Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (14 page)

In fairness, for a place overrun day and night by an average 150,000 shoppers, the Forum is remarkably clean, safe, and orderly. And the neighborhood does have its boosters. Most are philosophical, longtime local residents, as well as business owners, lovers of 1970s kitsch, itinerant masochists, and restless
banlieusards
—those beardless youths from the suburban housing projects the RER was designed to serve. As the proprietor of several chic short-term rental apartments near Les Halles observed one day, “I suppose they can hardly be blamed, as their own living area must be very sterile and boring!”

It was with trepidation that I alighted from my subway car at Les Halles and talked myself into taking a fresh look again,
again
. The long, steep escalators that strike terror into many Parisian hearts raised me from the Dantesque 1970s darkness of the RER platforms into the sunken plaza via a laminate of fluorescent-lit corridors that are begging to be reconfigured. The plaza and its bulging Plexiglas windows look increasingly like outsized vintage Tupperware, which ought to make them endearing. Still Europe’s busiest, with around 3,200 employees and 170 commercial spaces, the mall generates nearly $700 million annually for its private leaseholder, Unibail-Rodamco. Might that explain the eagerness of sixties and seventies real estate developers, and the myriad pressures still exerted on city hall to keep doing business as usual, or to add even more boutiques?

I was happy to confirm that FNAC thrives. On one memorable occasion—in 2005—I rappelled into the cavernous emporium to buy a copy of
Le Ventre de Paris
—Zola’s
Belly of Paris
—before striking out into the wasteland. But this time around I carried with me a dog-eared copy of
The Human Comedy
instead. With it in hand, an amulet against prejudice, I was delighted to discover the Forum’s multilevel “Rue du Cinéma.” This new film center and library has five screens, thousands of movies (5,500 of them about Paris), a movie-theme bar, and a long glass front that lets in more light than has been seen since the
trou
. The color scheme of pink, white, and gray seemed a long way from the mall’s dreary browns of yesteryear. Wrapping what is obviously a popular package is lighting designer Georges Berne’s “luminous ribbon.”

The shops on level Minus-3 nearest the RER entrances were also profitably deploying their wares. Other parts of the complex offered tempting vacancy signs, which to some might increase the old-fashioned gloom, but to others suggests the promise of change.

Reassuringly changeless instead was the air, as salubriously caustic as it was in 1986. It’s perfumed by French fries and hamburgers, reheated croissants, sausages, cheap perfume, disinfectants, and an eye-stinging scent many innocent shoppers mistakenly attribute to sewage. “The Belly of Paris aches,” quip regulars. Some invoke the supernatural: the Places des Innocents cemetery abutted the site, after all. An RATP municipal transit worker once explained to me that the
odeur
comes not from disgruntled, displaced souls, but rather from decomposing limestone, exposed by the
trou
. Long ago, the district was called Champeaux—“water-field”—and its soil had a fine reputation for consuming corpses faster than you can say Jacques Robinson. Whether Champeaux lies at the origin of “shampoo”—which the French spell “shampooing” and pronounce
sham-pwan
—is a matter of speculation. As it awaits remodeling, the mall gets a thorough wash daily, which accounts for the soapy layer in the air’s complex olfactory blend.

The Forum des Halles has two parts, the more recent and less egregious lying to the west. Opened in 1985, it was designed by Paul Chemetov (of the Ministry of Finance building at Bercy). According to the understandably embittered architect, interviewed by
Le Journal de Paris
, it would cost the city of Paris around one hundred million euros just to tear off his Forum’s cement ceiling.

Expense and technical challenges are among the reasons so many sandbags have been piled at Mayor Delanoë’s feet in the past decade. How much it would cost (and if it’s possible) to eliminate the stench of Champeaux is unknown. Shopping in the supermarket Mangin plans to install in reconverted car tunnels beneath Les Halles could be a pungent adventure.

Spend an hour or so, as I did, exploring the “corolla” pavilions and panoramic terraces excogitated by the long-forgotten Jean Willerval, then sit in the tatterdemalion park that stretches between the church of Saint-Eustache and the handsome, round eighteenth-century Bourse de Commerce. Eleven fountains squirt and splash. Children grab the sculpted ear and scale the giant stone hand and head of
L’Écoute
—a sculpture “listening” to the heartbeat of the city. The park is clearly much used. After decades of patient grooming, its ten thousand shrubs and 480 trees—someone has inventoried them—are finally leafing out, just when the gardens are to be relandscaped, three-quarters of the trees felled, and, some fear,
L’Écoute
displaced in the process. But only if Mangin and his sub-architects’ plans go ahead. They might very well be modified again (again).

One reason the project has been held up is Saint-Eustache, an endearingly homely barn with marvelous flying buttresses, several unusual bell towers, and a splendid organ. It’s a national landmark church, was restored recently, and is dramatically lit at night. A lantern in the proverbial darkness, it’s one of Paris’s most popular parish churches, especially among immigrants. Colbert is buried here, making Saint-Eustache a pilgrimage site for historians and royalists. More to the point, the gardens of Les Halles fall within its circle of landmark status, and therefore theoretically can’t be altered without a court order.

The charms of Saint-Eustache and other premodern relics in the area are many. But unless you’re taking happy pills, you may still wind up sharing the
New York Times
’s brutal 2005 assessment that Les Halles is “the worst of late twentieth-century Modernity, with its tabula rasa approach to history and its penchant for sterile, inhuman spaces.”

The “worst”? Maybe. To those sensible, boring souls who suggested in the 1960s that Baltard’s pavilions be repurposed as Pompidou’s contemporary art museum, and adjacent areas groomed into a “Central Park,” Pompidou retorted, “It would be invaded instantly by sixty thousand hippies!”

Pompidou’s visionaries dreamed up the Pompidou Center instead, and strove to erect colossi considerably more astonishing than what we currently see at Les Halles. They imagined spaghetti-bowl freeways and slug-like skyscrapers rearing their spiky heads, and other projects branded outrageously outlandish even for those swinging times. Today’s visionaries seem immune to history’s lessons. Jean Nouvel wanted sleek Manhattan high-rises with rooftop gardens. Rem Koolhaas planned vividly colored “Popsicle” towers poking up from below to broadcast the mall’s “energy.” The Dutch firm of MVRDV preferred stained-glass expanses, which were judged ludicrous and “un-build-able.”

By contrast, Mangin’s original suggestion to raze the wilted corollas and blaze a treeless esplanade from the Bourse de Commerce to a low, glass-covered subterranean atrium seemed downright reassuring, though it was hard to see why the greenery had to go. Perhaps because of public outcry over the destruction of the park, but more likely because of the mayor’s multifarious agenda, the job of actually designing the new mall was taken from Mangin and given to a pair of architects, Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti. Their vision is the latest version of the plan—call it Les Halles 2.011—and centers around “La Canopée.” If built, this wood-and-steel canopy will billow about fifty feet above the ground and stretch unsupported several acres across, replacing the corollas. It’s an audacious merger of a monster manta-ray, a louvred Bedouin tent, and a thatched tropical hut. La Canopée has many advantages, though waterproofing isn’t one of them. Wind and rain are expected as part of the new shopping and commuting experience, fitting perhaps for a globally warmed age. The Canopy is considerably lower than Willerval’s pavilions, and it’s not mirrored, already a vast improvement. Eventually the underground atrium beneath the Canopy will be fitted with slinky elevators that evoke the neck and back of a golden brontosaurus—or the arches of the multinational fast-food chain that happens to have an outlet nearby, facing the Fontaine des Innocents. And, of course, there will be many more shops.

In the end, Parisians can rest assured, no matter how the remodel is done, the shopping mall and RER station will remain.

Though eager to slip away, I coaxed myself into exploring the car-free district around Les Halles one more time. It’s not that I despise the area. I simply prefer other parts of town. The glad news was, the litter, fast-food franchises, down-market souvenir and clothing shops, and edgy atmosphere decrease manyfold the farther from the complex you get. At the same time, a feeling of pride and hope is returning to the perimeter of the neighborhood, perhaps inspired by the impending remodel and a rise in real estate prices. For instance, by the time you reach Rue Montorgueil—a lively market street beyond Saint-Eustache—or the church of Saint-Merri near the Pompidou Center, the
banlieusards
from the commuter trains have largely been replaced by trendy bohemian bourgeois
bobos
from the abutting Marais. The harder you look around Les Halles, the more you uncover pleasing architectural details, including the handsome Fontaine des Innocents and scores of centuries-old façades behind which lurk rebuilt apartment complexes. Until a few years ago the strongest reminders here of the pre-Pompidou era were the Irma La Douces. They plied their trade around Rue Saint-Denis from the Middle Ages onward. But they, too, are losing out to the forces of gentrification, and have decamped en masse to lower-rent districts.

Like Baltard’s pavilion in Nogent-sur-Marne, some vintage storefronts in the neighborhood admittedly appear to be bleached bones in a wasteland. As the quarter has grown into its 1970s–’80s Frankenstein skin, however, the scars have healed over, and few people have the stomach to tear them open again. I was especially happy to see the eye-catching window displays of the pest-control specialist Julien Aurouze, whose family business at 8 Rue des Halles has been around from the rat-infested days of yore. The dessicated, dangling rodents, some of them captured in 1925, still give frissons to passersby. A handful of cafés also survived the wrecker’s ball. Au Père Tranquille and Le Bon Pêcheur, facing each other and Les Halles’s mirrored façades, are two of them.

Once upon a time market workers and slumming party-goers would sup night and day on Au Père Tranquille’s “fine, pungent onion soup,” as Evelyn Waugh noted in early 1929. Cheap and warming, onion soup was the ideal fast food and hangover cure. The café still has the requisite broken-tile floors, (faux) cane chairs, and puffing poseurs—now banished to the smoking terrace—it had in market days, and even the onion soup. From its tiny round outdoor tables I have often observed groups of Les Halles adolescents, and I always wonder how much they know of the site’s historical, literary, and political significance. As a matter of fact, they probably know more than any other segment of society: in the second decade of the twenty-first century every French high schooler still studies Zola’s work inside out, upside down.

To understand why the neighborhood means so much to so many Parisians, you’ve got to do as the kids do and crack open Zola and the history books. You discover that this has always been the city’s market district—“always” meaning for at least the past nine hundred years. Granted, nowadays it’s a challenge to evoke watery Champeaux, the medieval pilgrimage route that ran by on Rue Saint-Martin, or the succession of marketplaces that operated hereabouts, starting with King Louis VI’s stalls of 1137. There’s no trace, for that matter, of Emperor Philippe Auguste’s walled market compound from 1183. Of François the First’s Renaissance market arcades (built from 1534 to 1572) only photographs from the nineteenth century remain. That’s because, in keeping with the preternaturally Parisian tabula rasa tradition, Emperor Napoléon III toppled them in his seismic Second Empire redesign of the district from 1852 to 1856. Did Parisians protest then? I wonder. Those who did presumably wound up floating in the Seine, or exiled to a penal colony.

The tale of Baltard’s much-lamented pavilions, conceived at the behest of Paris Prefect Claude-Philibert Barthelot, Comte de Rambuteau, in 1848, accounts for a little over one-eighth of the market district’s nine-hundred-year history. But the structures were—by all accounts, especially Zola’s—magnificent not only to look at. Unlike today’s Forum the market’s energy was electrifying.

Le Ventre de Paris
, written by Zola in 1873, is part of the Rougon-Macquart saga, a multiple-volume series. When the bespectacled, shortsighted author first stumbled upon Les Halles one sleepless night in 1869, he found “all the blossoming poetry of Paris’s streets on the muddy sidewalk amid Les Halles’s edibles.” But as clear-eyed Frenchmen and schoolchildren know,
The Belly of Paris
is no facile ode, and its influence on sensitive souls can be profound. No doubt it influenced my dark vision of Les Halles, and to this day I still have difficulty seeing the lighter side.

The novel’s ambivalent hero, Florent, mistaken for a revolutionary rioter and incarcerated on Devil’s Island during the coup d’état that brought Napoléon III to power in 1851, upon his return in 1856 discovers the then-new Les Halles. Hemmed in by menacing cartloads of carrots, mountains of cabbages, and piles of potatoes, Florent is swept along by the raucous crowd, slipping on grease and discarded artichoke leaves in a horrifying cornucopia right out of Hieronymus Bosch.

Like Zola himself, Florent is fascinated by the architecture and life of Les Halles—“the luminous, polished transparency” of the panes flooded with dawn’s light, the “slender herringbone pillars, the elegant curves of the woodwork ceiling, the geometric outlines of the roofs.” In the pavilion’s vaulted cellars Florent discovers Champeaux’s secret waters flowing into giant urns and tanks full of live fish. In the bright, prosperous charcuterie where he works, Florent is mesmerized by the abundance of hams, sausages, salami, lard, and other fatty, greasy, slippery delicacies, becoming increasingly obsessed by the corresponding plumpness and carnivorous contentment of the men and women around him—exemplars of a budding consumerist economy.