No matter how many times you visit a city—or no matter how long you explore your own—there’s always more, a lot more, to be found. I’ve visited Paris fairly often over the years, visiting ‘sights’ and museums, but also spending hours just walking the streets, noticing, feeling, wondering and questioning—but ignoring large areas of the city.
A year or so ago, when I was researching Art Nouveau in Paris, I found myself in arrondissements I was less familiar with: some a bit more upper-crust, some further west than my usual haunts. So, one of my visits this year, I devoted a good bit of my time to rambling in new-to-me environs, taking a look rather than passing through.
Armed with some excellent neighborhood guides from the official city tourism site, Paris je t’Aime, I set off for a couple of days wandering in the 13e and 14e arrondissements. I suppose you could call them part of the Left Bank, but they abut the city’s southern border and are quite a way from the ‘bank.’
My starting point was the state-owned centuries-old Manufacture des Gobelins, source of tapestries for French kings, presidents, emperors, churches and government buildings. The operation is 500 or so years old, but the building you see dates to 1912, a time when the area was growing, and was as much industrial as residential. Much of the area only became part of the city in the 1860s.
Around the corner is the Chateau de la Reine Blanche, or Palace of the White Queen, named for Margaret of Provence, widow of King Louis IX. Like Queen Victoria she wore mourning clothes the rest of her life, but they were white, not black. She had it built in 1290; 300 years later it was demolished and replace by this building, which served as home and workshop to the Gobelin family.
It was a good location for the Gobelin’s dye works—they could simply dump any waste into the Bievre river, covered over early in the last century and replaced by the curving Rue Berbier de Mets, above. The park across the street, Square René-Le Gall, occupied an island in the river, and was used as open space by nearby workers.
It’s been expanded bit by bit into a quite pleasant and sizeable park, with playgrounds as well as green spaces. For the tall apartment buildings which have grown on its edge in recent decades, it’s a remarkable amenity.
An impressive public school on the park’s corner was in summer recess. It bears one of the many sad reminders of other times, during the German occupation, when Jewish children from Paris schools were rounded up for deportation and death. In recent years, the plaques have also noted the active participation of the Vichy government.
Stepping away to head to one of the more picturesque parts of the area, the Butte-aux-Cailles neighborhood, I passed a mélange of recent-build apartment houses with quirky smaller buildings of different styles, crossed under the elevated Metro structure, and joined a crowd buying snacks, meals and produce at an outdoor market.
But, a ‘butte’ implies high ground, and my path confirmed it; I took the picture of the stairs after I climbed them, and before I realized that I could have taken a more circuitous but less steep path. At the top, a park and playground named for the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï, who lived in the area.
Leaving the park, I found myself at the beginning of a long stretch of streets and walls decorated with many kinds of art in many styles (more on that HERE)
Arriving at the Rue de Butte-aux-Cailles, I found reminders that the neighborhood was once a village of tanners and dyers. On the near corner, a bistro called Les Tanneurs de la Butte, on another the Tavern des Tanneurs and finally Barbecue de la Butte. You won’t starve on that corner!
And I didn’t: all that, including the beer, for just under €10.
Getting running water to homes and businesses at the top of the hill wasn’t always easy, and in the 1850s, drilling started for a deep well to provide water as well as to provide a stronger flow downhill to flush the Bievre. The work stopped in 1872, and wasn’t resumed and finished until 20 or so years later, by which time the Bievre was being covered over and pumped water had reached the Butte. But the well didn’t go to waste: it provides the water for this 1924 Art Deco public bath and swimming pool.
Not far away is another reminder of war—a plaque commemorating an explosion in a hand grenade factory that killed 46 and wounded many others in 1915. The flowers were fresh in August, and marked as coming from the Mayor of Paris.
More examples of the variety of architecture in the neighborhood; in some cases the multiple styles are contemporaries.
The ‘Street of Two Avenues’ is only a short block long, connecting Avenue d’Italie to Avenue de Choisy. It’s a privately-owned passage that was originally called Passage de Saint-Hippolyte. Since 1981, it’s open to pedestrians but still privately-owned.
Approaching Place d’Italie, and passing one of Paris’s iconic Morris columns and a Hector-Guimard-designed Metro entrance hardly prepared me for the shock around the corner. A giant shopping center complete with an Ikea store!
Time to turn back the other way… definitely, even if it means the rest of the stroll encountered a half-block of faux-Bavarian villas and a church with a puzzling name. A little research told me that Antoinism is sort of a century-too-early New Age religious movement that combines bits of Catholicism, spiritualism, reincarnation and healing. It’s been around since 1910.
And so, another ramble through Paris, another new experience… and a plan for another visit to another part of the city. Of course.
