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Eastern Paris, where new worlds emerge
Territories of the avant-garde -- plus new populations and ecological creations
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Eastern Paris is the place where things are humming, like Montmartre and Montparnasse when rents were low.
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The area is huge and the neighborhoods that we explore are highly varied.
Here are examples of what we will see.
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- To understand eastern Paris, one must evoke the Commune
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 - The tragedy began on the hilltops of Belleville and Montmartre.
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 - Belleville's summit, the place to tell the Commune's story.
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Revolutionary for its time (1871), the City put through the 8-hour day, free, secular schooling, equal pay for women and women's vote...
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The attempt ended with the massacre 20,000 Parisians. Hemingway recalls how that memory was recalled in the 1920's: we read that passage.
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- Here the libertarian tradition remains rooted
- Nestled among low-cost modern buildings, an authentic "vieux Paris" (unmodernized Paris)
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 - This venerable café looks like a movie set.
We came for chansons françaises, and heard a woman say that her cousin had written songs for Edith Piaf, who grew up in this neighborhood (Ménilmontant).
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The intensity of her iconic love songs fits its heartbreaking past.
The clients drew us into the dancing...
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- French people from elsewhere contribute to these neighborhoods' vitality
- Immense paintings transform blank walls into art galleries
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 - In Ménilmontant
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 - In Belleville
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These stunning works are among the city's most dramatic.
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- A young, creative public encourages the arts
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 - Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, in Hollywood, 1962...
Bobos ("bourgeois bohemians") raise rents and may marginalize the original residents. But their presence, which is recent, explains eastern Paris's dynamism in the arts.
For example...
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 - and as recalled in eastern Paris, 2009
"Whatever happened to Baby Jane?" is an American movie classic of the 1960's. One would not expect young French actors to create a play about its shooting, or that such a play would appeal to Parisians. Yet it had a six-week run here...
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 - When the City built a gym on a garden voters shared...
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 - it let them transfer that garden to the roof.
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We discover gardens that neighbors share,
sidewalk "guerilla gardens"
and the City's "biological garden".
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- Emphatically un-"touristy", the eastern city is at the heart of Paris's energy now
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 - This well-known supermarket, graffs and youth are part of the vigor that classic tourism forgets.
The movie view of Paris is in the west. The east is far more vibrant.
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Credits: wall art Ménilmontant / Anne Vanet; "Baby Jane" / trailer on internet; actresses / photo given by the artists; other photos / Catherine Aubin
 - Unexpected Paris guided tours
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