Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [161]
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. 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 PS will be able to afford it. Real estate sells for 7,500 euros per square meter in the Montorgueil citadel, up tenfold since pre-cobble days, and a thousand euros 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.
Closer to home, I toured the Marais’s newest pocket-size pedestrianized areas, my eyes on the peacocks’ tails and Whitman’s Samplers of cobblestones, not to mention the dalles and dallettes. Most of the Marais was gentrified in the 1980s and ’90s without the help of cobbleification—exception made for streets and squares like Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine. But it took the recent repaving and semi-pedestrianization of the old Jewish neighborhood on and around rue des Rosiers, and on rue Saint-Antoine, to complete the process. The boutiques stand cheek by jowl and real estate prices have spiraled up, apparently unaffected by the Great Recession of 2008–10. So far, some longtime residents have held on, anchored by religion, family, and culture. More walkers and bikers than ever crowd in, yet complaints about increased noise are few: the street has always been chaotic.
After months of jackhammering and snarled traffic, another semi-pedestrianized zone was born in 2008 on rue Saint-Antoine, fronting Saint-Paul. If Yann Le Toumelin is right, rues des Rosiers and Saint-Antoine are the way of the future. They’re part of Réseau Vert. Instead of a citadel with piston bollards—which often malfunction, damaging vehicles—other means will be used. They include easy and cheap traffic signals, 15 kph signage, cobbles, and traffic cops to bar the unauthorized. Sidewalks have been widened and lowered, and the poles that keep cars at bay—but hinder strolling—have been removed. No parking is allowed—in theory. Civic sense is key and plainly doesn’t always work. The Saint-Paul experiment and the Réseau Vert in general often feel like war zones, with frustrated drivers facing outraged bikers and pedestrians. Perhaps war is part of the process.
New-generation cobbled areas can only work in tandem with car-hostile roads flanking them, and bikes are essential. The Vélib rental scheme—in which riders pick up and drop off bikes at dozens of parking areas—is astonishingly popular, peaking at over one hundred thousand users a day. With armies of walkers and bikers, drivers will have to yield—or so the theory goes. War? Aux barricades, camarades!
Cobbled, semi-pedestrianized areas continue to crop up around town, from rue Cler in the seventh arrondissement to rue de la Forge-Royale in the eleventh and rue Cavallotti in the eighteenth. If—a big “if”—it is fully implemented, the Réseau Vert roadway network will link these green islands. Much depends on who sits in the mayor’s office. Another irony is, were the whole of Paris to be de-Haussmannized as Mayor Delanoë plans, the first generation of pedestrian citadels might morph back toward normality. They would be absorbed into a saner, gentler, less car-clogged cityscape. No one expects real estate prices to go down within them, or bobos to move out. Once the old-timers have left, they do not return. Meanwhile, investors are watching to see where the cobbles—and bike lanes—are headed next.
Perfection Squared
ANDRÉ ACIMAN
LIKE THE AUTHOR, I, too, think the Place des Vosges may be the world’s most