I’ve
always lived on the Left Bank.
Other than an apartment in the Marais during my first visit to Paris when I was
fifteen, I’ve always been a left-dweller. I lived in the friendly fourteenth
during a semester of study abroad in 2012 and now I’ve switched to its swankier
sister to the north, the sixth, in a decidedly un-swanky studio above the
Jardin de l’Observatoire. When I’m away from the city, my heart warms at the
mention of places like Saint-Michel, the Luxembourg Gardens and Montparnasse.
It’s here where I feel a semblance of belonging, where non-Parisians mistake me
for a local, asking for directions to the boulevard Saint-Germain in timid
French, where I can’t help but smile—even when my feet are sopping wet from the
constant rain—and where I come out of the Port-Royal station feeling exactly as
I do when I get out of my car in my garage in Minnesota. Home.
So what about the Right Bank, where the other million or so Parisians live?
Where do they feel at home? By following the arc of the métro’s line two that
cuts through the heart of the right side from west to east, I’m setting out to
catch a coup d’œil of my northern neighbors in the places that make them
feel at home.
On sunny,
cloudless days like today in Paris, il faut profiter du soleil. The sun
is hard to come by in Paris’s fall and winter months and any occasion to
conveniently forget my beat-up umbrella is reason enough to go on a small-scale
adventure. At Raspail, I study the stops listed on the wall. I’m at the center
of line six, equal distance from either end of line two. Eeny, meeny,
miny…moe. I squeeze onto the train and head west for Porte Dauphine.
THE
EDGE OF THE WORLD
Porte
Dauphine, 2:23 P.M.
 |
| An empty bench sits along the avenue Foch |
“Bonjour, madame,” One woman says, greeting
another with a smile and kisses on the cheek. I follow them up the concrete
steps, heading for the second sortie which will take me out to the
avenue Foch. The métro station is empty this Wednesday afternoon, save for a
few well-coiffed, white-haired women keeping pace with children, presumably
grandchildren. It’s fitting that the first thing I hear is politeness, for here
in the sixteenth arrondissement, my impression has always been that order and
refinement reign supreme in one of Paris’s upper-class haunts.
For a long time, the sixteenth has remained for me
a piece of the Parisian mystery that I haven’t had much desire to investigate.
Coupled with the seventeenth, I’ve somehow managed to avoid dipping my toes
into the west of Paris much at all, except for visits along its outskirts to
the Palais de Chaillot terrace at Trocadéro for photos of the Eiffel Tower and
a sprint to catch a Beauvais Airport shuttle at Porte Maillot.
Perhaps my disinterest stems from its reputation as
a place full of money—even saying la seizième carries that
connotation—signifying a lack of general joie de vivre. The district is
fourth in terms of average household income, after the eighth, seventh and
sixth. I’ve clung to the idea and heard myself repeating that the sixteenth is
“new money” and just across the Seine is “old money” in the seventh, a sort of
West and East Egg for the Paris crowd.
One night recently, atop the
nearby Arc de Triomphe, I braved some unpleasantly harsh winds and took in the
city’s panorama through watering eyes. This is the City of Light, they say, but
the lights themselves cast subtle, soft yellows on the architecture, making
Paris glow discreetly—quite different from the retina-burning quality of places
like New York’s Times Square. Through the pink, light-polluted vista, I peered
southwest at a long, tree-lined boulevard with few lights dotting the
blackness, contrasting with the red and white stripes of the traffic flowing
down the Champs-Élysées. I took note of how peculiarly empty and quiet it
looked, emanating out from the star of traffic towards the darkness of the Bois
de Boulogne. The panoramic map told me it was the avenue Foch.
Emerging out of the Art Nouveau métro exit onto the
avenue—Paris’s widest—it feels brighter than most of the city during the
daytime. The chestnut trees lining the avenue are tucked closely to the
buildings, leaving broad expanses of gravel sidewalks out in the sunlight. It’s
a desert for tourists, and really anyone, for that matter. The avenue lists
some of the most expensive real estate in the world, home to mansions and
palaces of wealthy international families.
I go west to the Place du Maréchal de Lattre de
Tassigny—an easy enough name to remember—and cross the boulevard Périphérique,
the major ring-road that separates Paris proper from its suburbs, to enter the
Bois de Boulogne. I dart dangerously across each road, always with the thought
that one surprise car could be my end. The noise of the freeway, the
frost-kissed grass, the skyscrapers of the business district La Défense looming
over the trees in the hazy distance and the sidewalk giving way to a dirt path
peppered with dead leaves give me a sudden pang of nostalgic familiarity. Even
the children playing soccer next to the highway remind me of my childhood years
before I realize that there are no girls playing and that they’re playing le
football. No, I remind myself, this isn’t West River Parkway in
Minneapolis. I pass a docking station with neat rows of public bikes with
their handlebars turned to the right, a man to my left urinating out of his
white delivery truck and I stand, watching clusters of smiling, retired men
tossing heavy silver balls during a game of pétanque. While this is the
edge of Paris—the edge of the world, it seems—this is still as Paris as Paris
can be.
COMPATRIOTS AND EXPATRIATES
Charles de Gaulle-Étoile, 2:54 P.M.
 |
| A tourist poses for a photo in front of the Arc de Triomphe |
My eyes flick over the yellowed wall tiles as the
escalator pulls me up from the platform at Charles de Gaulle-Étoile. Are the
tiles intentionally yellow or is the sickly scent of urine clouding my
judgment? These are the types of things I wonder about on public transportation.
The station has both a Bonne Journée chain bakery and a Souvenirs de Paris
shop, two tip-offs that I’ve entered a tourist-catering zone. With my camera
strap around my neck and a notepad in my hand, I blend in with the passersby,
speeding between lines one, two and six, the RER A and the exits. You’re more
likely to find a group of tourists at the turnstiles, unsure of how to insert
their tickets and blocking the flow of passengers than to find Parisians
swiping their Navigo passes and disappearing out of sight.
Charles de Gaulle-Étoile, located at what was once
the Place de l’Étoile and is now the Place Charles de Gaulle (named after the
former general and president of France) brings me to perhaps the most
strikingly evident spot of globalization in all of Paris—and arguably the
furthest from the local culture—the Champs-Élysées. With origins dating back to
the seventeenth century, it has been long revered as “the most beautiful avenue
in the world.” Even today, it remains an aesthetically beautiful place—for
tourists to flock to for photo opportunities and shop at internationally
recognizable luxury and commercial brands. What was once a grandiose symbol of
Paris and a favorite strolling spot with the locals with its ten lanes of
traffic, pruned, rectangular chestnut trees and its vista of the Place de la
Concorde and the Louvre, the avenue now bears the footprints of a commodified
promenade of foreign visitors.
Standing at the edge of the eight-lane traffic
circle around the Arc de Triomphe, I’m more of a compatriot than I am an
expatriate. The photo-snapping crowd speaks more English—specifically
American-accented English—than anything else I can hear. The coupling of
English and the conglomeration of shops equates to little more than a
Gallicized version of the Mall of America, my hometown landmark of over-the-top
materialism. I bear virtually no self-consciousness as I join my fellow
countrymen in the excitement of taking photos of the famous neoclassical
Napoléon-commissioned arch.
I’m also targeted by young girls who pretend to be
deaf and mute, hoping I’ll sign their petition and donate money—or distract me
enough to rifle through my bag. “Non,” I say sharply before walking
away. I’m confronted three more times, with the volume of my voice raising each
time. I lean up against a fence and watch them walk by, speaking amongst
themselves.
This is the reality of the Champs-Élysées today;
visitors fly in from faraway countries to shop at familiar megastores, order
their meals from pricy English language menus, get a few snapshots of the area,
donate money to scam artists and then duck back down into the métro. The French
are few and far between, and perhaps for good reason.
These are not the paradisaical Elysian Fields that they once were. Pas du tout.
GOLDEN
GATES
Monceau,
3:17 P.M.
 |
| Men stand near the gilded gate and rotunda of Parc Monceau |
The train is noticeably fuller than it was six stops ago. As we travel east,
I assume the influx of passengers is headed for the station Anvers to get off
in Montmartre. “Monceau,” the recorded woman’s voice says over the loudspeaker,
phrasing it like a question. “Monceau,” She confirms. I’m getting off in the
eighth arrondissement.
The sun
is lowering in the sky, cutting dramatic shadows through the thick haze. I pass
under the sumptuous, gilded gate of Parc Monceau and past the rotunda, small by
French standards. On the rare occasion that I think of Monceau, I think in
gold. Maybe it’s the golden sunlight touching the buildings, the golden fences
surrounding the park or even the apparent wealth that permeates the area.
Perhaps telling of the eighth’s privilege, the few residences located on the
park have twenty-four hour access, despite its closing at sundown for
non-residents.
Upon entering the park, I
take a left, passing green benches of teenagers and twenty-somethings flicking through
their iPhones. I meet faux Corinthian columns surrounding a small pond where
seagulls squawk angrily after one another. A few children go giggling by on
scooters, trailed by their smartly dressed mothers. Windows of stately façades
peer over the treetops like a neighbor’s eyes over a fence. Large stretches of
green grass are empty, forbidden to walkers—something I may never get used to
about this city—and the landscape is swathed in golden light despite being only
just past three. Strollers in the park are reduced to silhouettes against the
lowering afternoon sun, but its cinematic quality gets lost in my photos.
I climb a
short bridge over a stream and take in the view of the whole park. Parc Monceau
was planned in 1769 by Philippe d'Orléans, Duke of Chartres who wanted to
create a public park in an Anglo-Chinese style that would surprise and amuse
visitors, as the park contains various follies, such as an Egyptian pyramid and
a Dutch windmill.[3] The park was revamped during Baron Haussmann’s
transformation of Paris in the 1860s and has changed little since.
As I leave, camera still firmly around my neck for
the occasional photo, I write illegible notes because the cold is slowing the
muscles in my fingers. A group of older gentlemen cluster around the rotunda,
laughing. I think they see me take their picture. Monceau is like a private
party that I’ve snuck into and I know that I’m being watched. I follow a man
with a Dalmatian out and down into the métro, slipping out.
THE PARTY CONTINUES
Pigalle,
3:37 P.M.
 |
| Sex shops line the boulevard de Clichy |
“Excusez-moi, madame,” an African man in traditional attire
passing out fliers prompts me at the top of the stairs. I shake my head,
turning around him as I take in my first breaths of Pigalle: weed. I’ve been
here many times before, but I look around me. I mean, really look. Five
stops northeast from Monceau, the air is casual here, louder and less
occupied with self-importance. Maybe it’s the weed.
Gone are the grandmothers of Place Dauphine, the
tourists of Étoile and the privileged scooter children of Monceau. On the
boulevard de Clichy, each person who passes by is a character: a
twenty-something man with a sandy-colored beard and a guitar case slung over
his back, another man shoving the last bite of a Quick burger into his mouth,
girls with ripped tights laughing their way out of the métro station. Workers
converse mid-street and a group of RATP Sureté men cluster, flicking their
cigarette ashes onto the street corner. People stare curiously as I take
pictures.
The curling architectural details and fanciful
boulangeries I’ve grown accustomed to and come to expect this afternoon have
been mostly replaced with crumbling corners, simple windows and kebab shops. As
a sort of answer to Amsterdam’s red light district, Pigalle has long been known
for its sex. This stretch of the boulevard de Clichy heading west to Place
Blanche is ripe with sex museums, sex emporiums, sex shows, strip clubs and
nightclubs, a few of which bear the imaginative names of “Sexodrome,” “Lady’s”
and “Pussy’s.”
During the day, these places are fatigued, resting
for their nightly adventures. The area is virtually void of visitors at this
time of day and perhaps only an adventurous few have come down from the
Sacré-Cœur to make a quick stop down the street to the Moulin Rouge cabaret, where
they are mildly disappointed—like I was at fifteen—that it doesn’t quite have
the look or charm as the studio set from the Baz Luhrmann film and that it
costs a pretty penny to see an actual show. When the sun goes down, the area is
a blur of neon light. There are Irish pubs, grocery stores and fast food joints
sandwiched between sex shops and clubs, and families with strollers walking
through crowds of Pigalle patrons.
I stand for a while, watching the comings and
goings of the customers of the kebab shop across the street. People talk loudly
around cars in the middle of the road unapologetically, and the energy is
picking up. For as long as Pigalle has been Pigalle—the quartier that
entertained artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso—the party continues. The
sun lowers and people are on the move. Pigalle is beginning to wake up.
THE STREET
IS OURS
Barbès-Rochechouart,
4:14 P.M.
 |
| The busy platform at Barbès-Rochechouart |
Line two is packed. It’s full of the Montmartre crowd, tourists and bobos
(Paris’s hipsters) alike, aiming to transfer to line four, which
will take them back to the city center and the comfort of famous sites. The
train ascends like a rollercoaster up the tracks, where it will be elevated
above-ground for four stops. The brakes stop us suddenly more than once
and people who weren’t holding on scream and topple into other passengers. We
stop once more, intentionally, for our arrival at Barbès-Rochechouart. I slip
my camera away into my bag.
This is
the place I’ve been (perhaps unfairly) warned about when I’ve asked locals
which areas to avoid in Paris in order to stay safe. Most expats I know have
never heard of the place and the ones who have have told me stories such as
being pickpocketed at the massive Tati store that takes up several blocks just
outside the station. After living for four years in downtown Minneapolis, I can
tell it’s a similar story for Barbès: People who spend the least amount of time
in a place will be the strongest advocates for avoiding it altogether. In
Cedar-Riverside, my former multi-ethnic neighborhood and home to the largest
refugee and immigrant Somali population outside of Somalia, I’d receive
concerned looks when I told people where I lived and went to school. I’d
inevitably receive an earful on perhaps the epicenter of fear, a 1970s
apartment complex, once inhabited by Mary Tyler Moore and now respectfully
nicknamed “the Crack Stacks.” In sum, immigrant neighborhoods are to be
avoided. Or something like that.
This is
my second time at Barbès. I once came here to deliver a package while I was working
as an intern at a tourist agency about two years ago. I had gone straight to
the side-street hotel, handed over the envelope of Eiffel Tower tickets and
Paris maps for the arriving tourist group to the concierge and I was on my way
back to the office near Bastille. Subsequent glimpses had been from the window
of a line four train, staring down into the masses of people below.
I pause for a moment on the platform, letting the
passengers pass while considering a photo of the enormous Tati store and its
neon “Les plus bas prix” (“The lowest prices”) sign against the backdrop of the
white domes of the Sacré-Cœur. I’m at a perfect vantage point. As soon as I put
my fingers on the zipper of my bag, I’m approached by a man and have attracted
the eyes of several other observers. I forget the picture and walk down the
steps.
Halfway
to the ground level, police officers have stopped two young men, one North
African and the other black. The four of them are standing as if waiting for
something and I continue down the steps. One man nearly bowls me over as he
briskly sifts through a stack of euro bills. I look for an out-of-the-way spot
to stand on the trash-littered street, but everywhere is taken. Men swarm,
resting against every available pole and I wonder what they’re doing. They’re
not talking much to one another or smoking, but just standing there. I pass by
and several of them turn their heads toward me and smile, one uttering “Bonjour,
mademoiselle.” I continue east on the boulevard Barbès, passing wedding
dress shops and cell phone stores with handwritten signs.
As a piece of a larger quartier called the Goutte
d’Or, Barbès’s cosmopolitan spirit is a result of its growing population of
people of foreign origins. The eighteenth arrondissement counts over a quarter
of its total population as of immigrant origin, compared to about nine percent
for the total population of Paris.[4] Most of the immigrant population is from
North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. I look up at the Haussmann buildings that
look little different than in other quartiers. The buildings are occupied by
members of the middle class—not necessarily the shopkeepers who own the ground
floor businesses—who have seized the opportunity to live within the notoriously
expensive bounds of the city, which is quickly being wiped over by
gentrification.
[5]
Everyone
seems to have a plaid pink plastic bag with navy blue lettering in their hands.
These bags come from Tati, the capital of low prices in Paris and have come to
symbolize Barbès, the neighborhood in which Tati was born in 1949. Until the
1940s, Barbès relied on dense, traditional commercial activity and saw a far
smaller influx of shoppers and visitors than its line two neighbor, Anvers. Jules
Ouaki, an entrepreneur from Tunisia, saw this as an opportunity to attract more
people to this “working-class and miserable” quartier, and opened the very
first Tati.
[6]
Since then, Barbès and Tati have become inseparable; you can hardly speak
about one without the other. Parisians in search of the lowest prices have made
the area in and around Tati into a sort of marketplace of frenetic
deal-searching. In fact, a real marketplace takes place on Wednesday and
Saturday mornings underneath the elevated train tracks.
I’m back on the platform, groaning along with
everyone else as a train pulls in but doesn’t stop. The platform is
wall-to-wall people and a man behind me lights up a cigarette just behind my
ear while we wait. There’s more talking here than I’ve ever seen in the métro
and I can’t help but look around at all the different people. Once on the train
I’m jammed against the door. The sunset casts orange light over the scene as we
pass over the Gare du Nord train tracks.
This is not the Paris I know, but it’s a Paris home
to a rich, cross-cultural humanity at the heart of the city’s future. This is a
facet of Paris's reality that faces the tensions that accompany assimilation,
integration and racial profiling and is quickly changing what it means to be a
Parisian. La rue est à
nous, a Tati marketing
slogan once proclaimed. The street is ours.
PEOPLE
ARE STRANGE
Père-Lachaise,
4:08 P.M.
 |
| A couple strolls through the cemetery |
“DOCTEUR EN MÉDECINE,” one
gravestone reads. Three words to summarize a person’s seventy years of
life is shockingly strange, but not unexpected in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.
Occupying 110 acres in the twentieth arrondissement, Père-Lachaise, along with
the Paris Catacombs, has become an unusual and macabre tourist destination
where the remains of millions of Parisians are interred.
I’m back on line two on a Saturday afternoon.
I exit the Père-Lachaise station, cross the boulevard de Ménilmontant and enter
through the cemetery’s side entrance in the unmarked stone perimeter wall
blocking the dead from the living. My eyes are immediately drowned in a sea of
tombs rising up the hill and my ears adjust to the sudden respite from the
sound of traffic out on the boulevard. For a few euros, you can buy a map
detailing the most famous graves, like Édith Piaf, Oscar Wilde and Jim
Morrison, which have bizarrely become regular fixtures in Paris guidebooks.
The cobbled streets are slick with
moisture from the heavy mist. The sky is darkening and people are few and far
between, making for a distinctly spectral atmosphere. Birds are chirping
quietly and a boy jumps out from behind a crumbling tomb, scaring his little
brother. Couples walk hand in hand, stopping occasionally to look out over the
city as they climb higher and higher. From the cemetery’s heights, this is
where Eugène de Rastignac declares “It’s between you and me now!” to Paris at
the end of Le Père Goriot, Balzac’s 1835 masterpiece. Instead of
vengeance proclamations, the top of the cemetery has a lovely vantage point where
you can take a seat on a bench and look out to the south and west and see the
Tour Montparnasse and the Eiffel Tower on the horizon.
Père-Lachaise is a library of sorts, documenting
Paris’s history by the deaths of its people (In order to be buried in the
cemetery, the deceased must have either died in Paris or lived in Paris). I
study long-forgotten graves left deteriorating and rotting and enjoy the
refreshing quietness. This is the perfect place to wander and imagine the
stories behind the people buried below who will never know their bodies are now
part of a collective site for tourists and Parisians alike.
A group of French speakers go by, including a woman
clacking a green rolling suitcase behind her over the cobblestones. I wonder
why in the world she chose to cut through the cemetery with her luggage. The
cemetery is closing, so I walk with her and the other stragglers out to the
exit. In the last dregs of sunlight, a man with a wild crop of hair, orange
pants and a purple shirt zips by, shouting the lyrics to Madonna’s “Like a
Prayer.” At Père-Lachaise, as in all of Paris, the unusual prevails.
ALIVE AND
WELL
Nation,
5:11 P.M.
 |
| The columns and traffic at Place de la Nation |
A Cherry Coke can rolls noisily out from under a seat as the train slows to
a stop at Philippe Auguste. The moderate flow of passengers allows me to have a
seat near the window, thankfully. It’s a relief to have space on the train. We
pass the next stop, Alexandre Dumas, and I remember my friends who used to live
on the rue de Charonne and making middle of the night runs for a hot pain au
chocolat or two from its miraculous twenty-four-hour boulangerie. The
eleventh arrondissement is one of the few parts of the rive droite
to which I feel a strong connection. I was a terrified twenty-year-old intern
at a travel agency on the rue Amelot, I was an accidental pigeon-feeder just
across the bounds of the fourth in the Place des Vosges and I was an explorer
of bars, clubs, cafés, restaurants, parks and opera in the slightly edgy,
slightly grimy bobo haven.
But I never went to Nation. How many times had I found myself
underground, switching from the two to the six, the one to the nine underneath
Place de la Nation? The can rolls once more to a stop, signaling that we’ve
made it to the end of the line—or the start of the line—and my last stop on
this trip through Paris’s Right Bank.
I emerge from the confines of the underground out onto
Place de la Nation, half in the eleventh and half in the twelfth. It’s eerily
similar to the Place Charles de Gaulle, echoing the twelve-boulevard traffic
circle and staunch reminders of the power of the French state. At the center is
a bronze sculpture, Le Triomphe de la République: Marianne, the
traditional personification of France, stands facing Bastille in a chariot
being pulled by lions and is surrounded by further symbolism of the nation’s
strength. Formerly the Place du Trône, it was once the site of mass executions
by guillotine during the French Revolution and was renamed as the Place
de la Nation in 1880.[7]
Where I found myself in good company taking photos
of the Arc de Triomphe, I now find myself solo, stared at by people waiting for
buses as I photograph the Doric columns that bookend the eastern end of the
plaza. People cut in front of me to head towards businesses—French businesses,
this time—I can see, like Darty and Printemps and buses roar by every few
minutes. A man sits on a bench smoking both a pipe and a cigarette
simultaneously. Night has fallen and the familiar frenetic French energy that
was lost on the Champs-Élysées and subdued in the cemetery is alive and well
once again.
*
It’s time for me to journey back to the Left Bank.
I take a seat on line one next to a mother and her son and daughter. The girl,
with blonde pigtails and messy lavender eye shadow and probably no more than
six years old, curiously looks me up and down. She wordlessly knows that I’m
not from here and certainly not from Paris. She’s right, I’m a temporary
dweller and discoverer of Paris who’s found comfort on the Left and a newfound
curiosity for the Right. Maybe someday I’ll hop the Seine, move in and have a
different response to the question Which bank do you prefer?
But for now, I just smile at her and give up my
seat, heading for home.
____________________________
