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The first time I visited Casco Viejo, a significant portion of the neighborhood looked desperate. Businesses were boarded up, schools were crumbling, and teenagers stood aimlessly on street corners. Wooden porches sagged under the weight of their tenants and jury-rigged electricity wires hung like campaign bunting across the narrow streets. I was offered drugs on several occasions, avoided dog excrement at all costs, and exhaled the stench of Casco’s decomposing garbage dumps, which sat idly on street corners. Beneath this layer of stank though was some charm that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.
“You mean the dog shit?” my friend Kara asked, swatting a fly from her can of soda.
“No, there’s something endearing about it,” I said. “Like, something cool about the fact that no one wants to come here, I don’t know.”
“Well no one wants to go to Hibbert's Gore. Does that mean you want to move there too?”
I looked at Kara the way I often do when she pulls facts like this out of thin air.
“What? Hibbert's Gore, Maine. It’s one of five towns in the USA with a population of one person.”
“So I take it you know all of them by heart, to use specifically in conversations like this?”
“No. Only Hibbert's Gore. That and Erving's Location, New Hampshire are the only ones I remember.”
To cement her discomfort, I led Kara who, at this point was following me like a scared sheep, into a strip club called La Bocatorena around 3pm in the afternoon (this was a Tuesday). It was an all-male enclave with spit on the floor and massive women in lingerie dancing on stage. I remember one in particular who couldn’t have weighed less than 300 pounds. She was dark in complexion with long, wavy hair the color of Heinz mustard and a giant, and I mean giant – maybe the size of a magazine cover – tattoo on her back that read like a practical joke, “Sexy Bitch.”
“Oh my God I think I’m gonna barf,” Kara said, but I wasn’t able to hear her, what with the resounding underworld of seediness, sex, filth, and creepiness, revolving like a symphony around me.
In a world where many last centimeters of urban space have been gentrified, or more particularly Panama City where every spare lot has been kidnapped for a prospective high-rise, it takes someone streetwise to see a neighborhood like Casco Viejo fabulous in its own way too. To me, on that first visit, Panama City was an immaculate story of two towns: the archetypal third-world megalopolis and the low-rise slum, each alluring in its own sort of way.
A visit to Casco Viejo no doubt enriched my Panama City experience. And over my time here, from its eclectic cultural stew, brilliance, if not a striking sense of authenticity has emerged. It is far, both literally and figuratively, from the high-gloss of Punta Pacifica, a distant mindset – or lifestyle – apart from the slam-bam-thank-you-mam of Paitilla. That, quite clearly, is both why people either love it or hate it. It is why I ended up spending my time and energy in Casco Viejo and it is why Kara would just as soon move to Hibbert’s Gore, Maine.
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It would not be unfair to say that one of Casco Viejo's most iconic characteristics, its dangling veranera flower vines and the associated task of growing them, has deeply humbled me. I moved into a new apartment several months ago and adopted about six plants, each of which were flourishing and alive. I loved how they crept along my balcony trellis and how they hung like long locks of hair into the street way below swaying with the breeze that comes off the ocean.
Lately, a slew of new bars have been opening here in Casco Viejo. These new locations offer a greater variety of options for local residents and visiting tourists. Currently, there are more than 10 bars and late-night restaurants that keep their doors open to the wee hours in the morning.
