"Bucharest yesterday and now" a Bucharest Travel Page by RoBeauty

The old picture describe s the area where now is Unirii Square- Sitraco Bilding, Civic Center
BUCHAREST (Bucuresti), with a population of over two million, may be the largest city between Berlin and Athens, but it's by no means the most beautiful. At first sight the city is a chaotic jumble of traffic-choked streets, ugly concrete apartment blocks and grandiose but unfinished Communist developments. Lying 64km from the Danube, Romania's southern border, but 600km from its northern frontier, it's also far removed from the country's more obvious attractions. And yet, it's Romania's centre of government and commerce and site of its main airport, so most visitors to the country will find themselves passing through Bucharest at some point.

The core of the Centru Civic was largely completed by 1989, just in time for the dictator's overthrow. This western end of the development now seems almost human - unlike the larger eastern extension, where a forest of frozen cranes in an undergrowth of rusting reinforcing rods mark the site of what was to have been a cultural centre; the area is referred to by the locals as "Hiroshima". The nearby National Library seems abandoned in this wasteland. To the southeast, sitting incongruously alongside the neighbouring high-rises, the new Bucharest Mall on Calea Vitan is Romania's first western-style shopping mall, though it's a disappointing venture with uninspiring shops and minimal atmosphere.
Bulevardul Unirii unites the two halves of the Centru Civic; at 4km long and 120m wide, the road is intentionally slightly larger than the Champs-Élysées after which it was modelled. To the north of the complex, a banking district is slowly being developed.

Implementing this megalomaniac vision entailed the demolition of a quarter of Bucharest's historic centre (about five square kilometres), said to be slums damaged by the 1977 earthquake, but in fact containing 9000 largely undamaged nineteenth-century houses, whose 40,000 inhabitants were relocated in new developments on the outskirts of the city. There was worldwide condemnation of this vandalism, particularly since many old churches were to be swept away. Though some of the churches were in the end reprieved, they are now surrounded by huge modern apartment blocks and are separated from the urban context that gave them meaning.