Paris at a Certain Age

au revoir Paris

For now...

Is October Paris' most beautiful month?

A Fall Day in Paris

Jardin du Luxembourg

A Kiss for You from Paris

The Stravinsky Fountain by the Centre Pompidou

Paris Dogs at Work

Place Dauphine Dog Outside His Café

Rue Dauphine Dog Guarding His Boutique

More Metro Pub

Another Creepy Metro Ad: 'nuff said.

But then there is this one for a horse event. When you first look at the photo, it resembles the eye of a person, but then gradually you realize it's a horse. Very intriguing and riveting.

La Pub

Compared with the US, Paris is relatively free from the garish signage that permeates modern urban life. Even on television, the commercials are grouped into bunches every 15 minutes or half-hour and you can easily avoid them. These segments are called La pub, short for lapublicité. They seem to be wittier here and a great way to learn French, so ironically I watch more commercials. Advertisers want you to remember their products, so they speak clearly, give lots of visual clues and are easy to understand.

The metro stations have large ads, somewhat smaller than US billboards, and they don't seem quite as offensive. Some are downright intriguing, like this ad for Bigard, a show at Theâtre Comédia in our quartier. Others echo the Magritte exhibit at Musée Maillol right now.

But a few ads are downright creepy. Some of the sci-fi movies playing in Paris right now show people without eyes or mouths and I have to literally turn my ahead and avoid the images if I see I'm walking towards one of them. Others make me wince like the one below. Sab of Paris Set Me Free recently blogged about an ad that I found disturbing as well. In fact, I couldn't even take a photo of it. You'll have to visit his blog to view it.

Promenade Plantée

The Promenade Plantée is an unusual and amazing park in the 12th arrondissement that I’ve wanted to see for quite awhile. It was the first elevated park in the world, although other cities have since copied the idea. It’s built on top of an old railway viaduc that traveled from the Bastille to the eastern edge of Paris. The trains stopped in 1969, but rather than tearing the structure down and filling in the area with new buildings, they constructed spaces for charming art stores and cafes under the viaduc arches (Viaduc des Arts) with a 4.5 km elevated park on top. You might recognize it if you’ve seen the Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpey movie, Before Sunset. So take a Sunday walk with me along the Promenade Plantée. As always, click on a picture to see a larger view.

des vaches? à Paris?

Cows? In Berkeley?
San Francisco Bay Area folks may remember this Berkeley Farms Dairy advertisement. I had this same reaction on encountering large art cows all over Paris this spring. The Cow Parade concept of auctioning off life-size decorated 'art cows' has been used in many cities around the world for fund-raising. The Paris version is called Vach'Art and will help support the Africa Alive Foundation.

Other cities have adapted this idea into something more thematically appropriate for their locale. San Francisco had hearts. Sonoma County (home of Charles Schultz the cartoonist) had Charlie Browns. Santa Fe had ponies. Park City, Utah had Moose on the Loose. Seattle had pigs (pigs? Something to do with Pike Place Market).

I didn't expect Paris to decorate kitchy Tour Eiffels or Arcs de triomphe. But cows are hardly emblematic of Paris. Two things say Paris to me: little dogs and ladies' scarves. Can't you imagine statues of miniature poodles outfitted in foulards (scarves)?

Oui-Oui: not your père's pissoir

Paris is an amazingly clean city. Street sweepers work every day of the week. And there are public toilets available on streets all over the city (420 of them). Until February of this year it cost 40 centimes (euro) to use one, but now they are accés gratuit (free!). According to an aide to the Paris mayor, the change was not done to help tourists (“Tourists do not have a problem paying”) but “to help everyone”.

The toilets are known by their brand name: Sanisettes. They’re made by JC Decaux, the same company that makes the advertising display systems all over Paris. The Sanisettes are high tech and resemble a Star Trek device. Instructions are written in French on the outside, but getting into them is no problem if you don’t speak French. There is a red sign stating occupe if a person is inside or if someone has recently left but the unit is still cleaning itself. A big arrow points to a button. Push it and when the sanisette is libre (free) (or after completing its cleaning cycle) it will open. The stainless steel door slides open robotically and you enter an excretory space capsule. Floor sensors detect your presence and automatically seal the door. Don’t worry about sitting on the bowl with wet droplets; it’s just been sanitized and disinfected. There is plenty of toilet paper. After finishing, you’ll note a running stream of water in a little opening behind you. Put your hands inside and you’ll be squirted with soap and you can wash. A blow dryer comes on automatically for the grand ending. There is a door handle inside so you can exit when you want to, but it will open in 15 minutes, ready or not. After you leave the unit, the door will close and you’ll hear whooshing and mechanical noises as it washes away all residue of your visit.
Caution: don’t leave small children alone in a Sanisette. The floor sensors require a certain weight to prevent the automatic cleaning cycle from triggering.

There is talk of designing a more attractive unit and supplementing it with an outside tap for drinking water. See my previous post on Wallace Fountains for a discussion on the importance of public drinking water. With all the homeless people living on our streets in the great cities of the US, and the large numbers of tourists in the same places, why haven’t we undertaken such a common sense measure? How many toilets could we provide with the cost of one day of the War in Iraq?

Paris Dog of the Day

Dog on duty guarding his Tabac.

The Great Paris Flood of 1910

I passed a couple of these highwater markers on Paris buildings near Musée d’Orsay and, since it’s been raining and flooding in Sonoma County California, I thought those readers might be interested in the Inondation of Paris in 1910.

Paris was a very modern city at the turn of the last century. Six lines of the metro had opened by the beginning of 1910. Streetlights were gas illuminated and 60 to 70,000 Parisian homes had gas and electricity. The electrical system ran underground through the subway lines. A system of compressed air controlled 58,000 clocks and 4,000 elevators in Paris. Most buildings had sewer service and there was daily garbage pickup. So when all the clocks stopped simultaneously at ten minutes to eleven on Friday, January 21, 1910 because the station that powered them with compressed air was flooded, Parisians were surprised. An eyewitness account noted:

Crowds, it is true, had gathered on the embankments, admiring the headlong rush of the silent yellow river that carried with it logs and barrels, broken furniture, the carcasses of animals, and perhaps sometimes a corpse, all racing madly to the sea; they had watched cranes, great piles of stones, and the roofs of sheds emerge for a time from the flooded wharves and then vanish in the swirl of the rising water, while barges and pontoons, generally dissen from sight far below, rose gradually above the level of the streets, notably one great two-storied bathing barge, a vision of unsuspected hideousness, that threatened at any moment, triply moored as it was, to crash into the parapet.
…From visits to out-lying districts I retain a vague impression of thick black slime, abject shivering misery and great lakes of yellow water, with here and there the upper story of a house rising like an island from the desolate waste.

The Seine flowed through the Gare d’Orsay (now Musée d’Orsay) creating a two block long swimming pool that submerged the trains and engines.

The unfinished Metro tunnels and stations were flooded. Basements of the Louvre (with stored artworks) were threatened. Traffic was eventually stopped on the nine bridges between Pont Neuf and Pont de Grenelle.

The waters stopped rising on January29 and pumps of all sizes and types were brought in to help drain Paris. Authorities believe that Paris is still vulnerable to flooding today, if not more so, because of building in the danger zones (including hospitals and schools). Sounds similar to California, doesn’t it?

Paris Pussycats

I like the famous sights of Paris: the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, the Seine, etc., but I'm most enjoying the quiet unexpected little moments. Like this kitty and his sign urging passers-by not to disturb him because he's sleeping. Apparently he's always sleeping.

Gilt and Grèves

I’ve been at a conference on how to move to Paris and off-line awhile. The last day of the conference we had a private tour of the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall of Paris. It’s full of gilt and fine art and sculpture, but the part I liked most was learning the history of the word grève. The Place de l’Hôtel de Ville was originally called Place de Grève. In the past, a grève was a river bank, not a strike. There was a small harbor on the Seine since olden times and in the middle ages it was called the Port de la Grève. River traders unloaded their goods here and it was a mercantile center. People gathered in the nearby Place to look for work. It also became the location for celebrations, executions and pillorying people.

In the mid thirteen hundreds, the first city hall was built here. In the words of Victor Hugo in Notre Dame de Paris,

“The place de Greve was a horrible dark place, and so was the sinister town hall. Death was always present here by the presence of the gallows in the middle of the square, a pillory, chains and scaffold. This square of Death had always a morbid attraction on people.”

In 1830 the name of the Place was changed to Place de l’Hôtel de Ville and all that remains of Place de Grève is the word association of grève with public discord and employment issues. As we wait to see if there will be a grève (strike) in Paris, I try to imagine before the gilded halls of Hôtel de Ville were erected and the Place de Grève was noisy with the violent issues of those times.

Beauty Takes Practice in Paris

There is a beauty school on the ground floor of the apartment building where we are staying. When we leave each day, we watch the students practicing on live models as well as practice dummy heads.

And we found out where bad haircuts go to die.

Wallace Fountains

I’m grateful to Eric of Paris Daily Photo for introducing me to Wallace Fountains. They meld so beautifully into their surroundings that you aren’t consciously aware of them. But once they are pointed out, you begin noticing them with delight all over Paris.

Sir Richard Wallace was an Englishman enamored with his adopted city of Paris. He inherited a fortune and decided to utilize it to benefit the city he loved. He founded a hospital and distributed supplies during the Franco-Prussian War. After the war, the city’s water delivery infrastructure was seriously undermined and drinking water became costly and unaffordable to the poor. This inspired Wallace to provide free public drinking water.

He conceived the fountain’s design of 4 caryatids (representing kindness, simplicity, charity, and sobriety, ) supporting a dolphin-encrusted dome overhead with water trickling down from its center. Originally tin cups were affixed by a chain to permit passers-by the opportunity to easily quench their thirst. He wanted the fountains to be affordable so more could placed around the city and he wanted them to be useful yet beautiful. He intended them to be clearly visible, yet harmonious with their setting. He hired sculptor Charles Auguste Lebourg to execute his conception and the fountains were eventually made of cast iron painted dark green.

The city of Paris chose the locations and the majority are placed in squares. Most are still working but are turned off in the winter so freezing won’t damage the plumbing. They are much loved, but one source states that despite France’s respect for le patrimoine, the 108 Wallace fountains have not been designated as historical monuments. Other cities have embraced the idea and you can find Wallace fountains now in many countries.I carry around a list of Wallace Fountain locations so I can look for them when I visit a different quartier. I want to find as many as I can during this 3 month Paris visit.