WHAT'S NEW, BUENOS AIRES? EVITA'S ORIGINAL HANGOUTS.

Byline: Gary A. Warner Orange County Register

Look out, Buenos Aires - here comes Madonna's ``Evita.''

The ``grand village'' of 12 million people on the banks of the Rio de la Plata is squinting into the international spotlight as Hollywood unleashes its $60 million biopic of the infamous 1950s Argentinian first lady Evita Peron. (The film opened for a limited Los Angeles engagement on Christmas Day.)

Buenos Aires is an amazing up-all-night city of beautiful plazas and color-drenched neighborhoods. It feels like a long-lost European capital instead of a South American city. And despite its gleaming skyscrapers and cosmopolitan savoir faire, Buenos Aires remains a city captivated by the ghosts of Juan and Eva Peron. The husband-and-wife populist despots held Argentina in an iron grip in the late '40s and early '50s, when Eva Peron urged her husband to tap into the boiling discontent of the underclass that Evita dubbed discamisados - ``shirtless ones.''

Among the nostalgic, Juan Peron is revered. But Eva Peron is loved. Like Madonna, she is a one-name phenomenon: Evita (``little Eva'').

If Evita returned today, she would find her beloved Buenos Aires both familiar and transformed. A tour of her haunts sweeps from south to north, as her rise moved her from poor working-class hovels to the neighborhoods of wealth and power.

The illegitimate child of a wealthy pampas landowner, Evita came to Buenos Aires at age 16 in 1935 seeking fame and fortune on the silver screen. She settled into the ramshackle working-class area called La Boca, near the mouth of a small, smelly river, La Riachuelo. Once the city's rundown Little Italy, La Boca recently has transformed into a kind of South American Greenwich Village. Its old buildings with corrugated metal roofs near the Caminito pedestrian walk have been painted in bright primary hues. Dingy storefronts and former brothels on Calle Necochea have been swept away, replaced by trendy coffeehouses and a weekend crafts fair.

Evita arrived in Buenos Aires at the height of the tango craze. Her first lover in the city was a famous tango dancer and she was a regular in the tango bars that still dot San Telmo's cobblestone streets. If you have the time, inclination and swivel in your hips, the Academia Nacional del Tango will teach you how to dip and dive. Look for free weekend tango concerts in San Telmo that are advertised in La Nacion newspaper on Saturdays.

Evita longed for stardom in the theaters along Calle Corrientes, the ``Broadway of Buenos Aires.'' Now, as then, the wide swath of fancy shops, nightclubs and theaters pulse with party life well past the midnight hour. Nearby Calle Florida, now a pedestrian mall, is the place for a Buenos Aires shopping spree.

Evita took a succession of lovers, moving out of La Boca and into the tony neighborhood on Calle Posadas. At a charity concert, she met Juan Peron, then a rising colonel in the military junta. Together they forged an alliance, building a following among the poor classes that eventually would make Juan Peron the undisputed dictator of the land.

The city center is dotted with landmarks, many drenched in blood, of their reign.

Plaza Once and Plaza del Congreso were the scenes of massive anti-Peron demonstrations that were violently suppressed by the police. The baroque edifice of the Navy Ministry on Calle Florida is where Peron's troops butchered 400 cadets during a 1955 Navy coup attempt.

When a group of society women protested Peron's rule on the Calle Florida, Evita had them locked up - in cells reserved for prostitutes.

Visitors to Buenos Aires can stay at the Plaza Hotel on Plaza San Martin, where Peron's troops once herded opponents in a violent crackdown.

The Obelisco, looking like a small version of the Washington Monument, is hard to miss in the middle of Avenida Nueve de Julio, the world's widest boulevard. Here Peron held a famous floodlighted demonstration that ended with Evita waiving a pole holding an Argentine flag and a dirty workman's shirt, the symbol of the poor whom Evita championed.

If there is one place in the city that epitomizes Evita the woman and ``Evita'' the musical, it is the stately Plaza de Mayo. Here Juan and Evita Peron would hold their massive rallies, drawing thousands to hear their harangues from the microphone-festooned balcony of Casa Rosada (``the Pink House'').

The Perons' voices would boom over the throngs. Cries of ``Peron, Peron, Peron - Evita, Evita, Evita'' were loud enough to be heard across town. The tumult was broadcast live across the nation by radio. It was from the balcony that Evita told the nation that she was ill with the cancer that would take her life - a moment immortalized by the song ``Don't Cry for Me, Argentina,'' in ``Evita.''

Once Evita could command thousands of dockworkers to throw down their crates and rush to the nearby Plaza de Mayo to hear her harangue her enemies. Today the waterfront warehouses are the city's biggest and most successful urban renewal project, with dozens of fancy restaurants, automobile showrooms and cafes populating the quay.

On weekends, the plazas between the buildings pulsate with music as porteros dance and drink the warm afternoons away. El Mirasol, one of Buenos Aires' legendary steakhouses, has opened a satellite restaurant on the waterfront.

After too much food and drink, visitors can stroll in the bracing sea air and even tour a 19th-century sailing frigate on display amid a backdrop of now silent cranes and storehouses.

Both Evita and Madonna worked their charms amid the lovely canals of Tigre, a nearby suburb on the Delta del Parana known as ``the Venice of Argentina.'' Tigre was an infamous love nest for wealthy men and their mistresses. Soon after she caught the eye of Peron, Evita was visiting him in Tigre.

The eucalyptus-rimmed Olivos was home of the presidential palace, which the Perons at first eschewed as too far from the action in Buenos Aires. But as Peron's troubles worsened and Evita's cancer spread, they sought refuge in the palace. It was here that Evita died on July 26, 1952, at 8:25 p.m.

Perhaps the oddest piece of Evita's legacy is La Republica de los Ninos (``the children's republic''), a miniature city of pint-size buildings from around the world. The medievel German castles and Moorish temples are linked by a tiny steam train. It was Evita's way of showing the world to the impoverished children of her ``shirtless ones.''

After her death in 1952, Evita's body was shuffled around the world before finally being buried in Recoleta cemetery in 1976. Today the Recoleta area is among the city's prime shopping and eating districts, with a strip of cafes just across the street from the graves.

The best time to visit is on a Saturday or Sunday when throngs of tourists and old Peronists visit Evita's grave, filling the wrought-iron grille with flowers. A simple bronze plaque marks her resting place.

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Photo

Photo: Visitors to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, feed the birds in the shadow of the Casa Rosada, where Eva Peron once spoke to thousands of her husband's followers.

Chris Carlson/Orange Count Register