Paris: Père-Lachaise - Belleville - Buttes-Chaumont

 Entrance to Père Lachaise

You enter the great cemetery of Père-Lachaise though imposing gates. It was established in 1804 to replace a number of insalubrious parish  cemeteries. With over 4,000 trees its 43 hectares make it the largest green space in Paris. It is made up up of a large number of mostly straight paths each lined with tombs, often family ones. Countless famous people are buried here: Colette, Moliere, Isadora Duncan, Mariah Callas, Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust. We decided to confine ourselves to just two, the first of which was Jim Morrison, of the Doors.

It is a small grave – by the standards of Père-Lachaise – tucked into a quiet corner between several others. It is the only one with a crowd barrier around it. We were slightly offended by some other visitors smoking and drinking, but Jim would probably have done the same in their shoes.

Further on a terrace offered a pleasing view towards the Tour Montparnasse which we visited yesterday.

We headed right to pass the Crematorium and Columbarium. The main building has an unusual roof with golden leaf patterns on it.

Before we left the cemetery we visited our second grave, that of Oscar Wilde which is surmounted by a rather wonderful scuplture by Jacob Epstein. The figure once had testicles, but these were removed in an act of vandalism in 1961.

The grave is protected by a plexiglass sheet, and this is apparently because a tradition developed whereby visitors would kiss the tomb after applying lipstick to their mouth, thereby leaving a "print" of their kiss (why?). The screen was designed to prevent this.

We left Père Lachaise to reach the Boulevard  Gambetta and then head into Belleville (literally of course "beautiful town"). Our guide book (1993) laments the modern housing developments which have reduced the attractiveness of the area and it is surely worse now. After a while I did spot some nice tiles on a house gable, but walking through Belleville was a bit dispiriting. For the only time while we were in Paris we saw a patrolling solder armed with a machine gun on one of the streets.

Very soon after this we reached the Parc de Belleville. We had picked a poor day for this walk – it was Ascension Day, a public holiday in France – and the park was absolutely heaving. There was a nice view however over Paris and I was able to capture the Eiffel Tower and the Tour Montparnasse with the coloured roof of the Pompidou Centre in the middle.

We plodded on and eventually reached Avenue Simon-Bolivar which felt like a return to normal Paris. After a fortifying glass of rose and a bit of banter with the cheerful waiter who served us, we entered the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. This is about half the size of Père-Lachaise (22ha) and was created in 1863. It has several hills and a lake with an island crowned by a tempietto which is reached by a bridge. It was even more crowded than the Parc de Belleville.

I quite liked the brick pavilions with their tile decorations.

This picture shows the tempietto and the bridge (on the left) and some of the multitude who covered the grassy slopes. 

It is a lovely park however and we still managed to find a bench to sit and read for a while. Eventually time caught up with us and we headed off to catch the metro back to our hotel.  The métro entrance at Bolzaris was a particularly good example.

  

Conditions: warm and sunny.

From: Walking Paris by Giles Desmons (New Holland, 1994). References to shops, bars and restaurants may be out of date, but it remains a good guide. There is a 1999 edition.

Distance: 3.5 miles.

Rating: two stars. I really can't recommend this walk. Both Père-Lachaise and Parc des Buttes-Chaumont are well worth visiting, but do them separately or use the métro to get from one to the other.

Paris: Tour Montparnasse to Place d'Italie

Tour Montparnasse

For our third Parisian walk we met up with our friends Del and Arlette, who now live here, for this walk starting at the Tour Montparnasse. This building is 208m and 56 storeys high. When it was completed in 1973 it was the tallest office building in Europe (but well behind the Eiffel Tower at 300m). It wasn't part of the walk, but we couldn't resist going up to the viewing area of the top of the building. It was a pretty clear day and the views were outstanding. It was especially pleasing to identify the major landmarks and establish or confirm their relationship to each other across the city. I was most surprised by how big the Jardin de Luxembourg appeared. Notre Dame can be made out just behind the palace buildings.

We did a walk thorough it in March 2010 but the aerial view gives you a very different perspective.   An it would be wrong to not include the Eiffel Tower with the Palais Chaillot behind it, a reminder of our art deco walk in 2014.

We walked along Boulevard Montparnasse and I noted another nice art nouveau block with stone carvings of flower shapes. We turned right into rue de Montparnasse and then rue de Gaite where I spotted a building on the left with this beautiful frieze of floral tiles.

We Reached avenue de Maine and had a rather pointless detour which took us past a place where there once a chateau and down a street which once had a bakery with original painted glass décor – both no longer extant (the chateau was demolished in 1850!). However, re-emerging on the rue de Maine there was another fine art nouveau house at 29-31 rue Maurice Ripoche.

We passed the classic Mairie of the 14th arrondissement ...

... and made our way to place Denfert-Rochereau. Two 18th century pavilions stand here on the line of the 18th century city wall. This one contains the entrance tio the Paris catacombs: once they were underground stone quarries which provided the stone to build medieval Paris. In the 19th century some of these were filled in, to prevent the frequent sinkholes from opening, and others were converted into ossuaries to house bones from over-full cemeteries.

We continued along the charming leafy path along the centre of rue Remy-Dumoncel.

At the end we headed right and left to find the charming Villa Seurat, a lovely cobbled street which includes a number of artists' houses including that of the pointilliste Georges Seurat. I think Villa Seurat is the one on the immediate right.

We next passed the reservoir with its attractive pavilions.

Then turned left into Avenue Reille where at number 53 is the very first house designed by Le Corbusier, in 1922.

Just to its left is the delightful Square Montouris: a narrow winding street on a hillside which has a fascinating miscellany of turn of the 20th century houses, including a couple with wonderful  decorative tiles.

At the end of the square is the very pleasant Park Montsoris (1875), the second largest in Paris.

The final stage of the walk took us along Rue de Tolbiac, where I enjoyed this nice juxtaposition of art nouveau and art deco shopfronts.

Then through the Butte aux Cailles area to place d'Italie where I liked this new building (a shopping mall, sadly) with coloured metalwork adding interest.

                                                                                                                                                                    Conditions: warm and sunny.

From: Walking Paris by Giles Desmons (New Holland, 1994). References to shops, bars and restaurants may be out of date, but it remains a good guide. There is a 1999 edition.

Distance: 4.25 miles.

Rating: four stars. 

Footnote October 2016

 I was interested to see a report on ArchDaily that the Montparnasse Tower has often been cited as one of the architecture world’s most hated buildings, and criticized for its discordance with the Parisian urban landscape. Just two years after its completion, new buildings over seven stories high in the city centre were banned. The Ensemble Immobilier Tour Maine-Montparnasse (EITMM) has just selected 7 notable firms to continue to the second round in a competition for the renovation of the tower. It will be interesting to see who wins and what they make of it.    

Paris: La Coulée Verte Rene Dumont

The start, once you have climbed up from street level

Last year we walked the wonderful High Line linear park in New York. Afterwards, I was surprised to learn that although pioneering, it was not the first of its kind: there was an earlier one in Paris which was inaugurated in 1993. This was originally called La Promenade Plantée, but is now known as La Coulée Verte Rene Dumont (The René Dumont Green Path: named in honour of a pioneer ecologist). It's website is here. It is exactly the same concept: a redundant former goods railway line, long closed, was imaginatively converted into a green walkway. The High Line is entirely elevated, while only the first half of La Coulée Verte is.

It starts near to the Place de la Bastille, but exactly where proved difficult to establish as the map of the Promenade Plantée which I had downloaded proved hard to decipher. However, after we caught sight of people walking across an elevated railway bridge we managed to home in on it at the intersection of Avenue Daumesnil and Boulevard Ledru-Rollin. It turns out the Coulée follows the line of Avenue Daumesnil. The precise official start point is the junction of Boulevard Carnot, Avenue Emile-Laurent and Rue Edward-Lartet. 

You walk along a tarmac path with greenery on both sides and a smattering of spring flowers. Immediately there are quite a lot of birds.

From this elevated position there are good views of the surrounding buildings. I loved the art nouveau decotration of this block at 30 Avenue Daumesnil.

A bit further on we saw a sign which indicated that the needs of walkers were to be given priority, joggers were tolerated if they did not cause inconvenience. We saw loads of joggers, certainly as many as walkers, but this sign did explain one remarkable moment.

I was taking a picture looking ahead along the path when I heard a jogger coming up behind me and quickly took the shot. Meanwhile he stopped to ensure that he did not spoil the picture! Wonderful, but hitherto unheard of – pedestrians do occasionally, but never joggers.

A bit further on as we crossed Diderot, I spied another fantastic art nouveau block

Soon afterwards there was another lovely arrangement of the signature green arches.

And then at the intersection of Rue de Rambouillet we came upon this fantastic sight.

A whole series of identical naked male figures forming a frieze around  the top of an office block? Absolutely extraordinary! But the best bit was the building housed ....  a police station.

Soon after this we reached the Park Reuilly where a flower bed right at the entrance provided a wonderful burst of colour.

The path continued ahead, but now at ground level and passing through an area of new apartments  - and then we had to cross a road. What a shock! This sudden change of character ended after we went through an underpass and emerged into a leafy railway cutting.

The final section meandered under roads and through more housing developments to stop quite abruptly at a blocked underpass which would have gone under the Péripherique. Thanks to to the wonders of Google maps, we found our way to a métro station in the town of Saint-Mande, pausing for lunch on the way.

Conditions: Mostly sunny and warm, but did get a bit fresh from time to time.

Distance: 4.5 km.

Rating: Four stars. An absolute delight at first, but the second half was less rewarding – and you end up over half a mile from the nearest metro station.

Comparisons with the New York High Line

Signage and publicity are not so good. We gained the impression that La Coulée Verte was meant to be a resource for the local community, rather than a tourist attraction. In consequence it was not so crowded. It certainly carries more joggers – the High Line when we went was too crowded for this to be possible. Maybe it's different in the early morning.

As already noted, the High Line is solely elevated while La Coulée Verte only starts that way.

The landscaping is much less ambitious: the path follows the middle way with planting on either side, while the High Line is much more varied in the line of the path and the nature of seating and other areas, including one large grassy space for sunbathing.

The La Coulée Verte planting is more established, with perennial plants and shrubs, the High Line's is was developed and seemed to have more annuals. 

Footnote

It seems that further linear parks are under development in Chicago and Philadelphia.

Paris: République - Temple - Bastille

Place de la République

We have just arrived in Paris for a short break and we thought we'd begin by doing this short walk from the Place de la République, near to where we are staying. It comes from Giles Desmons's Walking Paris. For most of the 19th century this large square was called Place du Chateau-d'Eau, but was renamed when the statue of the virtues of the Republic was installed in the 1880s. Both square and statue seem to have currently acquired strong overtones of political protest. One of the banners on the statue reads "Frontiers kill. Solidarity with the migrants."

We headed west along Boulevard St-Martin, passing a house with lovely tiles on its façade.

A little later came the Théatre de la Porte de St Martin. Desmons tells us that Cyrano de Bergerac was premiered here in 1897. And amazingly it is still playing today!

At the next junction there is the Porte. It is a triumphal arch for Louis XIV built in 1674 on the site of a medieval gate.

We turned left into Rue St-Martin, apparently the joint oldest street in Paris, whatever that means. You would never guess – it looks no different from any other. On the right I noticed a wonderful inscription above a doorway: Property of the Civil Society for the Future of the Proletariat.

We passed the Museum of Arts and Crafts and round the corner found the church of St Martin in the Fields, said to be the first gothic building in Paris. You can see the transition from Norman to gothic as your eye moves from the apse towards the nave.

Now along the Rue au Maire, an old but undistinguished street. At the bottom, in Rue Volta is this lovely half timbered house which is allegedly the oldest in Paris – or maybe an 18th century fake. It certainly looks like the old houses we have seen in Dijon or Rouen.

This whole neighbourhood seemed a bit run down, but I just loved this grafito on a wall in Rue des Vertus. The name is ironic as it was apparently once the haunt of prostitutes.

Soon we reached Rue du Temple and I spotted this interesting gatehouse off to the right in Rue des Archives. According to the nearby plaque, it is the gate of the Hotel of Olivier de Clisson, Constable of France in 1380. The massive box-like Archives building just intrudes from the left.

At the end of this street you arrive at the Square du Temple, where the Knights Templar once had their palace. There fine covered market is Le Carré des Templiers.

We enjoyed a drink in a pavement café nearby and then continued in our route to reach the Rue de Bretagne where I happened to spot this fabulous art deco doorway on an otherwise uninspiring building of 1926.

The last section was uninspiring, but the walk ended on a high at the Place de la Bastille.

This was once the site of the notorious prison, stormed in 14 July 1789. The rather lovely column however does not commemorate the revolution of 1789, but rather that of 1830. The bones of those who died in that short-lived revolution were placed in an ossuary underneath the column, as were the dead of the 1848 revolution. According to our book you can climb the column and get a great view. There seems to be nobody up there however.

The building on the left is the Opéra de la Bastille, completed in 1989. Worth exploring another time. 

Conditions: warm and sunny.

From: Walking Paris by Giles Desmons (New Holland, 1994). References to shops, bars and restaurants may be out of date, but it remains a good guide. There is a 1999 edition.

Distance: 2 miles, but slow going because there are many twists and turns.

Rating: four stars.

Paris: Art nouveau and Modernist architecture

View from the Palais de Chaillot towards the Eiffel Tower

I had planned an art deco walk for today to complement the art nouveau one we did last March. My research led me to a modernism walk produced by Time Out and I decided to use it as a point of departure.

As with the art nouveau walk we started in the 16th arrondissement, this time at metro Jasmin, and walked down Avenue Mozart to revisit, at number 22, the house built for himself by the great art nouveau architect Hector Guimard.

We then retraced our steps to go up rue Henri Heine and tune left into rue du Docteur Blanche to find down an alley on the left the Fondation Le Corbusier. This occupies a pair of villas designed by him and Pierre Jeanneret in 1923. The contrast with the curves of Guimard's house could hardly be more stark.

You have to knock to gain entrance and we had the place almost to ourselves. Inside the most striking thing is the way spaces flow into each other. It is also more colourful than one might expect.

We doubled back along rue du Docteur Blanche to find rue Mallet-Stevens on the right. This is a small cul-de-sac with six houses designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens - it seems unusual to name the street after the architect.  However, "Along with Le Corbusier he is widely regarded as the most influential figure in French architecture in the period between the two World Wars" (Wikipedia - so perhaps not quite so surprising).  Although the houses are mostly tall, the overall feeling is quite intimate.

We headed down rue de L'Assomption to rejoin rue Mozart and head towards Passy where we enjoyed an excellent lunch at the art deco La Roronda de la Muette restaurant. We then found our way to rue Raynouard where numbers 51-55 are celebrated works by Auguste Perret. They were built from reinforced concrete tinted to look like stone. Celebrated maybe, but also hard to like.

Across Place de Costa Rica and into rue Benjamin-Franklin where another block had more classic and pleasing art deco details and strong vertical emphasis.

We then reached the back of the extraordinary Palais de Chaillot, here seen from the bottom of the Trocadero gardens by the river Seine.

It is classical revival architecture on a massive scale and was designed by Leon Azema, Louis-Hippolyte Boileau and Jacques Carlu for the Exposition Universelle of 1937. In the plaza between the two wings there are some rather lovely gold statutes, four of which can be seen in the picture at the head of this post. The terrace overlooking the Trocadero is perhaps the best place in Paris to see and photograph the Eiffel Tower.

Just along Avenue President Wilson is the smaller, but equally eye-popping Palais de Tokyo, also built for the 1937 Exposition. Until 2002 it seems to have been something of a white elephant, but is now a successful location for art exhibitions.

At the of Avenue President Wilson, we crossed Place de L'Alma to find Perret's Theatre des Champs Elysses in Avenue Montaigne. It opened in 1913 and is again constructed in reinforced concrete, although this reflected the quality of the subsoil and the proximity to the Seine, rather than solely Perret's apparent preference for this material.

It is plain and quite austere, with the facade brighted by areas of gold paint and the lovely bas reliefs  by Antoine Bourdelles. Inside, art deco stylistic features are more to the fore (it proved to be possible to just wander in and have a look at the lobby).

Conditions: quite bright, but cool (6 degrees).

Distance: about 3.5 miles.

Rating: four stars. Very interesting and illuminating, but not much to love.

Postscript

I had hoped to conclude this walk with a trip to see the incredible Louxor Cinema (170 Boulevard de Magenta, right by Barbes-Rochechouart metro station), but we did not have time. So we went there first thing the next morning and what a fantastic building it is.

It dates from 1921 and is still going as a palace of cinema. This is the area under the main awning.

And this is a detail of the mosaic on the columns of the foyer.