Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [187]
The Passage du Havre, located near the Gare Saint-Lazare, is even more honky-tonk, with the three well-stocked boutiques of La Maison du Train its only redeeming features. Little boys of all ages journey there to purchase rolling stock and to obtain spare parts and repairs.
Sadder still are those passages, like the Brady and the Prado, that have been grossly misused and not maintained, their identities swallowed up by neighborhoods grown tacky around them. The Brady was truncated by the cutting of the boulevard de Sébastopol and never really recovered. Today its name is hardly discernible in the broken floor tiles, and holes in the glazing gush rainwater on the merchants of ginger and manioc. The only shop front worth a pause—for the young and brave—is Allô-stop, a unique organization that for a minimal fee introduces would-be hitchhikers to drivers who are bound in the same direction.
But there is hope. With the examples of the Galerie Colbert and the Galerie Vivienne to inspire them, Paris’s architectural watchdogs appear to have persuaded the Assistance Publique, which owns the boarded-up Passage du Grand Cerf, to restore this once lovely, airy passage located near the Forum des Halles. Its glass will be renewed and its aerial walkways under the skylights will again survey healthy commerces. Improvements in its neighbor, the Passage Bourg-l’Abbé, now chiefly devoted to wholesale underwear manufacture, will surely follow, because late-twentieth-century urbanists have awakened to the amenity value of the passage.
But beware! There are passages and passages. Paris’s contemporary property developers have appropriated the name but spurned the extravagance of the glazed roof. However glitzy the boutiques that line the passages and galeries of the Champs-Élysées, they cannot compete with the haunted and haunting charms of the nineteenth-century passages.
The Secret Shops of the Palais Royal
BARBARA WILDE
WHEN I LIVED in Paris as a student, I rarely set food in the Palais Royal. “Too formal, too quiet,” I sniffed, preferring instead the impromptu gatherings of guitar-playing young people in the little park next to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in the Latin Quarter. Returning to Paris over the years, however, I have come to prefer the Palais Royal, and it has earned an unequivocal favorite place in my heart.
I love equally the gardens and the arcades, especially the enormous glass lamps that hang from them, as well as the site-specific outdoor work created by Daniel Buren—black and white striped columns, of varying heights, are arranged in rows in front of a fountain filled with large silver spheres that reflect the surroundings. Les Deux plateaux, more often referred to as “Colonnes de Buren” (Buren’s Columns), met with some resistance when it was mounted, but I think it’s wonderful—the juxtaposition really works, and it’s a great place for picture-taking. In 2007, Buren threatened to dismantle the whole project, claiming that the city had allowed it to deteriorate, but happily, a complete restoration effort began in 2009.
If you did nothing else than stroll the arcades and visit the retail shops within, that would be satisfying enough. The collection of shops in the Palais Royal is superb, utterly unique; there is positively no danger of buying something here that anyone back home will have. I, too, am a big fan of Mary Beyer (32–33 Galerie de Montpensier / marybeyer.com), and in addition to the other shops mentioned here I also recommend stepping into Dugrenot, a very beautiful antiquaire-décorateur founded in 1856 (21–22 Galerie de Montpensier).
BARBARA WILDE, introduced previously, is founder of L’Atelier Vert and writes a Paris Postcard blog, where this piece originally appeared.
FOR ABOUT A month now, I’ve been reading the complete novels of Colette, in French. At around seventeen