Why Paris? First of all, because I was born there. I grew up there. In my younger years, I studied there and even stayed on to work for a few years. France in general, and Paris in particular, is a second home (or maybe a first?). I’ve long since lost count of how many visits I’ve made to this city, but in recent years I’ve toured France itself more, renting a car at the airport and heading straight for the red “N” roads and yellow “D” roads. It’s been a long time since my feet touched the pavement of the streets of the “City of Light.”
I decided it was time to close some gaps and start crossing items off my ever-growing list of sights. As a longtime, consistent viewer of culture and tourism shows on French television, I keep a list of special sites, corners and places that nobody visits, that tourists have never heard of, and sometimes even longtime Parisians don’t know.
A Bit of Urban History: Le Paris Haussmannien (Haussmann’s Paris)
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, known as Napoleon III (1808-1873), the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte (the famous one…), was elected as France’s new ruler in the democratic elections held in December 1848, following the “Spring of Nations” that swept across Europe. In one of his first moves, one that would leave its mark for generations, he gave the prefect of the Paris region, Baron Haussmann (Georges-Eugène Haussmann, 1809-1891), free rein to renovate and rebuild entire districts of the capital.
The baron’s extensive works forever changed the face of the city and gave it the look we all recognize today. To keep a uniform appearance for the renewed city, Baron Haussmann set out how the city’s buildings should look: the number of floors, the width of the façade, the windows and the spacing between them, and more. He left architects free rein over all the building’s ornamentation: railings, doors, windows and other decorative details. That’s what makes the streets and buildings of Paris what they are, as we see them today.
For decades, the French (known for being fairly conservative) didn’t dare change anything fundamental about the “City of Light.” The first to break from the lines laid down back in the 19th century was President Georges Pompidou (1911-1974), after whom the cultural center he initiated is named: the “Centre Georges Pompidou,” an innovative and revolutionary project whose construction was marked by long and bitter public battles. After him, the one who continued with large and impressive building projects in the capital was President François Mitterrand (1916-1996), who is credited with impressive cultural projects like the new opera house (Opéra Bastille) and the “Bibliothèque Nationale.” Somehow, the floodgates opened on these building projects, and since the end of the 20th century, Paris hasn’t stopped renewing and changing.
On this visit, the closest I got to the Champs-Élysées or the Arc de Triomphe was in the metro, underground… I completely ignored every sight that appears in the travel guides: the Eiffel Tower, the Opéra (Garnier), the Louvre Museum and many others. I dedicated 10 days to touring and visiting streets, sites and places that even Parisians rarely reach, if ever. Rue Sainte-Marthe? Cité Leroy? Mouzaïa? Who’s heard of them, and a few others like them? This trip was devoted entirely to streets and alleys, to colors and markets, to houses and passages, a small few of which are known but the vast majority are not. There are surely more places and sites out there. I don’t claim to know, or to have visited, all of them.
God
The Council of Bishops of France counted 42,258 Catholic churches of various ranks (cathedrals, chapels, churches and so on) across all of France, as of a count completed on September 12, 2016. There’s some disagreement, depending on how the different types are classified, over how many lie within the city of Paris itself (meaning “inside” the Boulevard Périphérique, which marks the city’s municipal boundary across its 20 arrondissements). Some say 130 churches within Paris, others count 229. Either way, the vast majority of these churches have stood since the Middle Ages, give or take. A fairly small number were built in the 18th or 19th centuries. A small portion were built in the 20th century, as restoration and reconstruction of churches destroyed in World War I and World War II.
A tiny number of churches were built as entirely new churches in the last few decades. Naturally (in my opinion, mistakenly), these aren’t considered tourist sites because of their young age. Traditionally, we only visit a church if it’s already a few hundred years old, has a long “track record,” and has accumulated some heroes and saints, or maybe some relics (“relique”) that are many years old. You can count on one hand the brand-new churches built in just the past few years. For the most part, these are anonymous neighborhood churches that get no publicity, no newspaper coverage, let alone visitors or foreign tourists.
I admit, I came across one such church purely by chance. I was walking down a long street in Paris (Rue de la Roquette), and along the way I “stumbled” upon a church I didn’t recognize. The neighborhood is a residential area for working-class people, the poor, and the local priest managed to convince the church authorities to build one for them in 1930. On a limited budget, a small church was built on the street, simply constructed from the most basic materials. Over the years, the concrete crumbled, the iron frame rusted, and by the 1970s the building had become dangerous for the worshippers crowding inside. The old church was torn down, and a new, modern building was dedicated on the same spot in 1997.
The church, with its modern, clean design, has no ornamentation, no stained-glass windows and no images of saints. The building fits far better with the modern sensibilities of our time, and faithfully reflects (in my estimation, I’m no great expert on religious matters) a free faith, a personal relationship between a person and their God, without the trappings of medieval religion or even those of later centuries. During my visit there, on a weekday morning, I was alone in the building when a young Black priest came out from behind the scenes. When he asked if he could help me, I answered that I was just visiting. His reply can be loosely translated as: “Enjoy yourself” (“Au plaisir. Amusez-vous bien”).
Notre-Dame de l’Espérance (“Our Lady of Hope”)
The Catholic faith, in all its branches and variations, doesn’t particularly favor assigning saints to protect specific places (perhaps out of a belief that God is everywhere), but instead favors holidays and feast days dedicated to each saint. And yet, almost every country in the Christian world has “its own” patron saint watching over it as a whole. There are a few sites and cities in the Christian world that have their own protector saint, unrelated to the saint who protects the whole country. Such is Saint Isidore, the patron saint of Madrid, Spain. Saint Sebastian also watches over and protects the city of that name in southern France, among others. Paris, too, has a saint watching over it: Sainte Geneviève.
During the severe floods of 1910 that caused heavy damage in Paris, the Pont de la Tournelle, the wooden bridge in the east of the city, was destroyed, and for the design of the new bridge, a statue of the city’s patron saint was commissioned from Paul Landowski, a relatively unknown sculptor at the time. Following this statue, he was commissioned to create another work that brought him worldwide fame: the statue of Christ spreading his arms above Rio de Janeiro (“Cristo Redentor”). The statue of Saint Geneviève stands above the bridge, on the riverbank, looking out toward the mouth of the river, blessing all who enter the city. How many people exactly enter Paris by river?! But symbolism has no limits. How many Parisians and tourists know about the statue, standing there? How many of them stop on their daily route to look at it? I don’t have the answers, but I enjoyed looking at the tall, white, striking statue.
Decoration in Stone
As I mentioned at the start of this article (urban history), Baron Haussmann set many regulations, rules and measurements, but he left the architects free to decorate their creations. And decorate they did… It’s well known that in Paris you have to look up at the walls of the buildings, especially on the “older” streets, the ones built and designed in the 19th century. And although the buildings resemble one another, they’re not actually identical. On many buildings you can spot decorative architectural details, “ornaments,” if you like, that you’d never find on a modern building. Mask-like heads in various shapes, curtains that “spill” around windows and balconies, delicate curves like a woman’s body, unique supporting columns, large and small sculptures built right into the walls, all shaped by the good imagination of the stonecutters (“tailleur de pierre”) and architects.
But Paris isn’t just Haussmann, isn’t just the 19th century, and as they say, the world doesn’t stop (“On n’arrête pas le progrès”), and new buildings keep going up in Paris. Across the spectrum, from the exposed-concrete industrial architecture (Le Corbusier) of the mid-20th century to the steel and glass towers of “La Défense,” there are some real gems too (someone, please check whether Baron Haussmann is turning in his grave…).
And One More Small Story About Buildings in Paris
Rue Volta is a narrow street in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris, not far from Place de la République, named after the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), inventor of the electric battery. Number 3 on the street was built the way houses used to be: a mixture of mortar, plaster, straw and gravel (“torchis”), with wooden beams running through the walls, a look typical of other regions (Alsace, Normandy and so on) but quite unusual for Paris. Like a few other “islands” within the city, this building slipped past Baron Haussmann’s reach. For decades, many believed this house was built at the end of the 12th century, which made it the oldest house in the city and a tourist site in its own right. It was even listed among the historic sites of Paris. In 1979, documents were discovered in the archives proving that the house had actually been built by a wealthy merchant “only” in 1644 (the 17th century), as a copy of the neighboring building, which no longer exists. The title of the oldest house in the city then moved to a different address (Auberge Nicolas Flamel, 51 Rue de Montmorency).
America, Mouzaïa
Few people know it, but in the 19th arrondissement, in the northeast of Paris, there’s a neighborhood called “America” (“Quartier d’Amérique”), whose name is rooted in an urban legend. Back when this area was still outside the city, blocks of gypsum stone were quarried here for building Paris’s houses. The gypsum gleamed white, and legend has it that the whitest blocks were shipped at the end of the 17th century to America to help build the “White House” in Washington, completed in 1800, a building that has its own, different urban legend: that it was painted white to hide damage caused by a major fire in Washington.
Originally it was called the “President’s House,” and the name “White House” was given to it by the public, first in 1811, simply because it was… white. When the quarries north of Paris closed, as the city expanded in the 19th century, some of them became a large green park (Parc de la Butte-Chaumont, a story for another day). The unstable ground prevented tall construction, and so, by the end of the 19th century, this neighborhood remained lined with about 250 low, private houses along small dead-end alleys, laid out in a herringbone pattern around the main street, Rue de la Mouzaïa, named after a region in Algeria where harsh battles were fought between the French army and Berber tribes (1830).
Have you ever wandered through the small villages of Tuscany, Provence or Andalusia? Cobblestone alleys, greenery everywhere, hedges and small steps leading to a wooden door covered in cracked paint, with a rusty metal ornament around a huge keyhole… A plump cat lies on a white wooden chair, its tail tucked beneath it, its head resting on its front paws, its eyes fixed on the birds chirping around it, among green branches heavy with colorful flowers. The residents of this area, most of them quite elderly, don’t give up their neighborhood despite the difficulties and the work involved in maintaining old buildings. Houses where the next generation has already moved in are getting renovated and updated for the 21st century (intercoms, electric shutters, underground parking and more), but even these residents recognize the value of the property, and not just its emotional, family value, so they don’t easily give up living in the area. It’s hard to believe we’re in a big city, just a few hundred meters from bustling international tourist and commercial hubs.
A Garden in the City
Villa de l’Adour
This is a small, dead-end alley in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. The alley is blocked at its far end by a brick wall, while its entrance is a barred metal gate, and it’s defined as a “private way” (“voie privée”) reserved for its residents only. The alley opened in 1817 under the name “Villa Barthélémy,” and was renamed to its current name, after a river in southern France, in 1877. There are 19 houses along the alley, and because it’s defined as a private alley, the city has no authority over the area.
When extensive renovation and restoration work was carried out in the 1970s in the Belleville district, which until then had been a neglected, poor neighborhood of workers and struggling immigrants, the residents fought against any interference with their private space. Villa de l’Adour, 104 meters long and 2.50 meters wide, remained exactly as it was, left to the care of its 19 residents, who worked wonders. The small alley is lined with trees, potted plants, roses, flower beds and well-kept white houses on both sides of the stone-paved lane, with a rainwater drainage channel running down the middle, just like the old days… At number 3 in the alley, there used to be an industrial laundry pool, which has since been converted into a residential home, though the chimney still rising above the building hints at its past.
Laundry Pool: Lavoir
An enclosed pool used by the residents of a neighborhood, or village, for washing laundry by hand in the era before washing machines.
Cité Leroy
Hard to believe, but just 2 meters behind me, the photographer, is Rue des Pyrénées, one of the busiest streets in the 20th arrondissement. The area, the Belleville neighborhood, was in the 19th century a large village pressed right up against the city wall, outside it. Baron Haussmann’s major works never reached this part of the city, far from the center and somewhat problematic in terms of ground conditions, which don’t allow for new development and construction.
This dead-end alley, 4 meters wide and 60 meters long, opened here in 1869 and is defined as a “private way,” reserved for its residents only. Right next to it is another alley, also “private”: Villa de l’Ermitage. In 1992, the city of Paris announced a tender to build a multi-story residential building here. Residents of the district, not just of the alley itself, organized against the project, and the city changed the plan in 2000 to propose a wider, lower building, given the soft ground that doesn’t allow for tall construction.
This project, too, was rejected by the residents, with unexpected help from the district’s local council, which came out against the city of Paris. After more than 10 years of public struggle that spread far beyond the district’s boundaries, a compromise was reached: the alley would stay, and the land would become a shared green garden for the benefit of the neighborhood’s residents, “A Garden in the City” (“Jardin en Ville”), where local residents grow their own flowers and vegetables for personal use. 60 meters of small houses, a tiny village in a big city, a memory of a Paris that has vanished.
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