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My second most favorite subject to shoot.. Urban Art.
Most people don’t know this, but Santurce covers 40 sub-districts including, Condado, Isla Grande, Loiza, Miramar, Ocean Park and Sagrado Corazon. 
It runs the gamut of ritzy upscale hotels to abandoned barrio slums. You can see a full breakdown with a map of the area, on Wikipedia, via this link.
The first suburb of greater San Juan… a microcosm of life in Puerto Rico.
Because of it’s convenient bus routes and cheap housing, it is very popular with immigrants from Cuba and Haiti and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Dominican Republic. Though to be fair, most 
immigrants from the Dominican Republic are of a more professional background and tend to seek more upscale housing.
The gritty side of life…
The drug trade, driven by the local gangs, tends to dominate the poorer public housing areas. Efforts to reduce this in recent years has resulted in hundreds of arrests. Similar to the action taken in La Perla of Old San Juan. That made national news.
To be clear, most of Santurce is safe and the tourist areas are patrolled 24/7.
Santurce is also rife with history dating back to the earliest times.
Being just outside the fort walls, Santurce became the first suburb of San Juan.
It was also the home of a US Navy Squadron in Isla Grande during WWII and a separate military training center in what is now Las Casas, both of which are long gone.
I have to admit, I started my research about Santurce ‘after’ our shoot. I had read about the famous ‘Farmer’s Market’ before. It is quite popular with the locals and has been around forever, they say.
There is also a very popular museum as well as several other key historical buildings still standing. I will present all of that in a future story.In fact, this could be considered part 1 of 2 as I will detail our other ‘discovery of the day’ and the history behind it in my next post.
Safety in a large group-
This is an area of San Juan I’ve wanted to explore for some time.
Our Photo MeetUp group met early on a Sunday morning to shoot a new batch of street art and check out some old ruins too.
The ‘Graffiti’ is some of the best I’ve ever seen. The artists that create these masterpieces are often commissioned to cover public eyesores. A great idea, as far as I’m concerned.
There were empty spray paint cans, every where.
One artist in particular, ‘SKE’ has his own YouTube channel. You got to see this! It is awesome. He has done street art in New York as well as Texas too. Here’s one of his vids featuring San Juan-
We covered about 4 square blocks and investigated several buildings hoping to get a good overview of the street art. We never made it to the roof of any of them and did not want to disturb those sleeping in the abandoned buildings. One of them in particular was covered in
knee-deep discarded clothes and empty suit cases… like luggage that had been taken there and then rifled through and discarded. Lost cruise ship or airport baggage comes to mind.
It reeked of urine.. empty syringes were everywhere. Needless to say, we did not stick around long.
We hiked back to the cars and drove over to the Isla Grande area for more shots, but I’ll save that for my next post.
As usual, more, larger images of the street art can be seen over on me Facebook page dedicated to Roberto’s Puerto Rico.
ARRG!
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