Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [159]
Mallification 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 seventies and eighties, 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 eighties and nineties 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 télescopiques—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 20 × 14 × 14 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,