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The rue St. Denis: Fashion, Passion and Flashin'  

St. Denis is the patron saint of Paris, which means that he is entitled to have an important street named in his honor,  plus a Basilica, a Boulevard, a Triumphal Arch and many lesser ruelles and squares. He  was martyred in approximately 250 A .D. by having his head cut off, presumably but not certainly at Montmartre (“Mount of Martyrs”); the major street that bears his name starts at the Seine and wanders generally northward, following the path taken by French kings who were once buried in the St. Denis Basilica a few kilometers north of the city. On its way north from the Seine the street assumes a variety of vivid personalities: some lurid, some jazzy, some elegant and sophisticated, some old and some young, some simply astounding –in other words, a kaleidoscope almost as colorful and varied as Paris itself.  

        The rue St. Denis begins auspiciously just outside of the Place du Châtelet, a large open space on the north bank of the Seine whose principal monument is the Theatre du Châtelet, one of Paris’ most important theaters, the site of the hugely popular revival of Offenbach ’s La Belle Helene several years ago and a production of Bernstein’s Candide, produced here in 2006, for the first time ever in France. (This Candide  featured, among other things, Bush, Chirac, Putin and Blair in masks, snorkels and swim suits, floating in a massive oil spill and singing a ballad to democracy. It was  brilliant , wonderful and hilarious.)

        Below the stately façade of the theater and the swirling traffic of the Place du Châtelet, tens of millions of travelers stream through Paris’s largest Metro station, a labyrinth of corridors, moving sidewalks, underground boutiques and restaurants.  Metro Châtelet  is clean, well-marked and safe; it can even be exciting, for it includes a high-speed moving sidewalk that takes passengers (when it is working, which is not always) from one cluster of subway lines to another at a zippy 9 km per hour, three times faster than the adjacent “normal” sidewalk. The station also contributes to the city’s cultural life by providing free performance space to a varied cast of buskers who sing, play instruments or otherwise do their best to charm a few euros out of the rushing, preoccupied commuters.

                                                                                THE STREET BEGINS

        The girls have an even more elaborately contrived version of the treasured  “I am a slob” look. (The word “look” in French is pronounced loook and is often converted into a verb, as in “elle est très re-looké, meaning “she has really changed her look.”) These days the girls like to dress in a collection of clothes that appear to have been plucked directly from the trash: torn blouses and skirts, dresses with things hanging off them or with raggedy hemlines; bits and pieces of this and that. The favored hair-do –both for girls and boys, for white kids as well as black—involves corn rows and/or dreadlocks, frequently dyed in vividly unnatural colors. Bright green and hot pink are current favorites, as is powder blue; the colors are applied in streaks and patches, not as a uniform glob, and they complement an ensemble of un-matched clothes right down to the high-top sneakers, usually worn unlaced, in a variety of garish colors.

        The cheap clothing stores and fast food joints that cater to this group of kids are frequented and staffed mostly by young blacks who have presumably been imported from the dreaded banlieus, the low income suburbs that ring Paris in a numbing parade of faceless high-rise “cités.” The kids who come into town from these depressing places have cultivated an American-style ghetto attitude that says “I’m tough as nails, Don’t you better mess with me.”  One can hardly blame them.

        The vibes on the rue St. Denis change significantly a block or so later, when the street opens out onto the large and handsome Fontaine des Innocents. At this point the street merges into the huge redevelopment project known as the Forum des Halles, a retail/open space/underground shopping mall that the City of Paris constructed some 30 years ago to replace Les Halles, the city’s ancient food district. In creating this massive redevelopment, the city obviously hoped to create some green space and a respectable middle-class shopping area; what has emerged is a kind of low-end shopping street/public square that is a magnet for the aimless young of the “I’m just hangin’ out” variety, similar to Harvard Square, the Spanish Steps in Rome or a hundred other historic sites in Paris and elsewhere in the world. The kids here do a lot of skate boarding, beer-drinking and slouching; they graze for food at the MacDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Haagen Daz that surround the Fountain (American fast-food In the center of Paris! On the site of Les Halles, the epicenter of French culinary culture!); and they pointedly  ignore the Japanese tourists who arrive in an endless stream, group themselves stiffly in front of the fountain and then take pictures of eachother, staring unsmilingly straight ahead, with cameras that are apparently attached umbilically to their bodies. 

        The popular French writer Max Gallo recently used La Fountaine des Innocents as the title and the sordid setting for the  opening scene of a novel about a respectable Parisienne who descends into the underground shopping mall next to the fountain and is stabbed by an unknown tough with a needle, perhaps infected with AIDS. Gallo’s story resonates strongly with his Parisian readership, for they know that the Fontaine des Innocents is anything but an innocent and lovely place.   

                                                                                                PORN CENTRAL

                    Immediately north of the fountain, the rue St. Denis changes character once again. The street narrows, both physically and metaphorically, and for the next few blocks, the rue St. Denis becomes Porn Central, one of the two places in Paris with a serious concentration of hard-core porn shops.  (The other is Pigalle.)  

The tourists shy away from this part of the rue St. Denis –at least in the daytime. The cheap clothing stores mixed in with the dozens of porn shops (“Live Show! Individual Booths! Beautiful Girls!”) are mostly staffed by blacks who are both older and meaner-looking than their brothers near the Place du Châtelet, and Parisian friends regularly report seeing arrests on this area. A passerby can never be quite certain if the young tough slouching towards him, his head wrapped in a tight bandanna, is a drug dealer or an undercover cop who has adopted the “look” of his intended quarry. (Actual attacks on pedestrians in Paris are few and far between. The French do not have a tradition of urban violence; the streets are heavily policed; and street crime --pickpockets perhaps excepted-- is more or less non-existent, even on this part of the rue St. Denis.)

                                                                                                       THE SENTIER

The porn shops end abruptly at the intersection of St. Denis and the rue Réaumur. North of Réaumur, the street enters the neighborhood known as the ”Sentier” (“pathway”), Paris’s wholesale clothing district. The rue St. Denis in the Sentier is as different from the rue St. Denis on the other side of Réaumur as blue jeans and diamonds.  

       On the north side of Réaumur there are zero porn shops and zero toughs. Almost all of the stores sell wholesale clothing, mostly for women, mostly aimed at a middle-class market.    

During weekday working hours, the whole of the Sentier, including this part of the rue St. Denis, is crowded and bustling. No longer pedestrians-only as it was south of Réaumur, the street here is packed with delivery trucks and vans, with men and women who work in the rag trade and with women of fashion from all over the world, come to Paris to check out the trends. The stores here are mostly run by Jews, frequently Hassidic or orthodox: with their yarmulkes and beards or Hassidic black hats and long coats, they look as if they accidentally wandered into modern, bustling Paris from a 19th  century East- European stetl. The presence of the Hassids is one of the great time-warps of contemporary Paris , comparable as spectacle to the ravishing African women who ride the subway or saunter proudly down the streets in their flowing, voluminous, astoundingly colorful native robes, invariably crowned by a dashing, matching turban.

“       As I was walking along the rue St. Denis the other day I spotted a small crowd pushing up behind a truck with an open back. Inside the truck, a woman was pulling bunches of little dresses off a rack; and as people in the crowd called out   “3 large red, 4 medium green,” the woman and her assistant distributed the dresses to uplifted hands, moving as fast as they could.        "The truck has just come up from the South of Italy , where the dresses are manufactured,”  a man explained to me. “I would like to sell them from inside the store, but this model is so popular that the store would be mobbed, so we have to sell them right here on the street. As you’ll see, the truck will be empty in a manner of minutes.”

                    “And why is this particular style so popular?” I asked. 

                     “Ah, Monsieur, if we knew the answer to that question. . . .” He lifted his arms and his eyes skyward in a gesture of helplessness before the gods of fashion. “Sometimes we just get it right and our merchandise sells like hotcakes; other times . ...”  

On every corner of this part of the rue St. Denis there are small groups of men, obviously foreign, who hire themselves out on a per-job basis to haul merchandise from one part of the Sentier to another. The charge is 35 or 40 euros per trip and the work is arduous and undependable; on the rue St. Denis, all of the men –“all!” I was told emphatically – come from the Punjab region of India . (Elsewhere in the Sentier the bearers come from elsewhere in India , or even from Pakistan .) Standing stolidly beside their heavy-duty dolleys, they wait for their customers; they do not look as if their patience has made them rich.

                                                                                                   THE WHORES

Since          Since at least the 16^thcentury, the rue St. Denis has been famous for its whores. There are a few women-for-rent below the rue Réamur, down among the porn shops, and there are even occasional (much older) women at the bottom of the street, near Châtelet.  North of Réaumur, however, lurking among the wholesale clothing stores, the whores are thick upon the ground. Many look like grandmothers –most of them said adieu to the Springtime of their charms long, long ago -- and almost all of them are elaborately made up and turned out, all day long, from 9:00 in the morning until late at night.  

Not The Real Thing -- but a good imitation.      Store Mannequin in a shop window in            the Passage du Caire

The costumes and the anatomy of the prostitutes on the rue St. Denis are often Fellini-esque. Thanks, apparently, to the miracle of cosmetic surgery, many of the “girls” have breasts the size and shape of mega-grapefruits or small soccer balls; they display these amazing objects proudly, fully exposed to the breezes except for a tiny half-moon of a saucer that holds them up and out, barely covering the nipples. The women with good legs like to show them off: one tall lady wears six-inch high, clunky silver-lame heels and a tiny mini-skirt that barely covers the necessary; another sports a lacy, bright red mini-skirt the size of a pair of undies, with black garters visible beneath the lace. Other women, including older women of substantial heft, specialize in elaborate girdles and panties and suspenders, all in vivid colors, all on full display for the benefit of the passing crowd, which includes hungrily circling customers, ladies of fashion fresh off the plane from Tokyo or New York, an occasional Moslem housewife, her head covered with a scarf, pushing a baby carriage and dragging two small children beside her, the Hassids in their black clothes and their rigorously downcast eyes; and the weary owners of mom-and-pop clothes shops in Topeka, Winnepeg and Oslo, grimly trudging  through the Paris shops, shopping bags in hand, anxiously scanning the shop-windows for something that could be worn to the country club without causing a scandal.          The rue St. Denis has prostitutes and many other things;  the rue Blondel, a short street that branches off the rue St. Denis just below the Blvd. St. Denis, has prostitutes and nothing else. Indeed the rue Blondel has been synonymous with prostitution in Paris for centuries, and it houses a bordello that has such famous ceramics (the scenes depict the local specialities) that it has been classified as a national monument. Henry Miller brought Anäis Nin and her compliant husband here to participate in what is now referred to as a “live show;” then he wrote about it, and so did she; and they thereby added a layer of literary gloss to this particular corner of Parisian life.

           Like their sisters on the rue St. Denis, the elaborately coiffed and made-up ladies on the rue Blondel go as far as possible to display the merchandise, holding their coats (often mink) open in winter, one hand poised invitingly on a hip; in the summer their costumes are scantier by far, and little is left to the imagination. The ladies are friendly and cheerful, chatting and gossiping among themselves as they wait for their customers. A friend who was raised on the street tells me that he was always treated with great kindness and generosity by the local filles: he grew up thinking of whores as kindly, good-humored aunts. But whether symapthique or surly, they are most assuredly bounteous: a visitor to Paris who is looking for l’amour a la carte can find it on the rue Blondel, night and day, 365 days a year, in a vivid bouquet of colors, ages and sizes.  

My only disappointment on the rue Blondel is that photographs are strictly forbidden.          “Even if I pay?” I inquired of a lady with long black hair, purple eye shadow and a leopard-skin mini-skirt. “Even with your face turned away from the camera?”        “No pictures, ever,” she said with a sweet smile. “No one will let you take a photograph on the rue Blondel.”          (The picture on the right, like the picture of the faceless ladies below on the right, was taken in the Passage du Caire. It doesn't substitute for the lady with the leopard-skin mini-skirt, but it has its own charm.)

I love taking pictures in the Sentier. The picture below was taken near the rue d'Aboukir	This picture was taken in the Passage du Caire.

                                                                                  ISTAMBUL ON THE SEINE

The Blvd St. Denis, a broad boulevard that cuts across the rue St. Denis just north of the rue Blondel, delineates the end of the Sentier. No more whores or clothing stores; no more Hassids or Punjabi dolley-men; no more trucks full of dresses. On the other side of the Boulevard, just beyond the monolithic Porte St. Denis (a huge stone arch modeled after the Arch of Trajan in the Roman Forum and constructed by Louis XIV in 1672 to celebrate his military victories) the rue St Denis takes on a new name. North of the Blvd. de St. Denis it becomes the rue du Faubourg St. Denis – (“St. Denis extended”) and it assumes an entirely new character, as the center of Paris’s Turkish community.  The people on the street are mostly middle-aged Turks, speaking Turkish and dressed in Moslem headdress or colorful caps; even the beggars –and suddenly there are many women beggars, sprawled or seated on the sidewalk – are dressed in shapeless Moslem caftans. The cafes have names like “Le Café Istanbul ” and feature “Specialitées Turques”; the signs in the windows look like a Scrabble pick that will never make a word; and even the fruits and vegetables in the outdoor stands are exotic: 2 foot long bean-like thingies, or tiny, wrinkled red peppers unlike anything seen on the other side of the Boulevard.  

The Porte St. Denis	2 Foot Long Bean Thingies
A Turkish Cafe. "Would you like some Urfa Durum, Sir? It's very fresh today: would you like it fried or boiled?"	Not all the Passages off the rue du Faubourg St. Denis         are chic and glamorous.

This is basically a quartier populaire, a working class neighborhood, and produce, meat and groceries are sold here at prices far below the prices in the “nicer” neighborhoods of Paris. (With no loss, in my experience, in the quality of the food.) But no neighborhood in Paris is “only” one thing or another. A handful of elegant patisseries, a fashionable restaurant and a sophisticated wine shop indicate that the Turks on the rue du Faubourg St. Denis share their neighborhood with middle class French people: the mixture enriches both cultures.           In many parts of Paris, the square blocks –known charmingly in French as “patés des maisons”-- are so large that the 19th century developers who constructed them were able to create a kind of commercial corridor right through the middle of the space. These corridors, called “Passages” or “Galeries”, are found throughout the city, and  the Passages extending out of the rue St. Denis and the Faubourg St. Denis are particularly fascinating.

Julien, on the rue du Faubourg St. Denis. Recently bought by the "Flo Group," Julien has been a fashionable restaurant for a century --on a distinctly unfashionable street.

                                                               A FEW MORE PASSAGES; THE END IS NIGH

      The Passage du Grand Cerf, for example, runs between the rue St. Denis and the rue Doussoubs towards the super-trendy rue Montorgeuil. The passage begins on the rue St. Denis in the heart of porn-land, but it is filled with elegant shops that specialize in expensive and arty home furnishings, women’s clothes and jewelry: the contrast between the street and the Passage could not be more stark.  

        The Passage du Caire connects the rue St. Denis to the rue d’Aboukir and thereby links two of the most important streets in the Sentier. This Passage is a major commercial artery filled with dozens of shops selling mannequins, window decorations and other supplies for clothing stores; the lunch counter in the Passage is kosher --that's a picture of it, below left-- and at lunchtime it is filled to capacity.

Further north, to the left of the Faubourg St. Denis, the Cour des Petites Ecuries is home to one of the most important restaurants in Paris, the Brasserie Flo, a magnet for the Parisian beau monde, known here as “les people.”

         The rue du Faubourg St. Denis seems drab indeed after the glamour of les people, and the light seems to grow dimmer still as the street wanders farther northward and the Turkish population gives way to Indians and Pakistanis. Near the Gare du Nord the local video store is called Bollywood and the clothing stores sell saris rather than couture: the Punjabi dolley-men who live in this neighborhood can tumble out of bed and walk to work in the Sentier in a matter of seconds.   

        Just before the Gare de l’Est, the rue du Faubourg St. Denis intercepts a street that is named the rue de Paradis on the left and the rue de la Félicité on the right. (The rue de Paradis is a great place to shop for dishes and tableware.)

         It would be poetic to end an article about a street that is famous for its whores at the intersection of the rue de Paradis and the rue de la Félicité ; but in fact the rue du Faubourg  St Denis wanders on for another kilometer or so among a series of non-descript Indian and French stores before expiring wearily at the Blvd de la Chapelle.  Just below the Gare St. Lazare, there's a little carousel, much-used by the locals during good  weather.  

                                                                                LES BOUFFES DU NORD

The street does manage one last burst of drama before the end. The Bouffes du Nord is a small jewel of a theater constructed in 1876 that was abandoned for many decades before Peter Brooke acquired and restored it in 1974. His restoration respected the theater’s origins as a place of local entertainment for a working class community; that is, he retained the theater’s original size and shape, and he retained the original 19th century seating, which involves long benches rather than individual seats. He stabilized and added new lighting to the handsome, slightly crumbling three-story-high wall behind the stage, but he did not gussy it up.

        I recently went to the Bouffes du Nord for a performance of Portugal’s leading fado singer, and I was enchanted by the space as well as the performance. Small enough for perfect acoustics and for a clear view of the performers from every one of its 530 seats, the Bouffes feels venerable and proud; as I listened to the haunting, melancholy music and looked around at the unpretentious little theater, I felt as if I had left the world of today and entered a place of dream and magic, a universe that was suffused with the infinite sadness, the profound humanity and the heartrending beauty of ancient, ancient Europe.

        The street that begins at the Theatre du Chatelet and ends at the Bouffes du Nord –a street that embraces Bernstein and fado, “Sandwiches Pizza Crepes Pizza” and the brasserie Flo, the whores of the rue Blondel and the caftaned beggar ladies just north of the Porte St. Denis, the “NY Sex Team” tee shirts near Châtelet and the haute couture of the Sentier, a street that encompasses half a dozen wildly diverse worlds within a stretch of 3 or 4 kilometers: the rue St. Denis is Paris in a nutshell: splendid, sordid, multi-cultural, celestially French, deeply, magnificently human.  

        There’s nothing like it in Topeka.

                                                        A short note on the photo that heads the chapter       

          I generally don't like "explaining" my pictures, for the simple reason that other people's interpretations are usually far more interesting than my own. Without presuming to supplant anyone else's opinions, therefore, I'll just say what I find interesting about this image. 

           To me, the image is interesting because the mannequin is presumably about to be dressed, and is therefore about to become some kind of "ad" for the latest fashion. But standing as she is now --naked, flawlessly beautiful, surrounded by junk, with a Mohawk and a dog collar --and most vividly of all,  at the foot of  the Cross--  she is in a way the very definition of how "fashion" debases women. Or, one might say, how fashion "martryrises" women.

       I could go on; but you get the idea. The picture was taken on the rue Reaumur, near the rue St. Denis.

March 23, 2007

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