Making a Pilgrimage to Cathedrals of Commerce BY RICHARD B. WOODWARD
http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/travel/11culture.html
THE 19th-century shopping arcades of Paris, or passages couverts, are proof that anything modern, if spared the wrecking ball, can be stimulus for nostalgia. When these iron-columned, glass-covered structures shot up around the city in the 1820s and ’30s, they were visionary pieces of industrial-age technology, as whoop-de-do in their day as the warped titanium of Frank Gehry is for ours.
Diminutive cathedrals to commerce and leisure, the arcades offered unheard of amenities to the emerging class of bourgeois consumers. Gas lighting, heated shelter from rain and mud, a panoply of goods and services in a contained space, cafes and restaurants where you could rest and observe fellow lingerers — these were a decided plus over the shopping experience of hunting and gathering all around town.
The “Illustrated Guide to Paris” from 1852 neatly summarized the appeal: “In speaking of the inner boulevards, we have made mention again and again of the arcades which open onto them. These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.”
Their heyday was brief. Later trends in consumer architecture — notably the mid-century department store, another Paris invention — rendered these small-scale archetypes passé. This didn’t prevent other countries from copying a proven model. Glass-enclosed, sunlit bazaars soon appeared around the world. Every suburban galleria where you amble among a warren of upscale stores protected from the elements can trace its ancestry to the Paris arcades.
For a while the passages were frequented largely by architecture students and social historians curious to see where the shopping mall was born. But the city has in recent decades made an effort to commemorate their cultural importance (most have historical markers at their entrances) and to restore them as pleasure domes. Several have undergone thorough renovations and are again chic shopping destinations.
Even if you buy nothing, the reverberant acoustics and filtered light in any arcade make a stroll-through a worthwhile excursion. Like the factory loft and the barge canal, they are sentimental ruins of the industrial past and, as such, full of atmosphere for the post-modern tourist.
The Passage des Panoramas, off the boulevard Montmartre, is the place to start. Fewer than 20 of the 150 arcades built in the first half of the 19th century are still standing, and many of those that are, like this one, can be found in the Second Arrondissement. One of the oldest (the original version was built in 1800) and the first public place in Paris to have gas lighting (1817), it gets its name from the painted panoramas (one, an aerial view of Paris, the other, showing the evacuation of the English in 1793 from Toulon) that were once projected on twin rotundas inside the passage. When they were destroyed in 1831, the crowds dispersed. But with hangouts like Le Café Véron, Marquis Chocolates and La Pâtisserie Félix, the arcade remained popular with flâneurs (a not entirely complimentary term loosely translated as layabout and voyeur) for decades. The architect Jean-Louis Victor Grisart added three additional passages in the 1830s, one of which, the Galerie des Variétés, connected to the Théâtre des Variétés where in the 1860s many of Offenbach’s operas were first performed. (Declared a historic monument in 1975, the theater was owned until a few years ago by Jean-Paul Belmondo.)
Today, the labyrinth of quiet, sheltered pathways is struggling to keep up appearances. Stern, the venerable engraver and stationery store, has been here since 1834, while the Asian restaurants and office supply stores are, like much else, newer tenants. These arcades have long been a home for the philatelic trade, and many of the window displays in the tiny shops feature used stamps and postcards. (For 15 euros, or a little over $20, I bought some mid-20th-century views of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the spiral-shaped manmade park beloved by the surrealists.)
As you walk deeper into the intestines of the place and farther away from the boulevard, the number of empty storefronts increases. Attempts to revive the fortunes of this side of the street have been only partly successful, which makes its fragile existence more poignant.
The Passage Jouffroy on the other side of boulevard Montmartre is much livelier and more uniformly prosperous. The first heated arcade and the first built entirely of iron and glass, it has suffered fewer ups and downs than its neighbor. Restored in 1987, it is packed with intriguing, high-end specialty shops. Women can browse Boutique des Tuniques, in business here since 1903, while men who aspire to be a boulevardier or country squire can visit M. G. W. Segas, famed for its selection of walking sticks, some going for as much as 1,500 euros ($2,010 at $1.34 to the euro).
Farther in are two wonderlands for young children: Pain d’Épices, with its handmade toys and dolls, and La Boîte à Joujoux, sort of a Home Depot for miniaturists. It offers dozens of styles of Victorian dollhouses, and as many kinds of doors, windows, staircases, bookcases, even parquet. To ease life down the rabbit hole: a three-piece bathroom set (sink, tub, toilet) in blue china can be had for 11.90 euros.
One of the best aspects of the Passage Jouffroy is that the restorers haven’t embalmed it in good taste. Emptying into one end is an exit from the hokey Musée Grévin, with waxwork replicas of historic personages and celebrities (a recent one is the French-American basketball star Tony Parker) while at the other end is the Hôtel Chopin, with budget accommodations (single rooms start at 50 euros a night) in a funky setting. Cinédoc, among the city’s premier resources for film books, posters, stills and other cinema memorabilia, is also a reason for a visit.
Several blocks to the east, at 23, rue St.-Augustin, the Passage Choiseul could benefit from some tidying up. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose mother had a successful lace shop here in the 1910s, wrote loathing descriptions of the place (“the most worst of all”) in his novels. If largely devoid of the charm to be found in other arcades, this one at least is a vital place of business for its customers. Largely run by and for immigrants, it has the noisy air of an oriental souk, another prototype for the covered markets that no doubt guided 19th-century Parisian architects.
The exquisitely restored Galerie Vivienne, on the other hand, is so immaculate and lustrous that ordinary human beings can look out of place. With one of the three entrances at 4, rue des Petits-Champs, it is situated just north of the stone arcades at the Palais Royal, where the concept of browsing for fashionable items in a series of shops under one roof took hold in the 1780s.
Constructed in 1823 and opened to the public three years later, it quickly became a favorite with Parisians, especially artists. Berlioz led crowds here in singing “La Marseillaise” to celebrate the revolution of the July monarchy in 1830. By the end of the century, however, it was all but deserted. To bring it back to its former glory, along with its western neighbor, the Galerie Colbert, the French spent lavishly early in this decade. It is now stocked with high-end fashion boutiques (including Nathalie Garçon and Jean-Paul Gaultier), fun places to eat and drink (Bistrot Vivienne, La Bougainville and the sybaritic À Priori Thé), one of the oldest wine stores in Paris (Legrand Filles & Fils), and an excellent photography gallery (Serge Plantureux).
A walk through the Galerie Véro-Dodat (19, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau) rounds out a compact tour of the arcades. Stores shape the character of these spaces, and two outstanding 20th-century decorative arts dealers — the Galerie Eric Philippe and Galerie du Passage — help Véro-Dodat to project a more subdued but no less refined sensibility than Galerie Vivienne. The black-and-white marble floor, ball lamps and painted Corinthian columns were restored in the 1980s after almost a century of neglect. (It opened in 1826.) To maintain a level of elegant decorum among the various proprietors, the dealer Robert Capia, whose curiosity shop of antique dolls is a popular stop, has devised three rules: “no dogs, no phonographs, no parakeets.”
The German literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin spent the final 13 years of his life (he died in 1940, running from the Nazis) trying to fashion a theory of modernity based on the arcades. In their spatial ambiguity — visitors are both indoors and walking on an extension of the street — and in the bright scattering of impressions they presented to consumers, he thought he had found a secret history of the 19th century.
It’s unlikely that he had or ever would have. Unfinished at his death, the project consisted mainly of quotations from his years of reading at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He arranged this montage of snippets under 36 headings, such as “Fashion,” “Boredom,” “Advertising,” “Prostitution” and “Theory of Progress.”
His influential writings did, however, legitimize the movement to preserve the arcades in the 1970s and ’80s. He is as responsible as any urban planner for their present adoration and recovery. In an irony that he might not have appreciated, and that could perhaps only have happened in Paris, this fierce Marxist critic of the bourgeoisie has made shopping here an intellectual pursuit and unquestionably fashionable again.
THE 19th-century shopping arcades of Paris, or passages couverts, are proof that anything modern, if spared the wrecking ball, can be stimulus for nostalgia. When these iron-columned, glass-covered structures shot up around the city in the 1820s and ’30s, they were visionary pieces of industrial-age technology, as whoop-de-do in their day as the warped titanium of Frank Gehry is for ours.
Diminutive cathedrals to commerce and leisure, the arcades offered unheard of amenities to the emerging class of bourgeois consumers. Gas lighting, heated shelter from rain and mud, a panoply of goods and services in a contained space, cafes and restaurants where you could rest and observe fellow lingerers — these were a decided plus over the shopping experience of hunting and gathering all around town.
The “Illustrated Guide to Paris” from 1852 neatly summarized the appeal: “In speaking of the inner boulevards, we have made mention again and again of the arcades which open onto them. These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.”
Their heyday was brief. Later trends in consumer architecture — notably the mid-century department store, another Paris invention — rendered these small-scale archetypes passé. This didn’t prevent other countries from copying a proven model. Glass-enclosed, sunlit bazaars soon appeared around the world. Every suburban galleria where you amble among a warren of upscale stores protected from the elements can trace its ancestry to the Paris arcades.
For a while the passages were frequented largely by architecture students and social historians curious to see where the shopping mall was born. But the city has in recent decades made an effort to commemorate their cultural importance (most have historical markers at their entrances) and to restore them as pleasure domes. Several have undergone thorough renovations and are again chic shopping destinations.
Even if you buy nothing, the reverberant acoustics and filtered light in any arcade make a stroll-through a worthwhile excursion. Like the factory loft and the barge canal, they are sentimental ruins of the industrial past and, as such, full of atmosphere for the post-modern tourist.
The Passage des Panoramas, off the boulevard Montmartre, is the place to start. Fewer than 20 of the 150 arcades built in the first half of the 19th century are still standing, and many of those that are, like this one, can be found in the Second Arrondissement. One of the oldest (the original version was built in 1800) and the first public place in Paris to have gas lighting (1817), it gets its name from the painted panoramas (one, an aerial view of Paris, the other, showing the evacuation of the English in 1793 from Toulon) that were once projected on twin rotundas inside the passage. When they were destroyed in 1831, the crowds dispersed. But with hangouts like Le Café Véron, Marquis Chocolates and La Pâtisserie Félix, the arcade remained popular with flâneurs (a not entirely complimentary term loosely translated as layabout and voyeur) for decades. The architect Jean-Louis Victor Grisart added three additional passages in the 1830s, one of which, the Galerie des Variétés, connected to the Théâtre des Variétés where in the 1860s many of Offenbach’s operas were first performed. (Declared a historic monument in 1975, the theater was owned until a few years ago by Jean-Paul Belmondo.)
Today, the labyrinth of quiet, sheltered pathways is struggling to keep up appearances. Stern, the venerable engraver and stationery store, has been here since 1834, while the Asian restaurants and office supply stores are, like much else, newer tenants. These arcades have long been a home for the philatelic trade, and many of the window displays in the tiny shops feature used stamps and postcards. (For 15 euros, or a little over $20, I bought some mid-20th-century views of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the spiral-shaped manmade park beloved by the surrealists.)
As you walk deeper into the intestines of the place and farther away from the boulevard, the number of empty storefronts increases. Attempts to revive the fortunes of this side of the street have been only partly successful, which makes its fragile existence more poignant.
The Passage Jouffroy on the other side of boulevard Montmartre is much livelier and more uniformly prosperous. The first heated arcade and the first built entirely of iron and glass, it has suffered fewer ups and downs than its neighbor. Restored in 1987, it is packed with intriguing, high-end specialty shops. Women can browse Boutique des Tuniques, in business here since 1903, while men who aspire to be a boulevardier or country squire can visit M. G. W. Segas, famed for its selection of walking sticks, some going for as much as 1,500 euros ($2,010 at $1.34 to the euro).
Farther in are two wonderlands for young children: Pain d’Épices, with its handmade toys and dolls, and La Boîte à Joujoux, sort of a Home Depot for miniaturists. It offers dozens of styles of Victorian dollhouses, and as many kinds of doors, windows, staircases, bookcases, even parquet. To ease life down the rabbit hole: a three-piece bathroom set (sink, tub, toilet) in blue china can be had for 11.90 euros.
One of the best aspects of the Passage Jouffroy is that the restorers haven’t embalmed it in good taste. Emptying into one end is an exit from the hokey Musée Grévin, with waxwork replicas of historic personages and celebrities (a recent one is the French-American basketball star Tony Parker) while at the other end is the Hôtel Chopin, with budget accommodations (single rooms start at 50 euros a night) in a funky setting. Cinédoc, among the city’s premier resources for film books, posters, stills and other cinema memorabilia, is also a reason for a visit.
Several blocks to the east, at 23, rue St.-Augustin, the Passage Choiseul could benefit from some tidying up. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose mother had a successful lace shop here in the 1910s, wrote loathing descriptions of the place (“the most worst of all”) in his novels. If largely devoid of the charm to be found in other arcades, this one at least is a vital place of business for its customers. Largely run by and for immigrants, it has the noisy air of an oriental souk, another prototype for the covered markets that no doubt guided 19th-century Parisian architects.
The exquisitely restored Galerie Vivienne, on the other hand, is so immaculate and lustrous that ordinary human beings can look out of place. With one of the three entrances at 4, rue des Petits-Champs, it is situated just north of the stone arcades at the Palais Royal, where the concept of browsing for fashionable items in a series of shops under one roof took hold in the 1780s.
Constructed in 1823 and opened to the public three years later, it quickly became a favorite with Parisians, especially artists. Berlioz led crowds here in singing “La Marseillaise” to celebrate the revolution of the July monarchy in 1830. By the end of the century, however, it was all but deserted. To bring it back to its former glory, along with its western neighbor, the Galerie Colbert, the French spent lavishly early in this decade. It is now stocked with high-end fashion boutiques (including Nathalie Garçon and Jean-Paul Gaultier), fun places to eat and drink (Bistrot Vivienne, La Bougainville and the sybaritic À Priori Thé), one of the oldest wine stores in Paris (Legrand Filles & Fils), and an excellent photography gallery (Serge Plantureux).
A walk through the Galerie Véro-Dodat (19, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau) rounds out a compact tour of the arcades. Stores shape the character of these spaces, and two outstanding 20th-century decorative arts dealers — the Galerie Eric Philippe and Galerie du Passage — help Véro-Dodat to project a more subdued but no less refined sensibility than Galerie Vivienne. The black-and-white marble floor, ball lamps and painted Corinthian columns were restored in the 1980s after almost a century of neglect. (It opened in 1826.) To maintain a level of elegant decorum among the various proprietors, the dealer Robert Capia, whose curiosity shop of antique dolls is a popular stop, has devised three rules: “no dogs, no phonographs, no parakeets.”
The German literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin spent the final 13 years of his life (he died in 1940, running from the Nazis) trying to fashion a theory of modernity based on the arcades. In their spatial ambiguity — visitors are both indoors and walking on an extension of the street — and in the bright scattering of impressions they presented to consumers, he thought he had found a secret history of the 19th century.
It’s unlikely that he had or ever would have. Unfinished at his death, the project consisted mainly of quotations from his years of reading at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He arranged this montage of snippets under 36 headings, such as “Fashion,” “Boredom,” “Advertising,” “Prostitution” and “Theory of Progress.”
His influential writings did, however, legitimize the movement to preserve the arcades in the 1970s and ’80s. He is as responsible as any urban planner for their present adoration and recovery. In an irony that he might not have appreciated, and that could perhaps only have happened in Paris, this fierce Marxist critic of the bourgeoisie has made shopping here an intellectual pursuit and unquestionably fashionable again.
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Strollers and customers in the Passage des Panoramas, on the boulevard Montmartre. The sho |
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