ends of each lock chamber. They come in pairs. Each side or leaf, as they are called, is made of steel and is 65 feet wide, 50 or more feet high, and seven feet thick. I have trouble visualizing how you get a door that big onto its hinges.
The Canal employed an official photographer, Ernest or “Red” Hallen. One of his photos shows the Gatun Locks under construction. The gates are partially open, with a gap of perhaps ten feet. The chamber floors are dry, and a temporary railroad track runs along the floor.
A wooden beam perhaps 18 inches wide has been placed across the gap between the gates closest to the camera, and a rope is looped over it to support scaffolding on one of the leaves. A worker is lying flat on top of that beam. Most of one of his legs is in space, while his head and upper body are sticking out over the other edge. He looks down 50 feet or more to the cement floor. I have no idea who he is or what he’s doing, but I get a touch of vertigo just looking at him. I do not doubt the courage of the conquistadors, but none of them ever saw anything like this. Neither did the 49ers.
What shall we think of it? Here’s James Bryce, Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, author of an often reprinted history of the Holy Roman Empire, and, during most of the years of the Panama Canal’s construction, Britain’s ambassador in Washington. He says that with the Canal “one sees the latest, as far as can be foreseen, of any large changes which man is likely to try to work upon the surface of the earth… Nowhere else do there remain two continents to be divided, two oceans to be connected, … When an age arrived in which commercial and scientific views of nature prevailed… it became certain that here a canal would be some time or other made. Made it now has been. It is the greatest liberty Man has ever taken with Nature.”
We may worry when someone suggests taking great liberties with Nature, but Bryce considers the Canal proof of the capacity of human beings to do great things. I don’t disagree with that, though I could quibble about the definition of “great,” but here’s the question I would ask. We know that engineers like Henry Goldmark change the world and make life easier for all of us, but do they change themselves? And, maybe more important, do they change us?
I think our assumption is that they do not. We’re the actors in the drama, right? We change the world but remain unchanged, right? You remember the words: “One small step for man. One giant step for mankind.” Neil Armstrong was taking the first step in what people assume would be–will be–a long journey, but he was a man like the canal builder and the 49s and the conquistadors. That’s right, isn’t it?
Now meet William Franklin Sands, an American diplomat sent to Panama in 1904 by William Howard Taft to ease the friction that had arisen between two Americans there, one the U.S. ambassador to Panama and the other the Governor of the Canal Zone.
Sands was a diplomatic troubleshooter, and he fixed the problem by combining the two positions, but I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in what Sands thought about the Canal. The Canal–and these are his words–was "a narrow ribbon of standardized buildings and standardized men working at standardized jobs. Its people had been hammered into a highly disciplined civilian army, into a mechanical state with rigid hierarchies of labor, by processes which at that time seemed utterly un-American... There is much, it seems to me, that our Panama Canal engineers could have taught Lenin or Stalin about the ‘rationalization’ or mechanization of a human society.”
Sands was diplomatic enough to wait 40 years before publishing these words in 1944. Suppose he hadn’t waited. I imagine someone catching him on the street and saying, “Hey, buster, I worked in Panama under George Goethals for more than five years. I helped haul away the mountain that stood in our way. I helped quarry rock and sand from towns 20 miles down the coast, and I helped barge it to Colón. I watched men mix that rock and sand with cement and water to make concrete walls like nobody on earth has ever seen. Can you imagine a concrete wall a thousand feet long and 70 feet high, eight feet thick at the top and 50 feet thick at the bottom? We built two walls like that for every lock. You think you can do that without organization? Sure, we followed the boss’s orders, worked six days a week, often worked overtime without being paid overtime, slept in sweaty bunkhouses, ate in noisy mess halls, and lined up for our pay, but I’m no slave. I provide for my family, take my son fishing, take my wife to church, enjoy card games, and I couldn’t care less that you went to Yale and speak six languages.”
I like this rebuttal–it’s the human voice defending freedom–but George Goethels did run an industrial army. Robert Wood, his chief assistant, by 1950 was running something like 700 Sears, Roebuck stores. He had an army, too, and they weren’t happy, judging by the strenuous efforts Wood made to prevent their joining a labor union.
But, again, I’m not cheering for labor unions or railing against social injustice. I’m not even interested in what I take to be the obvious fact that civilization does make most people into wage slaves for at least 40 hours a week if not round the clock.
That’s progress, and I’m not being sarcastic, but what I’m really after is how, contrary to our conventional view, being part of that army changes the people in the army and changes the people living in the world created by that army. And I don’t just mean changes in how they feel or in their mood. I mean organic changes in their bodies.
I need a bit more rope. Seventy-five years ago and five days a week during the school year, I’d go up to a window at one side of our school yard. There was a counter there. I’d put down a dime, or maybe it was a nickel, and be handed a bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy. If you took me to San Francisco today, I could take you straight to that window, if it still exists.
How is that possible? Where do I keep all this junk? Get off the streetcar, walk up the long block with hedges on the right and tidy houses from the 1930s on the left. Turn right. Go up some stairs, turn left through that fence. See the music classroom there? That was Mr. Holbrook’s. He must be dead now. He had a dimple in his chin. Well, I scold my wife for having two jam-packed walk-in closets, but obviously I shouldn’t, although it is true, my warehouse is size the size of a big grapefruit.
I assume, for lack of a more plausible alternative, that all the memories I possess are somewhere inside my skull. I have no idea how they fit there or where they are kept exactly or how they are represented. (I could say “encoded,” but I don’t like the sound of that.) If I’m right, I must have returned from Panama a different person, not so different that you’d ask me what the hell happened down there, but different enough that I can babble like I’ve been babbling for the last hour.
There’s a potential fly in this ointment. Is the brain as comfortable storing memories of gigantic concrete walls as it is storing the taste of an apple? You can probably guess that I think it isn’t; otherwise I would have been happy with the word “encoded” a moment ago. Reminds of a college textbook once upon a time calledThe Machinery of the Body. I didn’t object to it then, and I grant that the authors were not outright calling us machines, but they might well have said that after reading the book we’d know a lot about what makes us tick. Oops.
Consider the possibility that the brain is more comfortable storing information about the kinds of things it has stored throughout our evolution. I understand it’s tempting to dismiss this as nonsense, because we are clearly tracking to a more and more artificial world where, if I’m right, our brains will be less and less comfortable. Perhaps they’ll simply disengage, and we’ll become stupid, but if you’re a technological optimist, you’ll insist that kids today are as quick to learn how to use phones as they once were in learning to make stone tools. I wouldn’t know how to respond except to ask if kids today are as happy as they were then and to suggest that if the answer is that they aren’t then the explanation might just be that I’m right.
I think I’m ready for the railroad track where I started. I visited a rolling mill once and saw red-hot steel rolled back and forth, each time becoming more and more like the rail it finally became, but I still have no reason to like two pieces of steel. I solve the mystery by realizing that memories aren’t kept in separate boxes. They cluster or bundle or stick together.
And so I remember 70 years ago sitting on a toolbox ten feet from a track. The box was on the outside of a sharp curve near a busy station, and every few minutes a steam locomotive would come pounding straight toward us before curving away so close that we got wet from the steam. I think now it was dangerous as hell, but nobody back then objected, and though it was scary, that was the fun of it.
We’d laugh at the thrill. The “we” here is me and my little brother, who was then about two years old. Now, like me, he’s collecting Social Security. See the bundle? The track I like today is like a mirror reflecting not my face but a memory that’s been gathering dust for a long time.
Is this good news? I mean, does it show that we’re OK with a bionic future because, even if our brains resist, we can always bundle good stuff with the bad? That’s assuming the good stuff sticks around. I’m told that birds are getting scarce in Belgium. Maybe they’re getting scarce here, too, like bees.
This morning I picked up a cat. It was lying on a bed, and I cradled it in my arms for a minute. I talked to it, bounced it a bit like a baby, and it purred. What would you think if I did that with my kitchen toaster? That Indian girl crouching in fear under the hand of Columbus has plenty to worry about.
There were no other vehicles on the road, and I caught myself thinking that I liked the track. Then I thought, “What? Why would you like a railroad track?” I can imagine laughter and jokes like, “Maybe for Christmas we should get him a fire hydrant!”
Set this aside and come with me to Panama City. I mean the real Panama City, not the place in the Florida panhandle that happens to be on a straight line between Chicago and Panama. A Florida community adopted the name in 1906, when Americans were as enthralled by the Panama Canal, which was then under construction, as millions today are about flights to the moon and Mars and–yes!--the stars. If you think I’m exaggerating, you haven’t spent time looking at books about the Panama Canal. There are dozens, overwhelmingly published between 1900 and 1914, when the Canal opened and when–talk about bad timing–readers were suddenly distracted by news from Sarajevo.
I had never been to Panama and as usual was on my own. It was dark, though not late. I got a rental car and put myself in the not always reliable hands of Google Maps. She–she is feminine, isn’t she?--she said it was about 20 miles or a little over a half-hour to one of the two hotels that actually have a view of ships in the Canal.
She worked. I even stopped at a grocery store to buy some UHT milk so I could make some coffee in my room the next morning. You’re learning all my secrets.
The Panama Canal doesn’t work at night, but the next morning I woke and saw a cruise ship, a Cunard Queen, moving like a monstrous amphibian taking its first, painfully slow steps on dry land. The ship moved almost imperceptibly slowly, but half an hour later a Chinese container ship repeated the trick. If I hadn’t known where I was, I would have called home and asked about drug reactions.
As always, I skipped the hotel breakfast (another of my secrets) and drove to the Casco Antiguo. That’s the old section of Panama City. It’s a tiny place, roughly six blocks by six and built on a squarish peninsula sticking into the ocean. Once, the land side was protected by a wall with a drawbridge over a saltwater moat. Only a few bits of that wall made it past the 1880s, but the peninsula’s waterfront was also walled, and most of that wall is intact and impressive. It apparently was made of stones hauled about six miles from the ruins of the first Panama City, Panama Viejo, which the pirate Henry Morgan attacked in 1671. He was subsequently knighted by Charles II and named governor of Jamaica. That’s what I call rehabilitation.
Despite the wall, I’m not sure if the Casco Antiguo deserves its UNESCO World Heritage status, because most of its buildings are from the 19th century. The churches are an exception, but–call me a barbarian–I skated through the cathedral and skipped the rest, except for the ruins of the Santo Domingo church, almost absurdly renowned for one wide and very flat arch that has withstood the centuries.
Early in the 19th century, the Casco Antiguo had an estimated population of only a thousand people. Then, in 1849, tens of thousands of men and a few women descended. They had landed at the mouth of the Chagres River on the other side of the isthmus. They had looked for anything that could carry them upstream 30 miles to the village of Cruces. (Don’t bother looking for that village. To build the Panama Canal, the Chagres was dammed, and the reservoir–it’s called Gatun Lake–reached upstream and flooded the village.) From Cruces, the 49ers walked, or rode a mule if they could get one, another 20 miles or so to Panama City. Most of them got out of town as soon as they could, but finding a ship going to California wasn’t always easy.
Some of the people who crossed the isthmus swore it was no big deal. A young Bayard Taylor, sent west by Horace Greeley to report on the news from California, wrote of the crossing that there was “nothing that I could exactly call hardship.” Others told different stories. A young Lt. Ulysses S. Grant, quartermaster of his regiment, got stuck in Cruces in 1852. Waiting for mules to carry supplies, a third of Grant’s men died of cholera. He mentions this in his memoirs. You may remember that they were published with the help of Mark Twain, who himself had gone West, but he went in the 1860s. Things were easier then, and Twain travelled by stagecoach from Missouri. He wrote about it and had the nerve to call the book Roughing It.
Maxime Huertematte, a Frenchman, decided to stay in Panama and open a store. Fifty years later, the Huertemattes owned the Bazar Frances, a department store opulent with a hanging display of Oriental rugs. Julio Huertematte, who ran the store in the 1930s, quit in 1945 and emigrated to the United States, where he held senior positions in the Organization of American States and then in the World Bank. I learned this only because, walking around just outside the Casco Antiguo, I came upon the store: three floors, with the family name in large letters up top. The building was in good shape but now housed craft shops. I suppose you could say that the Huertematte voyage to America took longer than most.
Equally, there was nothing Spanish about the Hotel Metropole next door. The Panama Guide, a valuable resource published in 1912, states that the hotel’s proprietor is F. P. Petersen, with a Scandinavian spelling. The hotel advertised baths and electricity and draft beer. My South American Handbook from 1928 lists the hotel, but it’s not there in the ‘49 edition. (I think I’m sharing too many secrets, but yes, I’m one of the six people on Earth who collect those things.) When I saw the building in 2025 it was derelict, with I suspect a few squatters. A sign said it was for sale.
I suppose you could argue that the Casco Antiguo deserves World Heritage status precisely because it’s a mongrel, a 17th century Spanish Colonial city taken over in the 19th by foreigners. The 1912 Guide offers plenty of supporting evidence. It has advertisements for the Emanuel Lyons hardware store, for the Cathedral Drug Store (“with competent German pharmacists”) and for a dentist licensed to practice in New York and Pennsylvania.
The city’s street addresses have been renumbered, so I couldn’t find any of these places, but I did find the cathedral, which was completed just before 1800. It faces the Central Hotel, which opened in 1874 as the Grand Central Hotel, Emil Dreyfous, proprietor. It burned a few years later, was rebuilt, and bought in 1894 by Henry Ehrman, who a decade later was exchanging telegrams with U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, who was–I will be diplomatic–helping Panama liberate itself from Colombia.
The hotel was rebuilt in 1917 and again about 2015, but it has never had anything to do with Spanish colonial architecture. The same thing is true for its neighbors, except for the cathedral. Step outside the hotel and on your left there’s another hotel, also from the 1870s but long ago converted to house the administrative offices of the French and then the American Canal builders. Panama City’s city hall stands next to it, completed in 1915 but built in the French style of the 1860s.
So what’s the most interesting thing about the Casco Antigua? Some might say it’s the number of buildings so ruined that, if you peek in the windows and look up, you see sky. Others might say it’s the investors and architects who are working to renovate many of these ruins and make them into stylish hotels and shops. Still others–and I saw banners to prove it–will go on the attack and say that the gentrification of the Casco Antiguo should be stopped and that neighborhoods without residents aren’t neighborhoods at all.
I don’t disagree with any of this, but I was most struck by something else. At the far edge of the peninsula, where ocean waves splash against the mighty wall…. But I must stop. I’m getting carried away. There’s a large tidal range in Panama City, and when the tide is out the shoreline is often a hundred feet or more from the wall, which then overlooks a shelf of solid rock. Anyway, out there at the point there’s a Panama Canal monument. What could be more appropriate? The entrance to the Canal is only five miles up the coast, and ships are almost always offshore waiting for their scheduled transit time.
The monument’s most prominent feature is a 60-foot obelisk of dark stone. Six busts sit on plinths in front of the obelisk. Most of the names are unfamiliar but one is not. It’s Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose spectacular career was brought low by his failure to repeat at Panama his success twenty years earlier at Suez.
The monument was built in 1921. The Canal had been operating by then for half a dozen years, but is there a bust of Teddy Roosevelt, who famously and perhaps apocryphally said he wanted the dirt to fly? There is not. Are there busts of John Stevens and George Goethals, the engineers in charge of planning and building the Canal? There are not. Is there any recognition of the fact that it was Americans who built the thing? There is not.
Now don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that the Panamanians are damned ungrateful. I’m saying almost the opposite, that Americans–and I’m talking about myself–who are surprised by the monument’s omission are stupid or, if you demand precision, blind. Maybe that’s too strong. Let’s go with blinkered, which at least holds out the promise of someday seeing clearly.
I’m reminded of a recent book by Marixa Lasso, who grew up in Panama when the Zone was still guarded by American troops. She writes that as a child she saw the Zone “as a place of desire and denial. Its many swimming pools, tennis courts, movie theaters, and restaurants were closed to Panamanians, unless invited by a Zone resident.” Well, put yourself in Panamanian shoes. Would you put up a monument to foreigners who move into your country and have a picnic behind a line of U.S. Marines? I bet you wouldn’t.
Forty years after the Canal Zone disappeared, you can still tell when you’ve crossed into it. I say you can, but I didn’t, not at first. You have to understand: there’s a big hill, Ancon Hill, that sits between the Casco Antiguo and the Canal Zone. On the Casco side, the traffic is slow, congested, and full of drivers impatient with newcomers who don’t know their way around. On the other side there are controlled-access highways whose signs don’t match up with the names Lady Google knows. She’ll say (I’ll make up a name) “take the Green St. ramp,” but there is no ramp labelled Green St. This is a great way to find yourself five miles out of your way and struggling for 15 minutes to get back to where you made the wrong turn.
Anyway, it’s only two miles from the cathedral to the Prado. That’s the focal point of Balboa, a planned community that once was safe within the Zone. It was built for Canal employees and their families, and it’s a different world over there, a garden suburb designed by landscape architects with direct connections to Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture.
Originally the houses were built of wood, but in the 1950s they were replaced by concrete. That, as we say or used to say, is a bummer, but these standardized and boring concrete homes offer lots of space, sensible layouts, and large lots with splendid trees. The houses line streets designed not with rulers and triangles but with French curves. If I was going to live in Panama (I wouldn’t; it’s called the “humid tropics” for a reason) I’d look for a place in one of the many old Canal Zone towns like Balboa.
By the way, they’re still mosquito free. I’m not sure it’s ecologically enlightened, but killing them rid the Canal Zone of yellow fever and malaria and more or less made it possible to build the Canal. When Americans first went to work in Panama–this was just before 1850–they came to the east coast to build a railroad across the isthmus. and the clouds of mosquitoes drove them to retreat at night to ships anchored offshore.
The Panama Canal administration building is on the north-facing slope of Ancon Hill. It took a while, but in 1954 George Goethals, the chief engineer during most of the construction period, got a monument at the very bottom of that hill. It’s a thin, wide rectangular shaft rising perhaps 30 feet with three shafts protruding from both the right and left sides. Water pours from shaft to shaft on both of those sides, and I’m probably the only person ever to look at it and fail to realize that the design symbolizes the Canal, which has three lock chambers on each side of a central reservoir, the same reservoir that flooded the village of Cruces.
I call it Art for Engineers. I’ll give you another example. I mentioned the Prado a minute ago. It’s a long, narrow lawn, planted with palms and stretching a thousand feet from the Goethels monument. The Canal’s administration building stands on the slope above and has a view over the monument and down the Prado, which, like Washington, D.C., is lined with government buildings. There’s this difference: the landscape architect who designed the Prado was told by Goethals that the lawn had to measure exactly one thousand feet long and 110 feet wide. Odd dimensions, but they are not accidental. They are the exact dimensions of the Panama Canal’s lock chambers. I imagine George Goethals up in his office, looking down, and thinking, “This lawn is perfect.”
Goethals at heart was a quartermaster. (It’s no accident that his longtime assistant went on to be the even longer-serving boss of Sears, Roebuck). Goethal’s predecessor, the volcanic Frank Stevens, is much more entertaining. In his two years as chief engineer, Stevens by force of will overwhelmed all opposition to the Canal design he wanted–and got. He would have been a shoo-in for a movie needing a charismatic lawman.
Poor Goethals wouldn’t have had a chance, but there is one admirable story about him. It is that lots of bigshots came for the Canal’s grand opening. They wanted to be on the first ship that went through, but Goethals said that the only people allowed on that ship were those who had worked on the Canal for seven years. Some men on that first transit are said to have cried. Reminds me of the time when in the late ‘50s I was walking down a street in Berkeley, California. My father leaned over and quietly said, “Did you see that old man who just walked by?” I turned to see an old, white-haired guy shuffling along. He was alone and just passing a parking meter. My father quietly said, “That’s Admiral Nimitz.”
I became a bit of a connoisseur of Canal Zone housing; my favorites are the wooden houses that for some reason survive at a Canal town called Gamboa, in the middle of the isthmus. These were the kind of homes that seventy percent of Americans would choose if they could have what they liked: lots of square footage, big lots, quiet streets. The houses are all private now, and some are air-conditioned, including the house of one owner who swore that it wasn’t necessary. He blamed his wife.
My fondness for Canal Zone towns is offset by my dislike of what most of Panama City became after World War II, which is to say a metropolis of two million people stretching 20 miles down the coast from the Casco Antiguo. In 1946, the architect Edward Durell Stone in New York had a visitor, a young Panamanian who wanted Stone to design a luxury hotel three miles east of Ancon Hill. Stone would later design Washington’s Kennedy Center and lots more–how about the American Embassy in New Delhi or (my favorite) the headquarters of the National Geographic Society.
Stone would later write that on his first visit to Panama he saw the proposed hotel’s “magnificent suburban site.” Photographs show a landscape that I’d say is closer to exurban than suburban.
LIFE Magazine in January, 1952, carried a story about the El Panama. That was its name at first, though it soon became the El Panama Hilton. It was remarkable for having no air conditioning in the guest rooms. Instead, the rooms opened onto balconies that caught breezes from the ocean, less than a mile away. The breeze blew across those balconies and through louvered doors into the rooms. There were no solid doors on the other side of the rooms, either, just more louvered doors opening onto an open-air corridor overlooking a nearly empty countryside.
Today, I can report, the balconies and louvers are gone, and the rooms are air-conditioned. It may be that guests demand it, but there are also other reasons.
If we take 100 meters as the minimum height of a skyscraper, the El Panama, with 11 floors, isn’t one. Panama City didn’t get one for another 30 years until BBVA, a Spanish bank, built a 25-story tower about a mile from the hotel and close to the water. It stood alone for a decade, but Panama in the 1970s became a magnet attracting international banks. The city had 23 of them at the beginning of the decade. Thirteen years later, in 1983, it had 125.
For reasons I don’t understand, banks like tall buildings, and by the year 2000 Panama City’s lonely skyscraper of 1979 had 10 siblings. Forty more were built in the next decade, and in the peak year, 2011, 15 were added, including the Trump Ocean Club, a combination hotel and condominium tower, which looks embarrassingly like Dubai’s Burj al Arab. Since then, Panama City has seen only about one new skyscraper annually.
The El Panama is still in business, but it is now surrounded by tall buildings. Worse, the street on the east side of the hotel is lined with a McDonald’s, a Subway, a Wendy’s, a Cinnabon, a Taco Bell, a Carl’s Jr., and a Domino’s. This is not what the young man who visited Edward Durell Stone in 1946 expected. The Hilton flag came down in 2017. There’s a Hilton Garden Inn nearby, but the real Panama City Hilton is now down by the water, close to the Spanish bank tower where the skyscraper fever began. The Spanish bank, by the way, quit Panama in 2021.
I went down to Punta Pacifica, the waterfront point with the city’s peak land values. The Trump Ocean Club is here, though I’m sorry to report that it’s now a J.W. Marriott. (I know, it’s terribly sad. Do you need a tissue?) Several other skyscrapers were built to keep it company. They include the Bahia Pacifica, the Venetian Tower, and the Bellagio. You have to admire the imagination of the developers who chose those names.
I walked to this most prestigious, which is to say, most expensive bit of Panama City. The street plan is simple: just imagine a lollipop with a bent stick. The stick is a two-lane road leading to a lollipop of a traffic circle enclosing a patch of grass maybe 100 feet across. It’s called a park, but the grass struggles in the perpetual shade cast by one tower or another.
There were no benches in the park, but I found a box. There was nobody around, except a dog walker and two childcare workers pushing a stroller. What I noticed most was the traffic. It would have been bad in any case, but a developer had built two small islands about 500 feet offshore. There was a sign over the causeway: “Welcome to your oasis in the city,” but there was a long line of cars backed up on the causeway as they tried to merge into the traffic around the circle. I felt sorry for the drivers, or at least glad I wasn’t one of them.
Guards kept me from walking over the causeway, so I just sat on my box, watched the dog on its leash, and thought that Punta Pacifica was a miserable place. I understand that the apartments–I’m sorry, I meant condos–have views of the ocean, which is very big and very blue. I see that at least one of the towers has a waterside tennis court. Another has a pool and a bit of Astroturf with palms, but still: why would anyone choose to live in such a space? I conclude that people for some reason want to live in whatever part of a city is most prestigious, which, again, is to say most expensive. I see Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull and asking him if he knows why.
I suggest that we drive an hour over to the Atlantic side of the isthmus and look at Colón, a town of about 250,000 people. I suggest it because, if the Punta is the place where people hope to live, Colón is the place where people hope not to live. Exceptions? Sure. Some people call Colón home and are sensible enough not to give a damn what anyone thinks.
En route in 1852 to that cholera disaster in Cruces, Ulysses S. Grant passed through Colón. In his memoirs he writes that he “wondered how any person could live many months” in Colón. He adds that he “wondered still more why any one tried.” Grant was being polite. An American doctor 50 years later wrote of "sultry, vile-smelling, dirty old Colón.... The town has been burned down once, but a few more first-class fires would be decidedly beneficial." A third visitor wrote of a day spent in "a pest-breeding wallow nearly a mile long, immediately back of the show street which fronts the waters of the Caribbean Sea." Here’s one more flower from this ugly bouquet. It comes from a distinguished British surgeon who later was honored for saving the life of George V. He writes: "...it is doubtful if any place is more fetid for its size than is this well-known seaport. Every city has its slums, but Colón is a slum without a city."
I should explain that Colón occupies a peninsula roughly a mile square with a generally gridded street pattern. The highways from Panama City (there are two of them, one of them a toll road) converge near the bottom of the peninsula and run straight through it for about 20 blocks along a boulevard with a wide and green median with benches shaded by mature trees. If you drive about halfway up this boulevard and then turn right, in half a mile you’ll come to saltwater and the city’s cruise-ship terminal, which opened in stages after 2000 and boasts a duty-free shopping center fit for Florida. We could stroll past Kenneth Cole, Nautica, Tommy Hilfiger, and Calvin Klein, and although you might wonder why we had come all this way for what we have at home, you couldn’t say the place was vile-smelling or pest-breeding or fetid.
If I engineered our visit carefully, we could stay at a reasonably standard Radisson hotel near the duty-free center. It’s probably the safest choice, though there’s another hotel on the edge of town. It used to be a Sheraton Four Points and, like the Radisson, it opened along with the cruise-ship terminal. The Sheraton flag has come down, but there’s still a Burger King next door.
If you insist on seeing something worthwhile, I’d take you to the Episcopal Church by the Sea, built in 1865. The Panama Railroad had opened ten years earlier and been a great financial success, so the owners could afford to give something back. The church is small and built of stone quarried from a spot deep in the isthmus, but there’s beautiful timberwork over the nave and crossing.
The architect was James Renwick, who had just completed the Smithsonian “castle” in Washington and who was working on New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I wondered at first why he undertook this small job, then I found out that William Aspinwall, the railroad’s chief investor, was Renwick’s father-in-law. I’d say that solves the mystery.
I suppose I’d take you to the monument erected to Aspinwall and two other men connected to the railroad. One of them is John Stephens, probably the most famous explorer of Maya ruins. His Incidents of Travel in Yucatan is a classic, very readable still. He was a man of prodigious energy, and he made it to 47 before malaria nailed him.
The monument stands along the boulevard just where the highway enters the city, and farther along there are other statues. The best known is a large bronze showing a paternal Columbus leading a young and fearful Indian girl forward. The statue was a gift of Eugènie, the empress of France, who probably could not conceive of the day when Columbus would no longer be universally hailed as–I’m translating the words on the plinth–“the immortal discoverer of the New World.”
I shouldn’t minimize his importance, but look around the statue and you may wonder if Columbus should have stayed home. Colón has very few single-family homes. After several major fires, it has very few wooden buildings. Almost everybody lives in three-floor apartment buildings of concrete blocks once painted but now covered with black mold. Many are abandoned. Windows are often blocked-up. Doors are missing; sometimes roofs are missing. There’s trash on the streets. Electric wires dangle, and uncovered manholes in the middle of the streets test to see if drivers are paying attention. Boys playing on those streets prove that people do live in at least some of these wrecks.
Many of the houses have deep porticoes on the sidewalks and deep balconies above. The design is especially graceful on corner buildings, where the balconies wrap around the facade in a stack of quarter-circles like buildings in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I don’t know how the style arrived here, and the railings here are of masonry, not iron, but they, too, are covered in mold. One of these corner buildings–it’s on the boulevard–was designated as a historic monument in 2002. The president of Panama 15 yeas later promised to find the funds to restore it, but as of 2025, it was still a wreck, possibly inhabited and minimally protected by a line of Jersey barriers. I wasn’t shocked, because I was already in shock from two churches built of masonry in the 1920s but looking as if they had been abandoned for centuries. New buildings? With the exception of the cruise-ship area, I don’t think I saw a dozen built after 1950.
Yet, and I still find this hard to believe, Colón has the busiest container port in all of Latin America. Mexico has 130 million people and Brazil has 240 million, but neither Mexico or Brazil have container ports as busy as Colon’s. And that’s not all. Colón’s port has often been ranked as the second biggest free port in the entire world, trailing only Hong Kong, At the southeast corner of the peninsula and just beyond it, four square miles are covered with warehouses filled with stuff imported duty-free from East Asia, Europe, and North America. Some 20 thousand people work here, and some 2,000 wholesalers and retailers come by to choose stuff to export, duty-free, to customers in South America. I often got stuck in traffic at the free-port’s gates across the street from buildings in the last stages of decrepitude. I should be able to explain this remarkable contrast, but all I know is that there’s almost no sign in Colón of the wealth it produces.
I’ve managed to get this far with barely mentioning the Panama Canal. That doesn’t seem right: nobody comes to Panama without seeing the Canal. And so, five miles outside Colón, I watched as the Pleiades Spirit, a Japanese-owned car carrier, sailed out of Gatun Lake and into the Gatun Locks. The ship moved so slowly that it left no wake. Soon, lowered 85 feet in the locks, it would be back in the Atlantic Ocean and taking its load of 5,000 motor vehicles perhaps to Baltimore, perhaps to Brunswick, Georgia, or perhaps to a port in a different country or different continent.
Over 30,000 shipping containers pass through the Panama Canal every day, and I watched the Enterprise, a container ship belonging to Mitsui, leave the locks and take 5,000 containers into Gatun Lake. They would then pass the locks on the other side, and proceed at sea level for the five miles to the Pacific. I started recording a short video of the two ships passing each other but turned it off because the action was so slow. It was more fun to watch the 20 freight trains that carry an additional 1,500 containers across the isthmus every day for ships too big to fit in the locks. The trains move a lot faster than the ships in the Canal. They slow down near Colón, but few people on the streets there will ever see what’s inside.
Oh, God, you’re thinking, here comes another call for social justice. Well, there’s something to that. If we went back 500 years, we could see pack trains carrying Inca gold and silver on the backs of mules walking on trails across the isthmus. That’s the way Spain got rich, after all, and the native peoples of the isthmus watched treasure go by, just as the people in Colón today do. But that’s not where I’m heading. I’m heading into less familiar territory that I hope will bring me back to that shiny railroad track where I started. I just need a bit of rope.
You remember Bayard Taylor, the guy who went west on Horace Greeley’s dime and who said that he found no real hardship on the isthmus. He was lucky enough to find a seat on a canoe heading upstream on the Chagres to Cruces. John Letts (spelled with a double T) wasn’t so lucky. He and a few friends gave up looking and spent three days building something. Letts says it measured 9 by 19 feet, but he doesn’t specify whether it was a raft or something more elaborate. Anyway, it got them to Cruces.
Jessie Benton Fremont, the wife of one of California’s first U.S. senators, travelled across the isthmus in 1848 without her husband John. She did have a brother-in-law with her, but in the sultry heat he grew impatient as their canoe was poled upstream inch by inch. Ignoring advice, he jumped into the water, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed from heatstroke. Jessie Fremont says he rested a few days, then went back to New York. She couldn’t turn back without disappointing her imperious father, the famous senator Thomas Hart Benton, and she says that the trail beyond Cruces went “straight up the sides of the steepest heights to the summit, then straight down them again to the base.”
Sixty years later, a Canal Zone policeman in 1912 wrote that the same trail was “a cobbled way some three feet wide… broken in places but still well marked.” There’s been some degradation since then, but I saw a bit of the trail myself. In fact there’s a Cruces Trail National Park with a visitor center half a dozen miles from the Casco Antiguo.
The policeman was Harry Francks, an inveterate traveler and one of the 30,000 men working for George Goethals. Another one of them was Henry Goldmark, a New Yorker, and a graduate of both Harvard and a German technical institute. Goldmark was the man who designed the steel gates that open and close at the ends of each lock chamber. They come in pairs. Each side or leaf, as they are called, is made of steel and is 65 feet wide, 50 or more feet high, and seven feet thick. I have trouble visualizing how you get a door that big onto its hinges.
The Canal employed an official photographer, Ernest or “Red” Hallen. One of his photos shows the Gatun Locks under construction. The gates are partially open, with a gap of perhaps ten feet. The chamber floors are dry, and a temporary railroad track runs along the floor.
A wooden beam perhaps 18 inches wide has been placed across the gap between the gates closest to the camera, and a rope is looped over it to support scaffolding on one of the leaves. A worker is lying flat on top of that beam. Most of one of his legs is in space, while his head and upper body are sticking out over the other edge. He looks down 50 feet or more to the cement floor. I have no idea who he is or what he’s doing, but I get a touch of vertigo just looking at him. I do not doubt the courage of the conquistadors, but none of them ever saw anything like this. Neither did the 49ers.
What shall we think of it? Here’s James Bryce, Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, author of an often reprinted history of the Holy Roman Empire, and, during most of the years of the Panama Canal’s construction, Britain’s ambassador in Washington. He says that with the Canal “one sees the latest, as far as can be foreseen, of any large changes which man is likely to try to work upon the surface of the earth… Nowhere else do there remain two continents to be divided, two oceans to be connected, … When an age arrived in which commercial and scientific views of nature prevailed… it became certain that here a canal would be some time or other made. Made it now has been. It is the greatest liberty Man has ever taken with Nature.”
We may worry when someone suggests taking great liberties with Nature, but Bryce considers the Canal proof of the capacity of human beings to do great things. I don’t disagree with that, though I could quibble about the definition of “great,” but here’s the question I would ask. We know that engineers like Henry Goldmark change the world and make life easier for all of us, but do they change themselves? And, maybe more important, do they change us?
I think our assumption is that they do not. We’re the actors in the drama, right? We change the world but remain unchanged, right? You remember the words: “One small step for man. One giant step for mankind.” Neil Armstrong was taking the first step in what people assume would be–will be–a long journey, but he was a man like the canal builder and the 49s and the conquistadors. That’s right, isn’t it?
Now meet William Franklin Sands, an American diplomat sent to Panama in 1904 by William Howard Taft to ease the friction that had arisen between two Americans there, one the U.S. ambassador to Panama and the other the Governor of the Canal Zone.
Sands was a diplomatic troubleshooter, and he fixed the problem by combining the two positions, but I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in what Sands thought about the Canal. The Canal–and these are his words–was "a narrow ribbon of standardized buildings and standardized men working at standardized jobs. Its people had been hammered into a highly disciplined civilian army, into a mechanical state with rigid hierarchies of labor, by processes which at that time seemed utterly un-American... There is much, it seems to me, that our Panama Canal engineers could have taught Lenin or Stalin about the ‘rationalization’ or mechanization of a human society.”
Sands was diplomatic enough to wait 40 years before publishing these words in 1944. Suppose he hadn’t waited. I imagine someone catching him on the street and saying, “Hey, buster, I worked in Panama under George Goethals for more than five years. I helped haul away the mountain that stood in our way. I helped quarry rock and sand from towns 20 miles down the coast, and I helped barge it to Colón. I watched men mix that rock and sand with cement and water to make concrete walls like nobody on earth has ever seen. Can you imagine a concrete wall a thousand feet long and 70 feet high, eight feet thick at the top and 50 feet thick at the bottom? We built two walls like that for every lock. You think you can do that without organization? Sure, we followed the boss’s orders, worked six days a week, often worked overtime without being paid overtime, slept in sweaty bunkhouses, ate in noisy mess halls, and lined up for our pay, but I’m no slave. I provide for my family, take my son fishing, take my wife to church, enjoy card games, and I couldn’t care less that you went to Yale and speak six languages.”
I like this rebuttal–it’s the human voice defending freedom–but George Goethels did run an industrial army. Robert Wood, his chief assistant, by 1950 was running something like 700 Sears, Roebuck stores. He had an army, too, and they weren’t happy, judging by the strenuous efforts Wood made to prevent their joining a labor union.
But, again, I’m not cheering for labor unions or railing against social injustice. I’m not even interested in what I take to be the obvious fact that civilization does make most people into wage slaves for at least 40 hours a week if not round the clock.
That’s progress, and I’m not being sarcastic, but what I’m really after is how, contrary to our conventional view, being part of that army changes the people in the army and changes the people living in the world created by that army. And I don’t just mean changes in how they feel or in their mood. I mean organic changes in their bodies.
I need a bit more rope. Seventy-five years ago and five days a week during the school year, I’d go up to a window at one side of our school yard. There was a counter there. I’d put down a dime, or maybe it was a nickel, and be handed a bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy. If you took me to San Francisco today, I could take you straight to that window, if it still exists.
How is that possible? Where do I keep all this junk? Get off the streetcar, walk up the long block with hedges on the right and tidy houses from the 1930s on the left. Turn right. Go up some stairs, turn left through that fence. See the music classroom there? That was Mr. Holbrook’s. He must be dead now. He had a dimple in his chin. Well, I scold my wife for having two jam-packed walk-in closets, but obviously I shouldn’t, although it is true, my warehouse is size the size of a big grapefruit.
I assume, for lack of a more plausible alternative, that all the memories I possess are somewhere inside my skull. I have no idea how they fit there or where they are kept exactly or how they are represented. (I could say “encoded,” but I don’t like the sound of that.) If I’m right, I must have returned from Panama a different person, not so different that you’d ask me what the hell happened down there, but different enough that I can babble like I’ve been babbling for the last hour.
There’s a potential fly in this ointment. Is the brain as comfortable storing memories of gigantic concrete walls as it is storing the taste of an apple? You can probably guess that I think it isn’t; otherwise I would have been happy with the word “encoded” a moment ago. Reminds of a college textbook once upon a time calledThe Machinery of the Body. I didn’t object to it then, and I grant that the authors were not outright calling us machines, but they might well have said that after reading the book we’d know a lot about what makes us tick. Oops.
Consider the possibility that the brain is more comfortable storing information about the kinds of things it has stored throughout our evolution. I understand it’s tempting to dismiss this as nonsense, because we are clearly tracking to a more and more artificial world where, if I’m right, our brains will be less and less comfortable. Perhaps they’ll simply disengage, and we’ll become stupid, but if you’re a technological optimist, you’ll insist that kids today are as quick to learn how to use phones as they once were in learning to make stone tools. I wouldn’t know how to respond except to ask if kids today are as happy as they were then and to suggest that if the answer is that they aren’t then the explanation might just be that I’m right.
I think I’m ready for the railroad track where I started. I visited a rolling mill once and saw red-hot steel rolled back and forth, each time becoming more and more like the rail it finally became, but I still have no reason to like two pieces of steel. I solve the mystery by realizing that memories aren’t kept in separate boxes. They cluster or bundle or stick together.
And so I remember 70 years ago sitting on a toolbox ten feet from a track. The box was on the outside of a sharp curve near a busy station, and every few minutes a steam locomotive would come pounding straight toward us before curving away so close that we got wet from the steam. I think now it was dangerous as hell, but nobody back then objected, and though it was scary, that was the fun of it.
We’d laugh at the thrill. The “we” here is me and my little brother, who was then about two years old. Now, like me, he’s collecting Social Security. See the bundle? The track I like today is like a mirror reflecting not my face but a memory that’s been gathering dust for a long time.
Is this good news? I mean, does it show that we’re OK with a bionic future because, even if our brains resist, we can always bundle good stuff with the bad? That’s assuming the good stuff sticks around. I’m told that birds are getting scarce in Belgium. Maybe they’re getting scarce here, too, like bees.
This morning I picked up a cat. It was lying on a bed, and I cradled it in my arms for a minute. I talked to it, bounced it a bit like a baby, and it purred. What would you think if I did that with my kitchen toaster? That Indian girl crouching in fear under the hand of Columbus has plenty to worry about.
