History is woven into the architecture at General Prim, site for the 2023 DLN Summit kickoff.
Step behind an unassuming facade in the Colonia Juarez neighborhood of Mexico City and you’re met with a vast, hushed courtyard outlined in wispy hanging vines, where weathered plaster around neoclassical architraves reveals red brick that lends a warm glow to the space. Swaying palm fronds and climbing fig leaves guide the way to an elegant double staircase that creeps up the courtyard’s perimeter and leads to a wrought-iron-balconied mezzanine. At night, in candlelight, the feeling veers toward the ethereal, stones aglow with flickering lumination that suggest layers of history. This is General Prim, formally Proyecto Público Prim, a once-abandoned Belle Epoque mansion whose architectural style—and storied patina—nods to the very fabric of Mexico City’s culture.
In the early twentieth century, when Mexico existed as a dictatorship under President Porfirio Diaz, this was the neighborhood for Mexico City’s elite. Alberto Robles Gil, engineer and onetime governor of Jalisco, commissioned a palatial pile, drawing on the neoclassical mania that was de rigeur in the capital at the time. When Gil—along with his aristocratic neighbors—fled the area in 1913 during one of the bloodiest phases of the Mexican Revolution, the mansion was sold to La Tabacalera Mexicana, a cigar manufacturer, who used it as office space. The building housed various subsequent tenants before being abandoned in the late 1970s. It remained neglected for some 47 years, the combinations of water damage, graffiti, and natural decay giving it a ghostly aura.
In 2014, the space underwent an extensive renovation and reopened as one of Mexico City’s premier event venues. General Prim has hosted concerts, festivals, and art fairs, its arched ceilings echoing with notes of music as local street vendors offer bites from stands dotting the courtyard and tequila and mezcal flows into the early hours. This will be the venue for the official kickoff to the DLN’s Mexico City summit, a celebratory evening welcoming our community to Mexico City and its wealth of history and culture—and it’s the perfect setting for it. With its winding corridors and labyrinths of historic rooms, General Prim beckons its guests into a thoughtful trip to a not-so-distant past.