June 10, 2002
Rue St Denis
Rue St Denis
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| La rue et the view (of a corner of Pompidou). 09 Juin. |
You can see that St Denis is literally a 2 minute walk from the Centre George Pompidou, a really amazing and massive public place. There's an excellent museum of modern art on the top floor, but the building itself is a significant architectural etoile in the firmament of Parisian buildings. Not just that but it has a tremendous public library inside, theater space for public performances, a post office, an excellent design store (Printemps Design; I must say that it is more advanced than the MoMA Design Store), among other things. More on that later, but the nearby tourist mecca explains why St Denis is East Village-Old Times Square-and-also-New-Times-Square. A number of the restaurants are big, efficient touristy caricatures of European cuisine (such as Pizza Pino across from the Diesel store).
The street culture buts right up against this. Last Friday night we found ourselves slicing through a crowd that was half african dancing and half milling. A big homemade sign proclaimed (roughly) a "spontaneous happening of the citizens of the street". People were giving out free food, preaching political views, and dancing to music.
Les Fetes along the Seine
Speaking of spontaneous happenings: Thursday night on the Seine is something to see. Strung across every bridge and along every nook of the pedestrian-friendly banks were dozens of picnics, soirees, and river-gazing couples. The Parisians gather en masse on the river during the warm evenings of summer and drink wine, eat food, play music (lots of tramps hanging out playing guitars and flutes and such), etc. The map of Paris doesn't have a big "central" park; but it has the Seine, which is fantastically beautiful and substantially preserved for use by the citizens (i.e. no Robert Moses-style West Side Highway/FDR drive to rob them of the riverbanks).
Posted by amol at June 10, 2002 09:31 AM