Notebook

The most famous architect - indeed for many people today, especially foreign visitors, the single most famous human being - that Barcelona ever produced, was killed by a streetcar one June day in 1926, as he toddled across Gran Via near the corner of Carrer Bailen. Evidently, he was lost in thought and fairly deaf, so that he neither saw the No. 30 tram bearing down on him nor heard the passers-by shouting their warnings. He was an old codger in a rusty black suit. His pockets were empty (except, by one account, for some orange peel), he carried neither identification nor money, and he was taken at first for one of the thousands of seedy old pensioners with whom the city abounded. Only later, as he lay dying in the public hospital, was it found that he was the seventy-four year-old Antoni Gaudí, architect of the unfinished temple of the Sagrada Família ad a dozen other smaller (but, many believe, better) buildings in and just outside the city.