This neighborhood, too, has a plaza in its center: the small, circular Plazoleta Cortázar, named for one of Argentina's two literary giants, Julio Cortázar, whose renowned 1963 novel, Hopscotch, concerns the Porteños' eternal dilemma—how much of their identity is European and how much is Argentinean? Calle Jorge Luis Borges, honoring perhaps Argentina's greatest writer, runs into the plaza, bringing together the two literary rivals for eternity. Is it a sign of the times that precisely where they come together there's a prominent real estate brokerage? Borges, of course, is known for his love of labyrinths and puzzles, confusions and mysteries, dead-ends and trapdoors. He lived not far from here, on Calle Serrano, a dignified residential street, but alas, there's nothing Borgesian about Palermo Viejo's orderly grid of streets planted with dusty shade trees.

Palermo Viejo is divided into two areas separated by a no-man's-land of train tracks. Palermo Soho is the more established and polished, its gentrification mostly complete. In Palermo Hollywood, which is farther northwest from the Microcenter, the transformation is ongoing. The streets are wider here, the old warehouses larger, the trees fewer, the sun, it seems, hotter. Because of its large industrial spaces, the neighborhood has become a nexus of television and film production companies, thus its name.

It is Palermo Hollywood, perhaps, that best epitomizes the new Buenos Aires and the new Porteños, the pioneers who have turned the status quo on its head. Take, for example, the restaurant and lounge Ølsen. When Ølsen opened in July 2001, the neighborhood hadn't seen anything like it: a two-story warehouse converted into an indoor-outdoor hot spot, drawing crowds throughout the day and late into the night, its menu both straightforward (a whitefish fillet leaning against a springy hill of lightly dressed red lettuce) and playful (a pouf of basil mousse). Ølsen was an instant hit, satisfying the city's demand for something hip and young and un-nostalgic, something that didn't look to nineteenth-century Paris or Rome for inspiration but turned instead to the mirror.

Or so it now seems. But this wasn't necessarily apparent at the time. "For two months the restaurant was packed," Germán Martitegui, Ølsen's chef and owner says. "Then, the crisis."

What happened next to Martitegui and Ølsen is typical of what befell entrepreneurs throughout the country. "For two months I couldn't pay my employees on time," Martitegui says. "There were no customers and no money. But they agreed to wait for their pay and…" He makes a gesture with his hand that means, in any language, somehow we got through.

Almost everyone here has a story of "the crisis," and indeed, in order to understand the vibrancy of Buenos Aires today, you need to know a little about the trauma the city recently survived. From 1998 to 2002, Argentina's GDP shrank twenty-five percent. Nationally, unemployment reached twenty percent and ran even higher in the capital. By the end of 2001, the country was on the verge of collapse. Then, overnight and without warning, the government detached the peso from its artificial link to the U.S. dollar. Instantly the exchange rate went from one-to-one to approximately four-to-one (after several months of turmoil, it settled at three-to-one, where it remains today). Panic ensued, and the government froze nearly all bank accounts, making it impossible to withdraw funds. Quite literally no one had any money.