Liverpool Polanco

The Liverpool Polanco store is a wonder of Mid-Century design. Perhaps the biggest wonder is how the giant Y-shaped complex has somehow survived. It’s almost fitting that it’s here, in the very east of west-heavy Polanco seeming always ready to sell out to Santa Fe. Somehow, Liverpool soldiers on. International visitors will find not just a retail shopping experience. It’s a trip into a past that City’s around the world would have been better off weathering the storms of the 1970s and 80s.

Residents around the Mariano Escobedo Causeway will recall the opening of Liverpool as nearly the final act of that older 1960s Polanco. The tower next to De La Mora’s striking Seguros Monterrey building had been completed a year before. And the fortress-chic Camino Real, exclusive almost to a fault, had been signaling a very different decade to come.

But Liverpool Polanco is still open. It’s not the flagship store it should be. It’s not even the most Modernist. That’s probably Insurgentes, although Santa Fe will likely put up an argument at least for “gigantism.”