The following testimony was written in 1970 by José Maria de Amorim, the first clerk of Erechim, who lived there from 1924 until his death on December 12, 1978. He recounts the design aspects of the city, its origin and its setbacks, which are not yet recorded in the official history of the county.
As mentioned previously, Erechim was created on April 30, 1918, by decree of the then State President Dr. Antonio Augusto Borges de Medeiros. Once formalized all necessary steps for the official act of creation, the Secretary of Public Works C. Gonçalves Torres ordered the geodesic division of the city that would serve as headquarters to the novel by county engineers and surveyors of the Land Committee, which worked in the old town Erechim (today Getulio Vargas). And they took as its starting point the train station, without having done so, it seems, the reconnaissance of the terrain.
The design repeated the plant in the city of Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais, also was inspired by urban concepts used in the tracings of Washington (1791) and Paris (1850) [9]. With plans in place, development of Erechim proceeded at a rapid pace, especially Avenida Jose Bonifacio, now called Maurício Cardoso.
Before long, news of the booming region's progress interest Torres Gonçalves, who came to visit the village, hoping to find it lying on flat terrain and easy to implement, with flat streets, with its triangular terminals perfectly leveled. But when he arrived and traveled aboard a 1929 Ford automobile, which growled furiously over steep hills of the streets, it was as he expected. Erechim indeed was built on hilly ground!
With the passage of time, the city was eventually leveled to the existing gully Avenue Maurício Cardoso, channeled the existing establishments in the first blocks of streets and Nelson Italy Ehlers, and many other depressions were more or less leveled with wood and earth.
On a visit to me, the notary Jose Maria Henriques de Amorim confessed that Erechim was his "greatest sin," because I never thought that the city had been planted on holes. And every time I returned there and visited Amorim said the notary public upon arrival "My friends, come see my sin." That was how Erechim called "my sin." And he was right. Later there have been big studies to see if it was possible to improve the geographical situation of the city, but all to no avail. The last work performed by the former Land Commission was a survey that lasted many months, led by Schneider dium, the Brother Malinowski, Losina brothers, Anthony and Henry Bergmann Schwerin, who did a survey every two square feet, as the situation. Even before the end of this service, one time mayor of the City Council ordered the surveyor's leveling the pavement and the strings were extended, with all the defects of the surface.
And so it was following the city, where many governments have tried in vain to level the city. Later drew up the Master Plan that had on the urban construction. With him, it was granted leveling many buildings before making the leveling of streets, which resulted in houses with many floors underground, after the street as it should be capped, to mitigate the steep subidas.Como is not difficult to guess there was great excitement in town about this master plan, which eventually shelved.
Today Erechim, with its ups and downs, is still thriving and flourishing. It has the air of a big city, with its cobbled streets and low buildings, and is increasingly known as the Capital of Friendship.