Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (13 page)

Given its age and the number of cataclysmic social events that have occurred around it—the storming of the Bastille, the Glorious Revolution of July 1830, the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, and rampant real estate speculation—it’s a miracle Place des Vosges has survived at all. People often say that poverty preserves and prosperity destroys. The postwar building boom threatened not only the square but also the entire Marais neighborhood around it. The bulldozers were stopped a few minutes past the nick of time, in the 1960s, by then culture minister André Malraux, who declared the neighborhood a historical monument. But the poverty-prosperity dictum’s opposite is also true: the 1789–to–Second World War chapter of Place des Vosges history is a chronicle of corrosive decline. Factories sprang up in courtyards. Pavilions were dismembered, their aristocratic interiors junked (luckily a few were preserved and remounted at the nearby Musée Carnavalet, Paris’s city history museum). If vast sums hadn’t been spent on the square in recent decades it probably would have collapsed.

Most of the friends I take to visit Place des Vosges wonder out loud about the people who live behind those handsome, impenetrable façades. If you wander aimlessly along the park’s grilles of an evening you can catch tantalizing glimpses of painted ceilings, of rare and valuable pictures hanging high upon a wall. But this is not just a bastion of the wealthy, I discovered some years ago. Henri IV’s 1605 building code set the architectural theme and also specified that pavilions had to be owned by single families—presumably very good, old families worthy of the royal square. That unusual law remained in force as late as the 1960s, so there are still a few single-family pavilions, purchased in the 1800s or early 1900s when the square was dilapidated. Some pavilions were split long ago into cheap, rent-controlled apartments. Others are occupied to this day by the descendants of once-rich dynasties now living in genteel penury, their cluttered apartments lifted from a Zola novel. I’ll never forget the time I visited one, and was led from floor to sagging floor by the pavilion’s unwashed, unshaved, ornery owner, who scowled out of the broken windowpanes and cursed his inheritance. “You think it’s beautiful,” he shouted over and over. “You like the view? I hate it here, I hate it …”

Many impoverished heirs have sold off apartments piecemeal over the past forty years. Properties worth peanuts a few decades ago now fetch staggering sums.
Étage noble
flats are the most valuable at up to seven million dollars.

Other pavilions have been “nationalized” and taken over by an elementary school, the Victor Hugo museum, and an Ashkenazim synagogue, which explains the numbers of small children, the tourists clutching copies of
Les Misérables
, and the more or less constant flow of Jewish wedding parties hamming it up for photographers under the linden trees or in front of the fountains.

In the Place des Vosges social hierarchy, inhabitants still fall into whole-pavilion or single-apartment categories. To some pedigreed clans, former culture minister Jack Lang, with his
étage noble
digs, is a
petit arriviste
—a social climber. Trendy denizens abound, though as one self-consciously fortunate resident told me, it’s inaccurate to call the square “fashionable.” “Fashion is facile, easy to acquire and superficial,” he quipped with a regal wag of bejeweled fingers. “Place des Vosges is complex, expensive—a kind of cloister.”

On several occasions I visited the apartment of one of Paris’s most successful and controversial art auctioneers, the affable scion of a family that has owned an entire pavilion since the early 1800s. His two-story apartment is littered with priceless antiques and artworks. It is also haunted, he told me, deadpan, by the ghost of Concino Concini, Maréchal d’Ancre, a nobleman murdered in 1617 by the Baron de Vitry, the pavilion’s first owner. The auctioneer leads a resolutely modern lifestyle. He had his beamed ceiling repainted by a Senegalese artist. The dining room looks like something out of Jules Verne, with a curious, curved sheet-metal ceiling. “I like mixtures,” he told me.

The auctioneer spoke convincingly of restoration, fashion, purity, and eclecticism, and pondered what it means to live today in a monument, dripping with history. “I even like the little nineteenth-century park there with its slightly worn, old-fashioned look and
bouquet
of chestnut trees,” he declared at last, with the easy brashness typical of his trade. He used the word “bouquet” on purpose. “It’s a naïf—a sort of Henri Rousseau,” he continued. “But I think it’s beautiful all the same.” As if echoing his words, a nattily dressed nanny appeared from the arcades below and swerved into the park, her blue baby carriage scattering pigeons and autumn leaves. A charming naïf it was, I agreed, framed by a masterpiece.

Belly Ache: Les Halles Redux (Again
)

The worst of late twentieth-century Modernity …

—New York Times

es Halles, the historic market district nicknamed “The Belly of Paris” since the mid-1800s heyday of novelist Émile Zola, will evolve in coming years from its 1970s incarnation. Into what, no one is yet sure. A public architectural competition held in 2004 ostensibly to bring the complex up to European Union safety standards proved unsatisfactory. Fanciful designs by star-architects Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas lost. No one “won.” Described by the
New York Times
as a “toothless architectural figurehead,” the relatively unknown David Mangin has since then courageously wrapped his gums around a “supervisory” role. Under the watchful eye of mayor Bertrand Delanoë, Mangin is charged with the remake of the subterranean Forum des Halles shopping mall, adjoining park, and RER commuter train station.

But after years of studies and politicking, work set to get under way in 2010 was repeatedly sandbagged, sometimes by planning commissions or courts, sometimes by outraged neighborhood associations. This entertainingly unpredictable roller-coaster provided me with the excuse to revisit the neighborhood yet again with fresh eyes and a determinedly light step.

When it was still a wholesale market, roughshod Les Halles employed upwards of thirteen thousand around the clock, including hundreds of the famously scurrilous
forts
—bruiser porters who to be certified had to haul four hundred forty pounds of freight on a hand-truck across the hangars, about five football fields in length. Les Halles today is a colorless expanse of mirrored buildings reflecting cement. With a budget of one billion dollars and a timeline of many years, the remake is no minor urban renewal scheme.

The entire Les Halles neighborhood covers only twenty-five acres, but few Paris places are freighted with heavier symbolic baggage. Victor Hugo set the riot scenes here in
Les Misérables
, and every French writer or poet worthy of note since has at least nodded in Les Halles’s direction. When Georges Pompidou’s Gaullist government brazenly removed Les Halles’s wholesale market to suburban Rungis in 1969 then demolished the market’s iron-and-glass “Baltard pavilions” two years later, an estimated three hundred thousand Parisians’ livelihoods were turned upside down, and millions of resident rats evicted. From across the political spectrum Frenchmen cried bloody murder, marching in the streets, as their forebears had in 1789, 1830, and 1968. Amid accusations of illegal real estate speculation involving Les Halles and other “development” schemes, the Gaullists were defeated at the polls in 1974. Politicians since then have tiptoed around the neighborhood.

In his broadside
L’Assassinat de Paris
, muckraking historian Louis Chevalier wrote at the time of the demolition, “Les Halles were Les Halles but then, and even more so, they were Paris itself.”

Many Parisians still remember the scandals, dust, and chaos to this day. Nostalgia for Baltard’s Les Halles and hatred of what replaced them remains surprisingly tangible. And memories of the twenty-year mess the construction of the Forum engendered are even more vivid. That’s why Mangin’s reputation and Delanoë’s political future—he’s a presidential hopeful—ride on the project’s outcome. How to redo Les Halles without undue disturbance, on schedule and within budget? That is the question.

The bland southern suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne may seem an odd place to seek Les Halles’s secrets, but the two sites are linked spiritually and by the RER “A” line. It’s in Nogent, reassembled on a leafy hillside over the Marne River, that you’ll find the only Les Halles pavilion left in France. As I rode the RER to Nogent for a visit, I couldn’t help noting the irony. Victor Baltard’s handsome, airy 1850s tin-roofed structures, with their slender fluted iron columns, gingerbread trim, and glass-paned sides, were destroyed in part to make way for what thirty-odd years ago was considered an ultramodern commuter rail network. Now I was riding in a ragged, tired old train from the distant 1970s, a train whose underground station at Les Halles was slated for demolition and rebuilding.

Of ten original Baltard pavilions, eight were sold as scrap metal (and fetched a paltry 395,000 francs). The ninth was bought by the city of Yokohama in Japan, but that seemed a bit far for me to travel. The sole surviving pavilion is now a venue for prestigious events such as the International Cat Salon or L’Odissée de l’Accordéon festival—an orgy of squeeze-box music. It’s flanked by cast-iron Belle Époque streetlamps, one of those nifty little Wallace fountains (decorated with dancing caryatids, designed in 1871, and donated to the city by a British philanthropist), a section of Eiffel Tower staircase, and a curbside fire-alarm box, each carefully transplanted and deprived of its functions. A pleasant place, Nogent’s Belle Époque theme park of architecture is a remarkable example of 1960s–’70s Paris urbanism, an object lesson in what not to do again.

While riding back into town in a packed RER train I reviewed my own checkered experiences at Les Halles and Beaubourg, starting in 1976, when I watched the high-gloss paintwork being applied to the unfinished Pompidou Center. In my ignorance I imagined the behemoth was a refinery. Much of the quarter had been bulldozed to accommodate it. A resident set me straight: until a few years earlier, he said, a tangle of alleys had converged on the so-called Plâteau Beaubourg, a depot for the trucks that hauled fruit, vegetables, and meat to the wholesale market at nearby Les Halles.

My curiosity piqued, I walked west from Beaubourg to where the marketplace had been and through clouds of dust watched construction workers pouring cement into the celebrated
trou—
the great twenty-five-acre, seven-story deep hole of Les Halles. In 1979 and ’83 I was in Paris again, and saw half (then a quarter) of the pit still gaping, and felt the ground still shaking from pneumatic drills. It was only when I’d moved fulltime to the city in 1986 that the hole had finally been filled and the Forum shopping center completed (by several teams of rival architects working at cross-purposes). The once seedy, unmistakably Parisian alleys where Billy Wilder’s irreverent 1963 cinematic tale of prostitute Irma La Douce was set, the streets that had inspired Hugo, Zola, Balzac, Breton, and a hundred others, had disappeared, “renovated” beyond recognition. Not that I would have recognized and bemoaned anything: a young San Franciscan intoxicated by Paris, thirty-five years ago “nostalgia” wasn’t in my vocabulary.

Since my early encounters with Les Halles I’ve dashed through the complex a few hundred times—usually to change subway trains or buy an otherwise un-findable item at FNAC, the country’s biggest and possibly most claustrophobic emporium for books, CDs, and electronics. Sardonic grumpiness isn’t something I aspire to, but over the past quarter-century the labyrinthine underground Forum with its mirrored-glass “corolla” buildings springing from the depths has somehow failed to win my affection. If I live long enough, I probably won’t miss the current Les Halles when finally it’s gutted and rebuilt to let in air and light, and to ease foot traffic.

Like the eight hundred thousand daily commuters and forty million annual Forum shoppers, I watched the mall decline from mere 1970s architectural absurdity into something spooky and sordid. It bottomed in the late ’90s and early 2000s.