At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of São Paulo was no more than a gamble. Functioning as the intermediary between the coffee-producing regions and the speculative international markets, the city underwent a forty-year period of erratic development and exponential growth. As the coffee economy grew, increasing in profit and national relevance, São Paulo became the locus for investment, a symbol of regional progress and the perfect showcase of coffee producers’ power and success. With São Paulo’s material life as the object and backdrop, this dissertation argues that renderings of the city’s early twentieth century have failed to capture the nuances of the capital’s material transition, simply sweeping them into grander accounts of its modernity, growth, development, and chaos. Against these at times teleological narratives, this dissertation frames São Paulo, and its residents, as active participants in the construction of newfound consumer cultures, questioning not only how they networked their material existences, but considering the limits and opportunities imposed by the urban environment in all its layers. By focusing on the circulation of things, in a scale that goes far beyond the boundaries of the city’s well-known commercial sphere, the dissertation presents a narrative that recasts ideas of informality, marginality, and illegality, arguing that spaces and practices that could very well be described as such were at the core of the city’s development; intrinsic pieces to São Paulo’s commercial expansion and the networking of its consumer cultures—past and present.