The neighbourhood of northern Clignancourt

[kerouac2]

I know that the title means nothing to just about everybody.  Even those who have visited Paris might just vaguely remember that the big flea market is at Porte de Clignancourt, but that's about the extent of it, even for the majority of Parisians.

Let's start with a tiny bit of history.  In 1860, Baron Haussmann was in charge of the city under the reign of Napoléon III.  It was decided that Paris needed to be enlarged outside of the old city walls, which were demolished.  Paris was expanded to its current city limits, which makes it tiny compared to a city like London.  It needs to be expanded quite a bit more now, and that is discussed from time to time, but it will not happen any time soon.  Not in my lifetime in any case.  In any case, Haussmann proceded to demolish 40% of the city and rebuild it (try that now!).  The history of all of this is absolutely fascinating and is really worth reading about.

There were multiple reasons for the expansion, but the one that concerns us is the desire to obliterate Montmartre.  It was a total den of iniquity just outside of the old city limits, full of untaxed alcohol, lascivious entertainment (you've seen the movie), drugs and anything else that was frowned upon.  All of the new 20 arrondissements of Paris were split into 4 administrative districts.  The village of Montmartre was one of the most powerful outer areas, so it was sliced out of existence.  See for yourselves.

There is no Montmartre in Paris.  It is a figment of our imagination.  I myself live on the border of Chapelle and Goutte d'Or, but I can be in "Clignancourt" on foot in less than ten minutes.

So it was time for a guided tour of northern Clignancourt, one of the least known areas of the city.  The southern part is still called Montmartre, and the behind it is a complete wasteland with nothing of interest, at least in terms of the tourists.  Even most locals are afraid of the area.

The rendezvous point was just outside metro Jules Joffrin, which is in front of the town hall of the 18th.  It was the very last one built by Haussmann and is considered to be the best, since it incorporated every improvement made in the other buildings over the years.  It has a super impressive wine cellar in the basement.  It also faces north, away from the city and away from Montmartre.  This is not an accident.

Just across from it is the church of Notre Dame de Clignancourt.  Normally, the mairie should have been here and the church on the other side.

Now all I had to do was wait 10 minutes for the tour appointment and spot the other people in the group.

[bixaorellana]

And the people in this group? We're waiting, too. *taps foot*

[kerouac2]

I've been on some of these visits before, and it isn't too hard to spot the other members of the group, usually 10-15 people. People just stand around aimlessly but keep looking at all of the other people around. That didn't happen this time. The area stayed mostly empty of people except for those walking directly through to some other destination. Five minutes before the appointed time, I decided to stand in the exact centre and not move. This brought the other people out almost immediately (also the time it was). There were just four of us. Unfortunately, the tour guide was not there. But one of the group had spoken to him on the phone. "He'll be about 5 minutes late because he had trouble finding a Vélib."

He quickly arrived, not quite out of breath, checked our names on his list. "I don't do big groups anyway." Actually, that was not surprising because you have to not be seeking success to propose a tour of northern Clignancourt. He also does tours of 3 or 4 other neighbourhoods and is currently putting together a tour of La Chapelle, which I do not really need to pay to see. But I will look for it on the list and see what it claims to show.

We moved half a block east to the Square de Clignancourt, which is amazing the first time one sees it. The neighbourhood is very working class and of extremely mixed ethnicity, but the Square de Clignancourt is like a chunk of the most chic part of Paris uprooted and deposited in the slums. Even the locals rarely notice it, because it is pretty much enclosed, and the green space in the middle looks private, even though it isn't. It's like all of those residential squares in London where you are not welcome. The only reason that I knew of it is because I was invited to a little party in one of the buildings once. A Danish woman I knew was flat sitting during the Christmas holidays and invited about a dozen of us to guzzle champagne and pastries. It was one of those huge apartments "like in the movies" with vast rooms and an endless corridor which needed explanation if you were looking for the WC. Definitely a totally different world.

Anyway, we were there mostly to sit on a bench in the weak sunshine while the guide explained a few basics about the history of the area, notably the three industries that caused people to settle there -- the gypsum quarries, all of the mills on the hill, and the vineyards. All of that has been gone for 150 years except for a few decorative vestiges. Nothing to see of the quarries except when a street or a building collapses every few years. One of the required documents for buying and selling properties in the whole area is a geological certificate saying that there is nothing dangerous underground. Even my place is considered to be in the "quarry zone" so I had to have one of them, too.

You would think that these buildings would be "Haussmann style" but they are not. If they were Haussmann, they would have wrap around balconies on the 2nd and 5th floors. These do not.



Then it was time to begin our long trek.

[mickthecactus]

Looking forward to this one.

[bjd]

Me too. I associate the word "Clignancourt" just with the flea market.

[bixaorellana]

Most interesting! I couldn't help but notice the red building on the right in the last picture, as it seems so much newer, with only token nods to the prevailing style around it.

[kerouac2]

One of the principal quirks of the area are the buildings that have refused to conform to the others. This café on Place Jules Joffrin, directly across from the church and the mairie could certainly have made a fortune by accepting demolition and a higher reconstruction of the building, but it doesn't give a damn about the money.

Up the next street, this café hit the jackpot when the city eliminated 5 diagonal parking spaces and allowed it to have a real terrace. There is an interesting medieval building next door which used to be a factory for fine porcelain dishes until WW2. It is now a swingers club. I didn't take a picture of it because an ugly van was blocking the view.

This little dead end (for cars at least) has a special claim to notoriety, rue Cyrano de Bergerac.



It has a mural of Edmond Rostand, the author of the play. The artist lives on this street.



But the main thing to admire is the covid lockdown mural by the same artist.

It has the dates of the first lockdown with the indication "55 days." The two dogs live on this street, as well as all of the people displayed in the windows. The shield shows the lockdown activities -- music, art and apéro. You can see people clapping at 20h00, a smiley wearing a surgical mask, the mouse who was often spotted in the street and a multitude of other tiny details. We encountered by accident one of the residents (who appears in the yellow window on the right). He explained that more and more people showed up every day and it ended up turning into a street party (like Downing Street, I suppose). He insisted that they caused no cluster and that the police never intervened in spite of the crowd. It was a festive lockdown for some.

[htmb]

Very interesting, so far.
It’s my assumption you could lead your own tour group, Kerouac, rather than sign up to listen to someone else talk.

[fumobici]

This is wonderful! I miss your neighborhood strolls in Paris. The time I was there and we had dinner with FMT I found myself by the Lamarck-Caulaincourt Metro entrance with every intention of walking up to the La Porte, but somehow never made it past (and I had to look this up) Rue Marcadet. Obviously I should have pressed on, might even have found that lovely square.

[fumobici]

If I see a tour guide in some public place and it sounds interesting I've got no hesitation eavesdropping. I won't follow the group around though, I do have some standards!

[kerouac2]

This building appears rather nondescript, but it actually has major significance in modern Parisian architectural history. It was one of the first apartment buildings to be built using reinforced concrete beams and it ended up serving as the model for most of those housing projects from the 1920s-30s that one can see ringing every side of outer Paris, more than 58,000 apartments in all. The ground level used to have some shops and a restaurant inside with the Le Corbusier style concept of bringing service to the residents rather than making them go out to find things. No, this building is not by Le Corbusier.

I'm not sure that the idea was on this other building, perhaps just to offer a refuge to people during a rain shower.



All of these streets still have a lot of independent shops full of surprises. It is one of the bonuses of the outer area without chain stores.

I made a report some time ago about the Square Léon Serpollet (Here it is.). It only dates from 1991 and was donated to the city by the heiress of Léon Serpollet, who had his steam propulsion factory here, leading to the production of steam cars. They were becoming a little too popular so a certain Mr. Peugeot bought the patent and crushed it so that he could develop internal combustion engines instead. Anyway, the heiress required that the land be transformed into a park and not developed. Besides demolishing the industrial buildings and decontaminating the ground, the city also had to wait for a residential building on the land to slowly empty out and be torn down before they could create the park. Considering the huge crowds that were there the other day, a park was sorely needed in the area.

It is still pretty early in the season, but the municipal gardeners have been busy.

[nycgirl]

Thanks for this fun tour of a little-seen part of Paris. I love the mural that captures a snapshot of the neighborhood during Covid. I would've loved to live in a community like that.

I see you have lots of blossoming trees already. It's been unseasonably cold here so that's been delaying the blossoms. I can't wait for it to finally look like spring.

[kerouac2]

Time for some more confidential arteries of the city. The centre of Paris used to have streets like this before Baron Haussmann's handiwork.



There's no point in regretting that most of these lanes are completely gentrified. The poor people who used to live here could never have fixed things up.





Sometimes when everything crumbled, a very nice building took the place of the ruins.









This street got its name to honour an explorer who lived in the neighbourhood.

[lugg]

Enjoying this vicarious tour K2 , thank you

[kerouac2]

There are still a lot of lanes with low buildings, but you have to know where to look.



Here is an interesting hybrid -- an old building with a totally different style added on top.





This café was pointed out because it appears in a lot of movies and TV series, slightly modified for whatever period is being recreated.





The problem with gentrification is the fact that the new people always want to hide. They are probably wise.

[bjd]

I wonder if the fact that there are fancy buildings mixed with plainer ones and small individual dwellings all dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries means that there was more of a social mixture in Parisian neighbourhoods then than there was later on. This refers of course to the outer arrondissements, not so much to the 8th or 7th. Since there were small shops everywhere and people doing all kinds of jobs not far from home, this would make sense.

[kerouac2]

I think the concept of gentrification has been around a lot longer than most of us think in both of its incarnations. First, people with enough money to live elsewhere but who are attracted to both the grit and vitality of poorer neighbourhoods. And then there are the promoters who come to cash in on these people when they decided they still like the area but wouldn't mind living in a nicer building. You can see all over (outer) Paris the number of Haussmann style buildings standing alone, with the stones of the front staggered like a jigsaw puzzle because the builders were certain that other similar buildings would spring up next door and create more wealth, and then it just didn't happen. Sometimes it was their own fault for making greedy guesses and sometimes annoying things like the bank crisis of the 1920s or an inconvenient war put an end to development.

[kerouac2]

The next stop was at one of the gardens along the petite ceinture. I have shown in the past the part accessible through the Récyclerie at the old train station, which you can see in the distance in the photo below. This time we entered from the next bridge to see the Jardins du Ruisseau. This is run by different gardening groups and was only recently opened to the general public, just on weekends for a start.

It was too early in the season to see much of anything growing. There is a whole beehive section at the end.

[kerouac2]

This is actually a very short report considering the fact that the tour lasted 4 hours instead of the planned 2½ hours. But a small group elicits a lot more conversation and questions than a bigger group that mostly just listens. I was the only person using a camera although the others used their phones for some photos. I think that the others thought I was a dinosaur.

Our last official stop was at a tiny lane called Villa des Tulipes, right at Porte de Clignancourt.



It is another (gentrified) haven of peace and calm in a very agitated and somewhat ill famed location.





Everybody is always in awe of the power of wisteria vines over mere mortal creations like iron or stone fences.









I have a vague plan to revisit the flea market again soon, but I will definitely stop here again when the season is more advanced.

But that's all for this report.

[htmb]

I’m curious about the thing that looks like a birdcage, with a face mask hanging next to it.

This looks like it was an interesting tour, especially if you learned a few new bits of information about your own ”back yard."

[kerouac2]

That's a bird cage, but I assume it is a little too early in the season for its usual resident to move into its summer quarters.

[mickthecactus]

You even went to the pictures there!

[kerouac2]

The technical glitch has been repaired.

[cheerypeabrain]

Very interesting, we rarely see this part of Paris on tv or in reports. I can understand the rich owners of the gentrified buildings hiding behind foliage...privacy must be difficult to maintain.

[bixaorellana]

I admire you for going on this tour even though you are more than qualified to give tours on lots & lots of Paris on your own. There is a good bit of food for thought in the history of the area. I love the story of the park and the fountain is just wonderful.

That glass addition atop what appears to be the newest building in that photo is interesting. Yes, it doesn't really fit, but I'll bet it's spectacular from the inside.

[kerouac2]

I was back at place Jules Joffrin at noon today, and it was teeming.

For one thing, today is the municipal referendum on banning (or not) the free floating electric scooters. There were more voters than I expected. But I'm not sure if participation will really be significant. For normal elections there are 68 polling stations in the 18th arrondissement, but for this referenendum, this was the only place to go. The downstairs foyer was full, the upstairs ceremonial hall was full, the mariage hall was full (I voted in the marriage hall.). I would have liked to take pictures, but I believe that it is frowned upon during any kind of election. But now I want to go back on a normal day and see what pictures I can take.

Since it happened to also be Palm Sunday, even the church was doing business for once.