Paris Transformed (Again)

“Old Paris is no more. A city’s shape changes more quickly, alas, than a mortal’s heart.”

For just about every generation of Parisians and Paris-lovers, Baudelaire’s famous line eventually rings true. With the fiftieth anniversary of my first visit to the city approaching, and having just returned from another one, it certainly rings true for me. Thinking back to my early visits, up pop what feel like random memories, although some strange operation of the subconscious is surely at work: hopping on the back platform of a moving bus; watching Parisians buy horse steaks at a neighborhood boucherie chevaline; relieving myself in a sidewalk pissoir; drinking steaming bowls of café au lait at breakfast. I remember charming working-class restaurants and horrible hotels that had in common their amazingly low prices. In the restaurants, I had my happy introduction to blanquette de veau, aligot, boudin noir, escargots, and rough red wine, all of it accompanied by choking cigarette smoke but a revelation nonetheless. As for the hotels… In one dreadful dive called the Hôtel Sunny on the Boulevard Port-Royal, the bathroom was down the hall, the vintage 1930’s telephone was fixed to the wall with the earpiece on a wire, and the bed sheets and weirdly unabsorbent towels seemed cut from the same scratchy cloth. But it cost all of 35 francs a night: $7. (It’s still there, long since renovated, and looks much nicer, not to mention much more expensive).

Architecturally, Paris has changed less than my hometown of New York over the same period. While much of Manhattan still has a classic twentieth-century feel to it, the skyline has been transformed, thanks largely to the private sector. There are the “pencil towers” to the south of Central Park, a bevy of new super-tall buildings in midtown, plus large-scale developments in the Battery and the West Side’s Hudson Yards. In Paris, the most striking changes to the cityscape largely involve individual new building projects, mostly carried out by the state, mostly for cultural purposes: the Louvre pyramid, the Bastille Opera, the Science Museum at La Villette, the National Library at Tolbiac, the Finance Ministry at Bercy, the Institute of the Arab World, the new Tribunal de Paris, the Philharmonic, the Fondation Louis Vuitton museum, and several more. The state banished most large-scale private sector construction to La Défense, outside of the city.

At street level, though, the changes to Paris have been dramatic. The Marais, once a warren of shabby shops, restaurants, and communal Jewish institutions (including a famous bathhouse) is now a showcase for high-end fashion and cocktails. The once-dilapidated banks of Parisian canals have become 24-hour party scenes in summertime. Emily, of “Emily in Paris” fame, may still think the Left Bank is the center of cool, but the more knowledgeable in her age cohort have moved across the river and kept going, up to Belleville, Ménilmontant and other formerly scorned neighborhoods of the 19^th and 20^th arrondissements.

Paris has long been a city with a heavy immigrant population. Even during my first visits, every neighborhood seemed to have its contingent of Portuguese concierges and Tunisian greengrocers. But, as with New York, continuous large-scale immigration has given the city a radical new vibe, most apparent to visitors in the culinary scene, with Korean restaurants one of the more interesting new fads (I only wish more Mexicans would arrive, to end the ongoing disaster of “French tacos”). And immigration has also reinvigorated traditional French cuisine, as shown by the fact that the winner of last year’s “best baguette” contest hailed from Sri Lanka (in New York, of course, the best bagels are made by Thais).

With every passing year, the French (and American) far right gets more hysterical about how immigrants have failed to assimilate into French society, have embraced violent Islamism and have generally “destroyed” the country. A portion of “immigrant-descended” youth remains alienated and resentful, and many suburban public housing estates are miserable and dangerous places. But you need only spend time in a suburban community like Montreuil to see how much more complicated and positive the story of immigration has been, with millions of “immigrant-descended” citizens making their way into the middle class and living peacefully alongside ethnically French neighbors. I was in Montreuil on May 30, the day when Paris Saint-Germain beat Arsenal in the Champions League final, and the celebrations took a frightening turn. Deafening firecracker barrages continued for hours, and in the main square the police used tear gas to disperse the crowds. But those crowds—and the equally raucous ones I saw later in central Paris—were multi-ethnic, white and black and North African together. Elon Musk’s attempt to attribute the violence to “immigrants” (and exaggerate its extent) was entirely false.

Meanwhile, one of the most striking changes in recent years—one without parallel in any American city—has come in the area of transportation. A succession of left-wing municipal governments has worked hard to reduce Parisians’ dependence on the automobile and promote public transportation and bicycling. According to one recent survey, only 1.7 percent of the city’s population now gets around principally by car, while 26.3 percent make regular use of bikes. A former highway along the Seine is now a lovely pedestrian promenade, and there are plans to reduce the number of lanes in the périphérique beltway around the city. The state is also building new Metro lines, with a projected sixty-eight new stations, mostly in the suburbs (New Yorkers can only weep…).

The Metro expansion points to one of the most important on-going transformations: the dissolution of the barrier between Paris and its surrounding towns. Paris has always been a small city. The French state long kept it so deliberately, since Parisians enjoyed costly tax exemptions and were politically restive (to say the least). Even today, the municipality—what the French still call Paris intra muros (“within the walls”)—measures less than forty square miles, It is less than half the size of the borough of Queens, and fully fifteen times smaller than the agglomeration that goes by the name of London. Its population is just over two million and has fallen dramatically since the early 1920s, when close to a million more people crowded into a not-much-smaller housing stock. And while Paris no longer has physical walls, it has the effective barrier of the périphérique separating it from towns like Montreuil and Aubervilliers which, in London or Berlin, would qualify as neighborhoods of the metropolis—inner neighborhoods, in fact. The boundary was reinforced by a 1964 reform that split up the old Department of the Seine, which had included numerous suburban townships, and made the city a Department of its own.

This spring, the French High Commission for Strategy and Planning floated a prospective reform by which Paris would absorb the near suburbs, creating a new municipality (and Department) of close to seven million, divided into forty new districts: Le Grand Paris. Any such plan is far from implementation and would doubtless stir considerable resistance in the near suburbs themselves if the government tried to pass it into law. But already, well over a million people commute into the city every day, and the changes to the périphérique and the new metro lines will only make such crossings easier. Meanwhile, many Parisians have moved into the suburbs because the changes I described above have made it virtually impossible to find affordable housing inside the périphérique, and that trend is sure to continue. The long-time Paris resident Simon Kuper, in an entertaining recent book on the city, discusses many other banal but significant ways in which Parisians venture “beyond the walls” more frequently than was once the case—for instance, taking their children to football practice on suburban pitches.

So Paris will continue to change. And while many have greeted the changes in Baudelaire’s mournful tones—or, worse, have called them an “assassination”—I can’t agree. If Paris has lost some of the charms that first made me fall in love with it half a century ago, it has gained many new ones and remains as beguiling as ever.