Paris - autour de Ménilmontant

The broken spine of the battered L'Indispensable has been taped up, restoring my Paris street plan to service.

It is randomly flicked open to reveal the northern sector of the 20th arrondissement.  An upturned plonk glass (appropriately, a ballon Paris) is plonked down on the page and a circle is drawn where the rim falls.
We start at 10 in the morning but 7 o'clock on the map, emerging from the Métro Gambetta and take the short walk to join the ring.

When a lone shop on a street sells flowers this usually denotes the proximity of a hospital or a cemetery and as this one is at the corner of the Avenue du Père Lachaise we know that the blooms are mainly destined for the dead.
At this cemetery gate we are near the commemorative monuments to foreign troops who gave their lives fighting for France.  This explains
why the inscription here is in Armenian, and it may go some way towards explaining architectural choices that seem outside the Parisian stylebook.
I would like to be more respectful, but I can only see a giant stone lemon-squeezer here.

We set aside morbidity, greet one of the many Père Lachaise cats, and regain the circle proper.  We don't leave commemorative inscriptions behind, however, as we notice, on the pavement, an outdated invitation to attend a pop-up show given by Le Hors Humain, a latter-day Houdini, and street stunt man.  Check him out here.   http://www.pbase.com/rollier/horshumain  I find myself  mentally transported back to the banks of the River Tyne in Newcastle, where, every Sunday morning at the quayside market, my youthful self would witness a life-scarred Irish-American have himself chained and padlocked prior to hurling himself into the then insanitary watery blackness.


Strange happenings abound in this area; giant spermatozoa emerge from the drains and high-tail it into the ventilation systems on the Avenue Gambetta in search of eggs. 

Nor have we left memento mori behind.  Events of 70 years ago resurge from the multitude of such plaques as this one which recalls the resistance activity of Fernande Onimus who gave secret shelter to numerous allied airmen via the Comet Line, an act which, when she was denounced by informers, cost her her life.






Do you sometimes think that contemporary urban street lack colour? 
If so, take yourself to the place Martin Nadaud

where the Lang/Baumann group, who specialise in publicly sponsored art in public places have made us see this neighbourhood differently for a while.

Round the corner, a 19th century  fairy-tale cement villa, seemingly sprouting from a petrified forest is menaced on all sides by amorphous blocks.  These outlying arrondissements of Paris are packed with these curious survivals, reminders that these hilly areas were once a succession of villages haphazardly developed because of the increasing demands of central Paris for raw materials - water, stone (here in the form of gypsum for sculpted façades) or for their strategic position in the era of new-fangled wireless communication.







There are handsome Art Déco piles which have been flexibly adapted to modern urban living while others, less propitious for change of function, seem to be literally dissolving into obscurity...




Ménilmontant and Belleville lay outside the taxation boundary marked by the wall of the Farmers General and therefore attracted impecunious bohemian communities who lived by their wits and their ability to make a living by entertaining others.  The combination of cheap living and the joining-up of villages into suburbs as housing for the emergent working classes encouraged artists to pool their resources as providers of popular entertainment, giving rise to the variety theatres and guingettes of Belleville which eventually stretched up the hill to Télégraphe.  Aristide Bruant, Piaf, Charles Trenet, Maurice Chevalier ....

Belleville has resurged and re-branded; other centres further out have managed to preserve their function as community 'arts' venues with an inviting shabby chic feel, such as La Bellevilloise on the rue Boyer.

Depictions of the area in film (e.g. Jaques Becker's Casque d'or (1952) probably helped to exaggerate the reputation of the area as edgy and violent, particularly after dark.  Today it feels quiet and safe, though this unofficial commemoration of an act of alleged police brutality testifies to currents of socio-political tension.  There are pockets of 'street' counter-culture which this fly-posting reflects.

In any stroll around Paris with an eye for the architecture, always expect the unexpected. Within a hundred metres we can gaze up at a 19th century evocation of flamboyant Gothic, or a giant pile of moderne-styled bricks.  That's how we did public baths in 1930, and now we do it this way:

Two minutes away, we can find ourselves in the quiet cobbled streets of a village enclave (cats, flower pots, mimosa, wisteria) resisting being gobbled up by the mushrooming city appartment blocks.  Around the edge of my circle there are several happy survivals of 'village' Paris, such as the Villa de l'Hermitage, where some cunning writing of covenants restricted building to two storeys and banned all non-residential activity, keeping developers at bay at the cost of constant vigilance.  

In Paris you can be in very different places in a very short time.  Psychogeoraphically, one can be in more than one place at the same time.

At one end of the rue Haxo, for example, we are firmly in bourgeois suburban Paris, playing mental noughts and crosses with our wall of privacy on either side of our 'keep-out' coffered door:

But swing round and our opposite neighbours are hangin' ten in Tahiti

Street configurations often hide the past, which is, as we know, a foreign country. There were boulevards here before Haussmann swung his wrecking ball to build new ones.  Here we are on the boulevard Mortier, on the line of the petite ceinture, where the little steam trains have been replaced by trams.  Trams like wide avenues, and here is one prepared earlier, at the time of the First Empire.  See where the modern houses curve round on the old building line?

This old city-limit ring is psychogeographically detectable, hugging the whole length of the modern Périphérique on the inside.  That would be an interesting stroll ....

Before the recent tramway, there were trains - a circular line (the Chemin de Fer de la Petite Ceinture), which should surely never have been discontinued, chuffed usefully around the entirety of Paris.  Parts of the line were gradually abandoned, others incorporated into the métro and suburban rail network, while other sections remain derelict but extant.  Plans are afoot to re-open some public transport on some sections, with cycle tracks and a 'greenway'.  These people are heading up the plans:  http://www.petiteceinture.org/La-Petite-Ceinture-dans-le-20e.html

There is more to urban strolling than meets the eye, yet what meets the eye has endless fascination.