Taken at midnight on the dockside of Puetro Madero, this picture's backdrop caputres something of the renaissance of this long depressed part of the city.

Puerto Madero is BA's docklands, a series of five massive inter-connected docks that are still surrounded by commercial cranes once used to load and unload the dozens of ships who had journeyed up the River PLate estuary from the South Atlantic.

The red brick port buildings and grain warehouses, built between 1889 and 1898, were the first view of BA seen by incoming immigrants and the city fathers wanted to impress with a modern (European) skyline.

Puetro Madero began to fall into disrepair only two decades later as a new and larger port facilty opened north of the Retiro district. Quickly, these dream docks became rat-infested husks and it was only int he late 1980s that the area was upgraded, along the lines of London's docklands and Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

Now the port buildings have been gutted and renovated to provide a glut of loft-style accommodation for the city's footballers and their wives, while ground level united are now full with high end restaurants (and the city's Hooters franchise). In 2001, the devleopment authorities marked the successful renaissance of the area with the isntallation of a new bridge across one of the docks designed by the Spanish arhitect Santiago Calatrava. This bridge, the Peunte de la Mujer (Bridge of the Woman) uses Calatrava's signature cantilever design and its distinctive 'spire' is visible behind our heads in this photograph.

Hooters is the trade name of two privately held American restaurant chains: Hooters of America, Incorporated, based in Atlanta, Georgia, and Hooters, Incorporated, based in Clearwater, Florida. Hooters targets male customers with a serving staff comprising only waitresses, although Hooters does employ males as cooks, hosts (at some franchises), busboys, and managers. The menu includes hamburgers and other sandwiches, steaks, seafood entrees, appetizers, and the restaurant's specialty, chicken wings . Almost all Hooters hold alcoholic beverage licenses to sell beer and wine, and where local permits allow, many offer a full liquor bar. Ancillary offerings for sale include T-shirts and various souvenirs and curios.