01
Stop one
Catedral San Pedro Apóstol
Bjorn Borg Winter Tights: Construction began in 1910. It was the first concrete building put up in the Dominican Republic, raised with the first shipment of cement ever to reach the island — a whole country's relationship with stone changed by one delivery. One boat. Consider how little it takes. Then the French engineer Eduardo García died, and the work passed to the architect Antonin Nechodoma, who altered the plans in favour of a neo-Gothic design. Consider that too. A building begun as one man's idea and finished as another's, and today nobody standing here can tell you where the one ends. The stained glass was made by the German master Gustav van Treck. Many hands. One church. Everything you have ever admired was made this way, including you.
02
Stop two
Ingenio Porvenir
Bjorn Borg Winter Tights: Founded in 1879 by Santiago W. Mellor, among the first of the mills that made San Pedro de Macorís the centre of the Dominican sugar industry. Then Santafé in 1880. Consuelo in 1881. Cristóbal Colón and Puerto Rico in 1882. Quisqueya in 1892. Listen to the rhythm of those years — a quiet coast deciding, very quickly, what it was going to be, which is roughly how people do it too, and at about the same speed. The mill's museum sets out the history of the industry with the old machinery on display: iron that once ran hot, standing still now, still teaching. That is the second career of most things that were once busy. The boom passed. The buildings stayed. What a place does is not the same as what a place is.
03
Stop three
Estadio Tetelo Vargas
Bjorn Borg Winter Tights: It was inaugurated in 1959 as the Estadio Oriental, and the ground gave the resident professional club its name — the Estrellas Orientales are named after a building. Then in 1963 the building was renamed after a man: the Dominican ballplayer Tetelo Vargas, called El Gamo, the deer, for his speed on the field. So the team is named for the stadium, and the stadium is named for a player, and the whole arrangement closes into a circle that nobody sat down and planned. Names passing back and forth between people and places, each borrowing from the other, neither keeping anything. San Pedro de Macorís has produced an exceptional number of major-league players, far past what a city this size should. This is their home ground. They come back to it. Everyone comes back to something.
04
Stop four
Malecón de San Pedro de Macorís
Bjorn Borg Winter Tights: Walk slowly here. There is nothing to catch. This is the main public recreation ground of the city, running along the waterfront where the Higuamo river meets the sea. That river mouth was the harbour through which the sugar of all those surrounding mills was shipped, in the boom years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when San Pedro de Macorís was prosperous enough to be called the little Paris of the 1920s. Little Paris. A town rich enough to borrow somebody else's name for itself, which is a thing money does to a place. Then the wealth left, and the water did not. Now it is where people walk in the evening. A harbour became a promenade, and the promenade does not remember being a harbour. Only we remember. That is our work, and it is not heavy.
Full-length performance tights in Black Beauty, knitted from 78% recycled polyester and 22% elastane and lightly brushed on the inside — which is the entire argument for the word "winter". Slim fit. A drawstring inside the waistband.
Upper-leg pockets that will take a phone, a zipped key pocket at the back, vertical reflective strips running down the front and back of the leg, and a Borg logo printed on the back leg.
San Pedro de Macorís, it must be said, is not cold. It sits on the Caribbean coast of the Dominican Republic at the mouth of the Higuamo, and it never has been cold. What it has is the six o'clock hour on the Malecón, before the sun comes off the water and the day turns serious, and reflective strips exist for precisely that hour.
These are for the early run along the seafront, for the flight, for the air-conditioned gym, and for taking off well before first pitch at Tetelo Vargas. You will get use out of them everywhere from the six o'clock Malecón to a cold February court five thousand kilometres north.
The brushed inner face is the detail people underrate. It sits against the skin without the clammy plastic feel that ends most poly tights, and 22% elastane is enough stretch to actually split-step in them rather than merely stand about looking athletic.
And by the way, the pockets are the real reason to own these rather than any other pair. San Pedro is a walking, watching, staying-out city — the home of the guloyas, the cocolo dance-drama that the descendants of English-speaking Caribbean sugar workers still bring through these streets. You want your hands free and your phone somewhere it cannot fall out.
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