Les secrets de la Ville de Lumiere

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org

One of the most interesting things about this trip was getting to see the different layers of Paris. The catacombs themselves had some layers - often there were two different levels above each other, with manholes, stairs, and ladders further adding a three-dimensional element of height and depth. But visiting the catacombs also exposed us to the layers of Paris as a whole. Here’s a few examples.

Our Hotel: View from street level, view of our second-floor room (that’s the cata map on the table), view from the roof, view from underneath in the catacombs.

The Val de Grace: View from street level, view from underneath in the catacombs

The Cemetery Montparnasse: View from above, view from ground level, view from the catacombs underneath the western end, view from the ossuaries underneath the eastern end.

While we only visited the Cemetery Montparnasse in order to get a ground-level shot above the ossuaries, I actually discovered a few famous graves - the first being Alfred Dreyfus (of the famous Dreyfus Affair), and his family, (some of whom, as you can tell from the grave, were deported to Auschwitz). The second was a joint grave: Simone de Beauvoir and her “longtime companion,” Jean-Paul Sartre. I felt very French (and was endlessly amused) when I got to tell Steve to literally “meet me at the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre.” I also thought I had found the grave of Dr. Jack Kevorkian (one of the people he helped commit suicide, Merian Frederick, actually used to be our neighbor). I was a little thrown by the “Aram” before the “Jack Kevorkian,” but I figured this quote at the bottom of the grave was kind of indicative of the Jack Kevorkian we all know. But I was wrong - Dr. Jack’s currently still alive and in jail, while it’s lawyer and newsletter publisher Jack Kevorkian who died in 2003 and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

The shot of the cemetery from above was taken from the Tour Montparnasse - the best and least appreciated of the observation decks of Paris. In addition to our unofficial views, I had been up the Eiffel Tower on an earlier trip (as related here), and also went up to the roof of the Notre Dame on this trip. My advice is to save your money (and time spent waiting in line) for the Eiffel Tower, go on the Notre Dame tour only for the up-close view of the gothic architecture, and make sure to hit the roof of the Tour Montparnasse. Don’t pay though - just say you’re going up to the restaurant. Nobody checks tickets for the roof. And while the daytime view is certainly nice, make sure you’re up there at night - and you’ll see that Paris has truly earned its nickname of the City of Light.

Paris is a small city - at a brisk pace you can walk across it in less than three hours. And Paris also doesn’t have a great deal of geographical or structural diversity - for the most part, a block on the north side of town is going to look pretty much like a block on the south side of town. Because I can’t speak French, it was a lot tougher for me to get a feel for the different types of neighborhoods in terms of the social aspects, but other than an interesting immigrant area around Gard d’Nord, and to a lesser extent the eastern fringes of the city, Paris seemed fairly homogenous from a social aspect as well. Everything you’ve heard about the literati sipping espressos on a quaint little sidewalk cafe is pretty much true (although for the first time in my life, I actively sought out Starbucks. 3 ounce espressos don’t cut it when you’re a caffeine junkie of my caliber). You kind of have to equate Paris with “Manhattan,” not with “New York City,” and I’d venture to say that even the Manhattan of today has a lot more social diversity, and certainly more physical diversity, than Paris.

But as anyone in New York knows, the most interesting parts of town nowadays are outside of Manhattan - sometimes well outside. So I decided to take a walk all the way up north to the Banlieues, as the suburbs are called here.

Suburbs in Paris - and in most of Europe - aren’t the same as in the United States. Despite the recent renaissance of some of the larger and more interesting cities in the U.S., the general model is still the poorer inner city and the wealthier suburbs. In Europe, it’s somewhat the opposite. And to boot, in Paris there’s no real industry or even commercial activity. Downtown Paris is government offices and museums, and the rest of the city is basically residential - which is how despite having no residential building taller than 6 stories or so, Paris can have a population density that rivals Manhattan’s. The financial district is located in a Western suburb, and pretty much everything that smacks of anything remotely industrial has long since been pushed out of Paname (as Paris proper is sometimes referred to).

I only briefly visited two Banlieues during my time in Paris - one while dropping off a package for a friend, and the other during this walk. Both seemed, well, fairly normal. I’d heard a lot about the social unrest in the Banlieues that had happened a bit before I got to Paris, but I didn’t really see any remnants of that in the parts of town I wandered into. One was a Western suburb called Clichy - which is basically a little more the type of area that people in the U.S. might think of as a “suburb.” The other was the northern suburb of Aubervilliers, which was heavily industrial, spotted with huge public housing projects. It reminded me a bit of where I live in Queens.

While I felt like I really got to know Paris in terms of the different physical aspects, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see a great deal of the different types of people that made up the city, or even the region. But we did get to hang out with one interesting crew. Rosie’s friends were squatters. Now, this is much different from what you might think as “squatting” here in the United States. Basically, laws are a lot more liberal. From what I gathered, if you can manage to get in a building - any building - you can pretty much stick around for years. And we’re not talking an old abandoned factory on the edge of town (or in the Banlieues). We saw two different artist squats when we were in Paris - both right in the middle of town. The first was 59 Rue de Rivoli, which was smack-dab in the middle of the equivalent of Madison Avenue. Basically, imagine this right on top of Brooks Brothers. The second was in an old bank in another super ritzy part of town. We got to go down into the vault, where I noticed that even in a bank, Europeans still used the medievil warded locks and keys, instead of pin tumbler locks and keys (take out your house key. That’s a pin-tumbler key). After a quick trip upstairs (where they were having Tango lessons), and to the abandoned front hall, we took our leave. But of course, not before climbing up on the roof. Walking around town, meeting interesting people, and seeing how the nutty Euro artists live are all well and good, but you have to keep your priorities after all.

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