A ONCE-SEEDY NEIGHBORHOOD AND GENTRIFICATION WITH CHARACTER

A DETECTIVE STORY OF 1955 STARTS WITH A SHOOT-OUT

IN A BAR AT THE SAINT-DENIS GATE

    The bar at this corner, in front of the former convent.

"The Saint-Denis gate is a monument 

that hoods seem specially to favor

 

Long ago, that's where our sovereigns made their triumphal entries into our good town and also their exit, when they were taken, feet first, to the royal necropolis.

 For mobsters, it's about the same. 

That night, I went for a drink to the little bistro at the corner of rue Blondel. It held its usual contingent of male and female clients: furtive dandies with agile eyes and whores still more naked in their molded garb [...] and lost in the mass, clients for carnal commerce, their shoulders bent under the weight of their sad and humble solitude."

--  Prologue, "Kilometers of Shrouds" by Leo Malet, 1955, in French

Sex workers are reminders of a neighborhood that used to be sleazy: "I don't want to see you from my palace!" stormed Saint Louis (Louis IX), and the women remain indissociable from the territory where he sent them, beyond the 13th-century gate:  

# # #

"I don't know why I ventured into the passage, perhaps because the gate was open when it should have been closed...

Passage du Caire by Eugène Atget (cut), 1903

On my crepe soles that brought no echo [...] 

I passed in front of the hostile shops whose obscure windows protected the whole scale of feminine undergarments, and less poetic shelf-furnishing vaguely reflecting my furtive silhouette. Suddenly I felt that within a shop, human forms were watching me. For three seconds I shone my flashlight on the wax mannequins with their lovely smiling faces, their pretty pink breasts extended. Immediately afterwards I came up against a thing, huddled in a gallery angle, like a pack of rags. It was not rags. It was, also, a kind of mannequin. But not pink. Or more alive."  

-- Kilometers of Shrouds

 

That place now

(Passage du Caire)

# # #

When you come to this terrace sit down and watch the street

You will find sex workers in a doorway, families with children, delivery men, young people who adapt the trends in personal ways, Airbnb visitors with baggage... 

Across the way: Shops so individualistic that their owners fit the wares :

Thelma Fewo

251 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis

Next door

One can regret a neighborhood

that was disreputable but never anonymous,

and also appreciate the modern creativity

and mix of epochs:

Now for the gate.

End of this section.

*    *    *

The next section,

II.3.3.e.,

Louis XIV's arch looms over the route