“The poet Dimitrie Bolintineanu lived in this house. 1870 – 1871” ... or not.
At number 16 on Negustori / Merchant’s Street in Bucharest
Hanna Derer
 
By its very nature, the city refuses properties that are completely useless to it, including plots occupied by building remains that can no longer fulfil absolutely any function, that is, not even one of an educational and / or cultural nature. In fact, to protect itself from ruins (but not from vestiges), the city (normally) developed a self-defence mechanism, based in part on recycling the built stock and involving owners, architects and local authorities. At the same time, it is obvious that the success of this kind of attitude (as opposed to the one that replaces buildings that no longer correspond with completely new ones) also depends on the extent to which the purpose of recycling is consistent with the evolution of the entire urban organism or at least of the part where it is located the property in question.
An eloquent example of how this relationship determines, for better or for worse, the fate of a property can be found at 16 on Negustori / Merchant’s Street in Bucharest. Here, that is, in an area located for a while on the edge between the centre and the periphery, the capital’s household of a gentry family would have hosted the poet Dimitrie Bolintineanu in the years 1870-1871. Later, beginning in 1883, the main building was ingeniously transformed by the architect Paul Gottereau into a doctor’s home, a veritable residence in its relationship to the public area, with obvious aspirations for an elegant private life. In other words, the remodelling in question gave the property qualities required of a peri-central area, a fact confirmed, among other things, by the representative garden displayed in the historical plans of the city drawn up at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the next. After knowing two other interventions determined by the same evolutionary process specific to the entire area but less beneficial to the building, on the building recycled by Paul Gottereau, which integrates parts of the previous one, but which could never have housed the poet and former minister of Culture, passed away in 1872, a commemorative plaque was installed with the text “The poet Dimitrie Bolintineanu lived in this house. 1870 – 1871”.