Portraits of a Changing Paris

Chat up a critic of historic preservation and the conversation may turn, sooner or later, toward Paris. What the French capital’s historic center has retained in fin-de-siècle flourish, s/he might claim, it lacks in the dynamism that fuels the growth of other great cities. London, New York, and Tokyo boast continually adaptable, evolving cores. But in attempting to cling to its glory days as “capital of the 19th century”, Paris consigns its modern needs to forgettable, peripheral suburbs. Its heart risks becoming little more than a quaint period museum.

You don’t have to be a Paris detractor to buy into such a narrative. Luc Sante, the author of a recent look at two new Paris histories in the New York Review of Books, has noticed the city’s chroniclers shifting their gaze, increasingly focusing on the large-scale changes now taking place outside Paris’ core. Today they find it impossible to even conceive of the city as a living, breathing organism without casting their glance toward its roiling, occasionally riotous, undeniably more au courant satellite settlements. As Eric Hazan writes in his new book, The Invention of Paris:

[A]nother “new Paris” is taking shape…it is leaving the west of the city to advertising executives and oil tycoons…crossing the terrible barrier of the Boulevard Périphérique…and stretching towards what is already de facto the twenty-first arrondissement, towards Pantin, Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, Bagnolet, Montreuil…

There’s no question that much of Paris’s cultural and economic dynamism alike is now weighted toward its outskirts. But to what extent is its center’s supposedly stultifying over-preservation to blame? Images taken by Laurent David Ruamps, an architecture enthusiast who has rephotographed a number of old postcard views of early 20th century Paris, suggest that the idea itself that Paris has been frozen in architectural time might not be so fully borne out.

Ruamps’ then-and-after views of Le Corbusier’s modernist Villa Bresnus, swallowed by denser, more street-sensitive construction, demonstrated the resilience of traditional urban development in a Paris suburb. That makes it less surprising to consider that, much more than many casual observers would suppose, the central Paris we know today was a relatively recent invention.

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Modernism Debauched

Villa Besnus in 1922 and 2010.
Photo compilation by Laurent David Ruamps

In 1922, Le Corbusier was hired by a man named George Besnus to build a new house in the Paris suburb of Vaucresson. It was the architect’s first chance to put the Purist ideals he had been toying with to practice: an architecture stripped of its excesses, made as clean, clear and efficient as possible. The house was meant as a statement, from the gracefully rounded edges of its balcony to the bathroom, which was placed in the centre of the building, allowing for an uninterrupted flow of interior space.

As you can see in the photo compilation above, though, Le Corbusier’s original design has been altered beyond recognition. Gone are the carefully-considered proportions, the clean contrast with scrubby surroundings. A four-sided roof replaced the original flat one and shops were built in the house’s front garden. It now looks like a slightly more modern version of the petit bourgeois houses that surround it, which is ironic, considering that Le Corbusier’s Modernist villa predates them by at least several years. In a way, knowing that those fuddy-duddy traditional houses were built during the emergence of Modernism makes you all the more sympathetic to Le Corbusier’s ideals. You can see very clearly what he was working against.

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Montreal to Paris: Fog, Strikes, and Salmon

Le voyage commence à l’embarquement dans ce bus déjà trop plein – suite 747 – qui nous débarquera à l’aéroport P.E.T.

Et si ce même voyage commencait déjà, par ce chemin, au travers du centre des affaires montréalais – vaste esplanade commerciale – et qui nous dépose au pied de Marie-Reine du Monde. Notre cathédrale. Celle qui nous fait déjà rêver de Roma, de San Pietro au crépuscule. La vie, la bousculade. Le mouvement. Un espresso sur fond de paysage enflammé.

Aussi on embarque dans ce bus – franchement trop plein – et on défile au travers de Montréal, en glissant la pente vers les faubourgs du Sud-Ouest. On croise rapidement le marché Atwater, qui nous transporte jusqu’à la Méditérannée, et puis on suit la longue et paresseuse coulée du canal de Lachine. Des murs aux briques rouges, avec en arrière-plan, le Mont-Royal : arqué et coloré, en cette saison où l’automne ronge rapidement les arbres, les préparant pour ces trois longs mois d’hivers. On a un peu froid : cette carte postale nous donne le vertige, avec un certain de degré de romantisme. L’appel à l’infinie.

Ce voyage promet d’être décisif.

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How to Fix a Troublesome Highway

When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a Modernist victory cry.

The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away. The railyards that once spread out from the interchange—and from which the Turcot took its name—were closed by Canadian National in 2002. Ordinary highway lights replaced the space-age illuminations when the aluminum wiring decayed. Winter road salt has soaked the structure in a corrosive brine, inflating steel reinforcement bars into rusted balloons ten times their original size, causing concrete to fall off in chunks.

In 2007, the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) proposed tearing the whole thing down and building a new ground-level interchange in its place. According to the renderings, vehicular capacity would be increased by 20 percent, but the new interchange—projected to cost $1.5 billion over seven years—would require the demolition of two hundred homes, including an entire street of walkup apartments and a large loft building that housed more than four hundred people. Its embankments would cut off links between St. Henri, Côte St. Paul and the other working-class areas adjacent to the interchange.

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How Bike-Sharing Changes the City

Photo by cagliostro

The launch of Bixi, Montreal’s new bike-sharing system, has been nothing short of spectacular. Despite early problems — faulty lock mechanisms have led to the theft of dozens of bikes — it has been more successful than anyone imagined. In fact, Montrealers have taken so well to Bixi that Stationnement de Montréal, the municipal agency that runs the system, has decided to bump up an expansion that wasn’t planned until next year. Next month, an additional 2,000 bikes will be added at 100 new stations in Villeray, Little Burgundy and Côte des Neiges.

Just as the public has quickly taken to Bixi, the bike-sharing service has already engrained itself in the city. “Bixi has truly changed the urban landscape here,” notes On Two Wheels, the Gazette’s cycling blog. “There is a new, yet already familiar ‘blink’ on the bike paths; downtown it seems like every third bike is a Bixi. This program is clearly doing some heavy lifting toward getting more people using bikes that might not have otherwise.”

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The Errant Canadians

It’s fun to see Jean-Paul Riopelle, now considered to have been of Canada’s foremost artists, described as a “young abstract painter” in Les Canadiens errants, a 1956 National Film Board documentary. He describes the open atmosphere of Paris as being particularly conducive to the creation of art. Implicitly, of course, he is referring to the atmosphere back home in Quebec, which was decidedly hostile to any sort of innovative thinking. In 1948, when Riopelle joined fifteen other artists and intellectuals in publishing the Refus global, a manifesto against the conservative Quebec establishment of the era, he was essentially chased out of town. He moved to Paris in 1949 and he continued to split his time between France and Canada until the 1990s.

Canada has always been a country of immigrants but what isn’t as widely known is that it has been, for just as long, a country of emigrants. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration and a high birth rate were the only things preventing Canada from losing population as hundreds of thousands of people left for better economic prospects in the United States. Throughout its history, many of its luminaries have found it more worthwhile to live abroad — Mordecai Richler in London, Leonard Cohen in Greece, Mavis Gallant and Anne Hébert in Paris, just to name a few. Even today, an estimated two million Canadians live outside of Canada.

What interests me about this is how the expatriate experience has informed the Canadian identity. Unfortunately, the film above doesn’t really offer much in that regard, dwelling mainly on the surface of why such talented people decided to leave Canada for Paris and London. Unlike immigrants, who leave their countries to join family abroad or to pursue better educational or economic opportunities elsewhere, expats tend to come from positions of relative privilege. For them, moving abroad is a lifestyle choice more than anything else. That has been my experience in Hong Kong, at least, and from what what I can glean in Les Canadiens errants, it was true in 1950s Europe, too.

Shopping Places, Then and Now

The Galéries Lafayette in Paris still is a gorgeous retail space

As with so many things having to do with taste in the 19th century, the French generally get the credit for inventing the department store: the Parisian pioneer Au bon marché adopted the formula in 1852, just at the beginning of the massive transformation of the city under Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and Napoléon III. In his novel The Ladies’ Delight (Au bonheur des dames), Emile Zola tells the story of its beginning from the point of view of a plucky young woman from the provinces who is captivated by the bustle and exuberance of the new form of selling things.

She defends the high-volume, quick turnover approach to her uncle who is forced out of business by the department store. “You probably are more competent than me, “ she says at one point, betraying a modesty that Zola seemed to admire, “but I’ll say what I’m thinking …prices, rather than be set as they were before, by 50 businesses, are set today by four or five, and they’re lower, thanks to the power of the capital and the strength of their clientele. It’s so much better for the public, that’s all.“ Reading that is like hearing an apologist for Wal-Mart (although it should be noted that Zola says Au bon marché provided health care for its staff while Wal-Mart had to be pressured into doing that more than a century later) which perhaps shows again that there’s nothing new under the sun. At any rate, the Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker adapted—or maybe reinvented—the form in the 1870s in his home town. His success inspired much imitation. By the late 19th century big cities in the US and Canada each had one or more department stores that were not just places for buying but places where everyone went.

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Paris: Beyond the End of History

Quai d’Orsay: From Commuters to Connoisseurs

French culture is dead. So declared Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, France’s once-trendsetting culture class have failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — at least superficially.

The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains — seemingly — a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light has maybe taken its very apt nickname a bit too far, bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow. It’s easy to forgeet, while strolling through the Tuileries in the evening, that the city isn’t some recently dreamed-up theme park — especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground.

It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris – the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few mid-20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of the Velib’ bike-sharing system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. Paris may not only be ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.

Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City

Morrison hasn’t completely given up on French culture, claiming that hope lies in the cultural explosion percolating in the immigrant ghettos that proliferate in France’s suburban banlieues and the untapped engine of neoliberal economic growth: the former providing new twists on what “French” means, the latter allowing this new France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world.

It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The upscale offices of American firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.

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Public Displays of (Dis) Affection

Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, Paris

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The Paris the Tour Guides Avoid

Paris’s 15th probably carries the distinction of being the city’s least loved arrondissement. Though there isn’t much to distinguish it from, say, the 14th arrondissement just to the west, or the 12th crosstown, the 15th languishes in oubli. Tourists eschew it, locals kick it around in jokes, and the most famous attraction anywhere nearby, the Eiffel Tower, is actually about three blocks outside. I once had a tour book that advised its readers to avoid the area altogether.

It’s clear when you enter this arrondissement that you’re still inside Paris; but still, you can’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, you’ve been dropped somewhere else. The famous blue and green street signs are still there, but often the Metro is far away; gone are the hordes of tourists, gone is the whole notion of monumentality, gone are Haussmann’s huge boulevards. Instead, the 15th arrondissement has subtler points of interest: its tucked away little residential streets, its out-of-the-norm commercial throughfares, the contrasts of late 1800s-vintage structures against modernist apartment buildings. Every question Paris has faced in the last 150 years as a city, whether implicitly or explicitly, is there to be seen: functionalism or mixité? Cars or pedestrians? Bulldoze or leave be?

I hadn’t even thought to bring a map with me before setting off for this pocket of town. Generally there’s no use: in Paris, it usually takes no more than five minutes to arrive at a large boulevard, from where it’s usually easy to find either a metro station or a map on the backside of an advertisement. But no less than 15 minutes after stepping off the new Tramway that stretches out along the Boulevards des Maréchaux near the city’s southern border, I found myself entirely lost. Soon after, my state worsened: it began to rain. Then pour. I was saved by the garage entry of a 1960s-vintage compound that faced out toward the entrance to a villa from at least fifty years before, an intimate, tree-lined dead end. It was only too appropriate.

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Reading Alone, One Warm Afternoon

Reading on the Place des Vosges and on the bank of the Seine

Tourists Lost on Three Continents

Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris

Fishing in the Seine

Not fish, actually—the guy caught an eel.

Eel is delicious, but I’m not sure if I would trust the cleanliness of a river that runs through the heart of Paris.

The City of a Thousand Leaves

Running across the boulevard Saint-Germain, through the Carrefour de l’Odéon, we dashed into the box office and bought our tickets, ducking into the darkened cinema just as the opening credits finished. We sat down in the back row, interrupting a clearly annoyed couple’s face-sucking session, and watched as the first short began: “Montmartre.”

Paris, je t’aime, which we had just handed over our seven euros to see, is a collective film (it’s composed of eighteen segments) directed by a number of big names from around the world, including the Coen Brothers, Gurinder Chadha and Olivier Assayas. Each segment is set in a different part of Paris and deals with, in some way, love. In “Loin du 16ème,” Walter Salles depicts a young Latin American mother who must leave her own child in a suburban daycare in order to care for another in the wealthy sixteenth arrondissement. Sylvain Chomet’s “Tour Eiffel” is an irreverent and off-kilter take on the life of mimes.

Paris, je t’aime is more than just a collection of disparate shorts. Its producers like to call it a “collective film,” since it understands the futility of trying to reduce the Parisian experience into a single story—any attempt to do so will result in an enjoyable but empty Amélie fantasy. Instead, Paris, je t’aime suggests that Paris is a city of vignettes, a collection of dramas that share the same stage. Of course, every city is like this to some extent, but in Paris the effect is exaggerated by geographical compactness. Central Paris is a neat circle just ten kilometres across, ringed by the Périphérique highway; within its boundaries, the city is a treasure chest of humanity.

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