Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (32 page)

Sous les pavés, la plage
. (Under the paving stones lies a beach.)

—Slogan of Paris student rioters in 1968

hat city’s streets are paved with dreams and peacock-tail mosaics—thousands of them? No prize if you guessed. The classic Paris cobble is an eight- or ten-centimeter granite cube, a
pavé mosaïque
, laid down in patterns road builders call
queues de paon
. Many of the capital’s 5,993 streets—totaling more than 1,000 miles—are cobbled, and cover a quarter of Paris’s surface area. That translates to millions of cobbles, often unseen under the asphalt, and always unsung.

Cobblestones are as much a part of Paris’s identity as the Eiffel Tower. Read a classic from Anatole France to Émile Zola, find a riot or revolution, and cobbles will star in the show. The pavements rose in righteous wrath in 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870–71, and again in 1944, when the Nazis decamped. There’s nothing better than cobbles for barricade-building or shot-putting.
Aux barricades, camarades!
And there lies the irony. Cobbles did not disappear when Paris streets were widened, paved, and modernized. Modernization—“Haussmannization”—aimed to rid Paris of medieval alleys, where rioters could ambush troops. The cobbles merely went underground—under the asphalt.

Sound like ancient history? Click forward to times recent enough for hoary fifty-somethings like me to remember. Behind the cobblestone barricades of 1968, rioters shouted not only
aux barricades
but also
sous les pavés la plage
—under the paving stones lies a beach. The cryptic chant egged on students to tear up stones as their forebears had, but also hinted at a different world, a beach in the big city, symbolic of a better, more carefree life.

In reality that “beach” was the sandy layer the cobbles are embedded in—or were. Nowadays sand is mixed with mortar, and joints between cobbles are grouted. Rioters would be hard pressed to pry them out. That’s telling of our times. So, too, is the current positive value attached to the humble cobblestone, at least for those with green credentials, meaning green politics or a swelling wallet full of greenbacks.

The sometimes idealistic
soixante-huitards
of 1968 are as dead today as the barricade builders of Rue Royale in 1848. Everyone but commuters, it seems, is embracing cobbles and their petrified relatives as heralds of low-carbon prosperity. Wherever the peacock’s tail is laid down anew or exposed by
débitumation—
the stripping of bitumen, meaning asphalt—real estate values soar. Neighborhoods are revolutionized not by rioters tearing up cobbles, but by cobble-prone developers, new-paradigm moguls, Greens, and
bobos
—Paris’s celebrated bohemian bourgeois.

“Cobble-ification” is an integral part of pedestrianization and means that streets or neighborhoods are car-free or benefit from restricted traffic flow. In Paris, these areas go by the designations
zone piétonnière, aire piétonne, quartier vert
and, most recently, Réseau Vert—a specific pedestrian-cyclist roadway network.

Like other attempts at social engineering through urban planning, Europe’s first and biggest pedestrian zone was created in the 1960s. The Strøget area turned historic Copenhagen into a giant mall, complete with fast-food joints, roughneck street fauna, men dressed as Vikings, and what boosters called “street entertainers”—musicians, performers, artists, jugglers, and fire-swallowers. They’ve become a permanent feature of pedestrian zones worldwide, and a powerful argument against building more of them.

Given the motor-mania of the 1960s, Paris was slow to follow Denmark’s lead. The City of Light’s first and still its largest pedestrianized area was begun in the mid-1970s. It spread around the former wholesale markets at Les Halles, and the Pompidou Center at Place Beaubourg. The idea was to redesign European cities such as Paris for cars, creating safe havens for tourists, especially shoppers, in traffic-clogged historic neighborhoods. After the Les Halles–Beaubourg experiment came the Saint-Séverin–Saint-Michel precinct and its wall-to-wall couscous joints and Greek tavernas, an object lesson in how not to masterplan a city.

Mall-ification continued under pro-automobile mayor Jacques Chirac, and the policy only began to morph during the reign of his successor Jean Tiberi. But with traffic, noise, and air pollution untenable, instead of beginning the process of limiting cars throughout town, Tiberi initiated more refuges. These weren’t the malls of the 1970s and 1980s, but they maintained the fiction that Paris and cars could live together. The Les Halles–Beaubourg enclave grew, and more were planned and built.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s near Rue Montorgueil northwest of Les Halles, the barricades against traffic went up, creating a fortified city-within-the-city, this time with cobbled streets in white Carrara marble. On the periphery, pneumatically activated telescopic piston-bollards—called
bornes téléscopiques
—do today what drawbridges did in the past. They’re linked via audio and video to a remote police squad in a centralized
poste de contrôle
security HQ, with a 24/7 maintenance crew. Only residents, delivery trucks, and emergency vehicles are allowed into the citadel.

In recent years, the Montorgueil zone has spread to Rue Saint-Denis and abutting streets, extending as far as Rue Montmartre. Running across it is the first section of Réseau Vert, an experimental linear network of semi-pedestrianized, partly cobbled streets with limited car access. To slow traffic, cobbles also mark intersections and pedestrian crossings elsewhere. For now, Réseau Vert runs from Châtelet to Canal Saint-Martin. It may well prove the twenty-first-century answer to twentieth-century citadel-pedestrianization.

Though invented by Green Party planners nearly twenty years ago, Réseau Vert is a weapon in Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë’s anti-vehicular arsenal. The days of denial are over. The mayor’s “de-Haussmannization” campaign to keep cars out of town means pain to drivers will increase until they switch to public transportation, bicycles, and walking.

Aptly, a few hundred yards west of the Les Halles–Beaubourg–Montorgueil—Saint-Denis pedestrian zone–cum–Réseau Vert, in Rue du Louvre, is Paris’s Direction de la Voirie et des Déplacements. The roadworks department is on the front line in the war against automotive oppression. Here I met architect Yann Le Toumelin, in charge of the Réseau Vert. Mild-mannered, Le Toumelin is too young to remember Les Halles before the wholesale market became a mall. For Parisians under fifty, Les Halles and the Saint-Séverin–Saint-Michel pedestrian zone “have always been there.”

Longevity isn’t always a measure of success. The mistakes of past pedestrianization—lack of access, increased street noise from cafés and musicians, radical demographic shifts, aggravated congestion on perimeter streets—are being studied from the ground up. “Starting with the cobbles,” said Le Toumelin mildly. “Nothing makes a pedestrian area look and feel more seedy than broken or missing paving stones.”

Some stones crack under the weight of a single delivery truck, he explained, adjusting his frameless designer glasses. While sketching on an A3 sheet, he described the various cobbles and flagstones found in Paris. There are the classic
pavés mosaïques
in peacock-tail patterns. The best are granite; other stones wear too fast. Second-most popular is the
pavé échantillon
, shaped like a bread loaf in a variety—a Whitman’s Sampler—of colors. They’re rectangular, measuring twenty by fourteen by fourteen centimeters, and laid out side by side. The
dalle
is a flat, rectangular flagstone and varies widely in size. Usually gray, heavy and expensive,
dalles
are used not only on streets but also on sidewalks, such as those of Rue de Rivoli or the Île Saint-Louis. A novelty is the
dallette
, a smaller flagstone measuring twenty by thirteen by fifteen centimeters. “They’re tricky to keep in place,” Le Toumelin admitted, citing recent problems in the Marais’s main street, Rue Saint-Antoine, fronting the celebrated baroque church of Saint-Paul.

I left the affable architect’s office having learned a new vocabulary, from
débitumer
and
dépoteletisation
to
axes civilisés, ralentisseur, dos d’ânes
, and
gendarme endormie
. Whether stripping bitumen off cobbles and removing poles from sidewalks, trying to teach civility to Parisian drivers, or installing cobbled speed bumps (aka “sleeping policemen”), Le Toumelin and his department have their work cut out. They can design a pedestrian-friendly world with low sidewalks, handsome paving, ingenious one-ways and deadends, plus limited, snail’s-pace traffic, but the city of Paris lacks police authority to enforce driving and parking regulations. That’s the job of the Préfecture de Police, which controls the Police d’État, which is often at odds with the mayor. Paris is the only city in France without its own police force.

The oddity of the situation continues: a major source of revenue for the French government is the tax on gasoline. It varies with petroleum prices and exchange rates, but generally yields about a euro per liter, meaning four to six dollars per gallon. So how much does the government really want to reduce car use? Bankruptcy would probably follow if green policies were ever adopted. On the other hand, the city of Paris depends on revenues from parking and driving violations, and they increase as it becomes harder to drive in the city, so the anti-car war the mayor is waging is not only virtuous, it’s profitable.

Curiouser still, city planners have yet to commission studies to determine whether residents in pedestrianized areas are satisfied, and whether, as anecdotal evidence clearly suggests, cobbles lead to gentrification—meaning higher real estate prices, and radical shifts in resident profiles, street-level business, and noise problems. Once a policy has been adopted on high, the man in the street either adapts or moves out. Why are there no statistics showing how the demographics of cobbled neighborhoods shift? It’s hard to get eye-witness reports before and after cobbling, for a simple reason: locals of pre-cobble days disappear.

At the top of Rue Montorgueil near the Sentier Métro station, the date 1991 is spelled out in cobbles. I remember watching the roadworkers laying them down, and wondering what Carrara marble had to do with Paris. Back then Alison and I used a ragtag gym in a tumbledown building off this street. Reportedly it was the oldest gym in Paris. We wagered ourselves how long it would be before the
bobos
showed up. We’ve lived in Paris for decades, in the Marais for more than twenty-five years, and have witnessed the changes cobbles bring.

As I strolled down Rue Montorgueil on a recent visit, heading toward Les Halles, I couldn’t help being impressed by the chain-store bakeries and cafés, designer boutiques and trendy restaurants, not to mention the offices of Web consultants, artists’ studios, and real estate agencies, most on side streets. Never mind that the Carrara marble pavements wouldn’t stick, and have been replaced by classic cobbles.

It was reassuring to find a handful of traditional places—among them the landmark pastry shop at 51 Rue Montorgueil, with a nineteenth-century storefront and painted ceilings, Stohrer. They invented the Baba au Rhum and Puits d’Amour. I always bought sweets here after a workout; the gym was next door. The gym is no longer. A luxury apartment complex has replaced it.

The landmark oyster eatery from the mid-1800s, Au Rocher de Cancale (at number seventy-eight), still has its wonderful murals of birds and boozers, and carved wooden oyster decorations outside. Lounging on sidewalk tables, thirty-somethings half-hidden by cigarette smoke pecked at their laptops, hooked up via WiFi. Indoors a couple of codgers rustled newspapers and looked distinctly out of place.

The totally un-PC façade of Au Beau Noir (number fifty-nine) is still around, and new neighborhood regulars I buttonholed find the establishment’s dry-cleaning services handy. Farther down the road, historic restaurant L’Escargot Montorgueil appears little changed, with its private dining rooms and cozy décor, though most of the snails are imported from eastern Europe nowadays, and the longtime clientele is gone.

For better or worse, the feel of the neighborhood has changed, utterly. As one curmudgeonly butcher told me, Montorgueil has gone from a rough-and-ready “authentic” market street, to a certified
bobo
playground, preferred, it’s claimed, by the
gauche caviar
—the caviar-eating Left, what we would call “latte liberals.” It’s a fact that the Socialist party’s local HQ is on the corner of rues Montorgueil and Léopold Bellan, but, ironically, given the rents, you have to wonder how much longer the Parti Socialiste will be able to afford it. Real estate sells for about $1,000 per square foot in the Montorgueil citadel, up tenfold since pre-cobble days, and $1,400 a month to rent a closet-size studio is typical, among Paris’s highest. There’s no question of chicken or egg. As with Les Halles–Beaubourg–Saint-Denis, the cobbles came first.