One of the first serious urban planning conflicts took place on Carrer Aragó. Ildefons Cerdà designed a street much wider than the traditional ones in the Eixample with its 20 metres; predicted that the great rail link would be concentrated along this street, but they did not take it seriously.
The owners and the City Council fought to tighten it, until they succeeded. The façade of the Concepció parish is the only one that shows the reduced width.
When the moment of truth fatally arrived and it was seen that Cerdà was right, the owners and the City Council engaged in a poisonous dispute: both recognized that the trains had to run through an open trench, but neither wanted to cover such a large expense. Then the energetic petty impulse surfaced, also in both parts: to run along the ground.
I don't even want to think what the brutal gamble of such an important double railway line would have meant for the elegant Paseo de Gràcia.
Fortunately, the arbitration of an equitable man was requested: José de Echegaray, who in addition to Nobel was a road engineer. And he ruled that he had to drive through a trench paid for by the City Council.
The problem solved, Carrer Aragó thus became two narrow carriageways and even narrower sidewalks. The trench was protected by a stone railing; she looked solid, but she wasn't. The proof is that from time to time there were accidents due to the increasing number of motorized and badly driven vehicles.
The car was leaving Garage Barcelona Auto, located at number 208, between Aribau and Muntaner, when a wrong action by the driver caused this brutal and dangerous accident.
The new profile of this railway street, with its unbreathable smoke that blackened the facades, caused it to lose its category and then began to attract rather prosaic services, rather than attractive shops. Like the garage and warehouse of the manufacturer and broker Paco Abadal, designed with style by the architect Enric Sagnier; or the avant-garde Service Station; or the publishing house Montaner i Simon.
