Residencial Las Casas
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The Residencial Bartolome de Las Casas, more commonly known as Residencial Las Casas, is a 500 plus building complex located in San Juan, Puerto Rico, about five minutes driving distance from the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport. It is also located about ten to fifteen minutes away from San Juan's ritzier and exclusive areas of El Condado, Isla Verde, Ocean Park and Old San Juan. It was named after the famous Spaniard catholic frail, Bartolome de Las Casas, who also has a town named after him in Mexico.
The area where the residencial is located at was used by the United States military beginning in 1908, as a training camp for the Porto Rican regime of Infantry that saw action in World War I and World War II. During that era, the area was known as "Camp Las Casas".
One of San Juan's oldest projects, Residencial Las Casas wasn't always a poverty stricken place; It was built during the 1950s, after the military had left the area, with middle class customers in mind. Many of San Juan's affluent families bought property there. One of its earliest residents was renowned Puerto Rican actress Miriam Colon.
The deterioration of Las Casas, as it is also known around Puerto Rico, began during the 1970s, when most of the middle class families moved, giving way to lower class families. The new neighbors would typically complain of jet airplane noise as the pilots of airliners landing at the airport would use the apartment complex as a guiding point and airplanes would zoom loudly just over the rooftops of these buildings, on an average of about every five minutes or so. During the middle 1970s, resident Luciano Rivera made the headlines nationally, as he was one of a few survivors of a Prinair crash that happened nearby.
By the early 1980s, Salsa singer Cano Estremera, a resident, began bringing his musician friends over to practice at the residencial. Estremera would go on to become a legendary singer and international super-star who, in 2003, made a CD commemorating his twenty years in the music industry. Around this time too, paint on most of the buildings started falling off, turning ugly or looking dirty. Most buildings at Las Casas still wore their original painting jobs, done in the 1950s, thirty years after construction of the complex was done.
By the late 1980s, however, illegal drugs began making their way into the residencial, although the Puerto Rican drug wars of the era were mainly concentrated into the nearby Residencial Nemesio M. Canales and Residencial Luis Llorens Torres. In 1989, the residencial was affected deeply by the passing of Hurricane Hugo, apartments were destroyed, trees fell apart, and FEMA had to help some of the families living there.
By 2004, Las Casas elements had dug into the drug wars, and the residential has been affected by an unprecedented (for the area) rise in violent crimes.