The Ignacio Bañuelos Cabezud alley, as it is currently named, was known as Plaza de Los Arbolitos in the mid-nineteenth century and as former Muelle street from 1886, the year of the first great reform of the cadastre concerning the La Paz City Council when the classification of blocks, streets and official numbers of the buildings were changed. The current name of the alley corresponds to a character who arrived in La Paz from the state of Jalisco (Mexico) at the end of the 19th century who founded a Maderista oriented newspaper in 1912, called El Eco de California, and who criticized the then governor named Carlos M. Esquerro in the mid-1920 decade. The governor made death threats to the journalist and ordered the destruction of his printer, which was located next to his family house on the corner of the former Segunda Street (current Madero Street) and Independencia Street.

​

     It is called an alley but it was always a large road and it was probably the first street to be formed in the irregular urban configuration of a broken plate that still exists in the lower part of the city, a place where streets and alleys like the blocks are a different size, unlike the rest of the old city that was formed in the north and south hills on one side of the former Central Street (current 16 de Septiembre Street). Muelle Street was a mandatory passage for goods that were taken to Casa Ruffo warehouses in wagons or loaded on the backs of the workers (dockers).
 

     Former Muelle Street was not only emblematic but also a key site in the economic history of the city since it is an extension of the former Main Pier where merchandise and people were embarked and disembarked. In one of the corners was the old customs office where the freight wagons arrived to check the goods and collect import and export taxes; a wooden building with a gabled roof with tejamanil (wooden-tile ceilings) and outside a notary's stand and a soft-drink stand next to leafy shade trees; in front of them were the customs agencies, such as Fernando Chacón Meza's.
 

     On the other corner, since the 19th century, Hotel Palacio owned by Pedro Mehyer was located in front of the Watchtower from the Main Pier, which accommodated and offered food to travelers arriving on boats; a curious historical fact is that in January 1912 the Mexican Vice President José María Pino Suárez landed from a steamboat that docked at the Main Pier and the La Paz City Council offered him a banquet at Hotel Palacio where nearly a hundred people attended, for which they bought crockery, cutlery, and drinks, among other things, at Casa Ruffo.
 

     Hotel Palacio was a building with mere neoclassical architecture with an entrance facing the former Playa Street (current Álvaro Obregón Street); a wooden access door with a three-point arc, and kee-ping the symmetry on each side with rectangular door-windows framed with a molding protruding from the upper part of the frame similar to the crest as a discreet cornice as a finial; in the lower part a mid-height continuous plinth, while the corner is semi-circular in the form of a detached co-lumn with a neoclassical capital integrated into the cornice along the facades of the hotel and a parapet finish at the top.
 

     At the end of Muelle Street in front of the former Comercio Street, next to Casa Ruffo (La Perla de La Paz), there was another lodging place, Hotel California built two-storey with a continuous balcony supported by wooden poles with a view towards the Main Pier.
 

​

La Paz, Baja California Sur, March 24, 2020.

​

​

​