Building a New Paris

Standing atop the Arc de Triomphe, the American gazed in silence over the panorama of Paris, traditional city of light, of elegance and romance. Finally he spoke. "This isn't quite what I expected," said Bill Estes, 22, of Atlanta. "But I guess you can't stop progress."

All over the city, from St. Cloud to Montparnasse, from Place d'ltalie to Belleville, there are signs of building, burrowing and bulldozing. Some 60 new skyscrapers puncture a skyline once graced mainly by domes and spires; one cluster of tall buildings even crowds the Eiffel Tower. A superhighway cuts along the quai on the Right Bank of the Seine where Utrillo once painted his cityscapes while patient fishermen waited for the carp to bite. The Place Vendome, Place de la Madeleine and the Avenue Foch have been gouged to accommodate layer on layer of cars in subterranean parking gai ages. It all adds up, reports TIME Bureau Chief Charles Eisendrath, to Paris' biggest urban renewal since the 1850s, when Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann tore up much of the medieval town and started creating his city of symmetry, parks and long vistas.

Like Haussmann's work in its time, the new changes are stirring some impassioned outcries. Last year 100,000 Frenchmen petitioned in vain to save Les Halles, the old central food market that Emile Zola described as "the belly of Paris." The market has now been moved to more functional quarters in the suburbs, near Orly airport, and a giant commercial center called the Plateau Beaubourg will rise in place of the old vegetable stands. Last month there were demonstrations against plans for an expressway along the Left Bank. "Today for the first time within memory," says Etienne Mallet, urban-affairs critic for the daily Le Monde, "people are going into the streets to protest against new construction."

Is the city of light becoming the city of blight? Not really. The ardent reaction is partly due to the fact that Paris remained virtually unchanged for half a century. Unlike Berlin or London, it escaped bombing during World War II and did not have to be rebuilt. Nor are Parisians like American city dwellers, who see constant demolition and construction as necessary signs of economic health. Paris remained recognizably the place described by Proust, Hemingway and Fitzgerald--stylish, intimate and lovely. That was part of its charm, and any change thus comes as a shock.

The fact is that change was needed --and badly. Few visitors realize that Parisians do not really like to live in tiny walk-up apartments without adequate plumbing. (At last check in 1968, fully one-third of the city's housing lacked private toilets.) Even worse, Paris was clearly being overwhelmed by "le boom." Though the city (pop. 2.5 million) continually loses people to the suburbs (pop. about 7,000,000), the vast majority of jobs are in town. That means commuters and commuters mean cars. Every weekday, 900,000 automobiles flow through Paris, and there are only 150,000 parking spaces on the streets of the central city.

But le boom also provided enough francs for officials to do something about Paris' troubles, starting with the car. In accordance with a Gaullist master plan devised in 1965, a six-lane highway called the Peripherique now girdles the city, diverting traffic from the center. For those who insist on driving downtown, huge new subterranean parking garages containing spaces for 30,000 cars have been constructed, with another 15,000 under way.

New Subways. What the planners would much prefer is that commuters leave their cars at the city gates and use mass-transit lines from there on. To that end, the Metro subway system is carrying out a 20-year program of expansion and renovation that will ultimately cost $1 billion. It has already built parking lots with 24,000 places at the outermost stops. It has extended lines into the suburbs and added express service. Metro stations are being scrubbed and renovated. New ones, like Auber and De Gaulle, boast modernistic kiosks and boutiques.

The traffic improvements would be pointless and expensive--they eat up half of Paris' $270 million annual budget--if taming the auto were the officials' only goal. But that is just part of the master plan, entitled the "Grand Design for the Year 2000," and its mandate is clear: as with Les Halles, industry will be moved from the core of the city to its outskirts, and white-collar jobs will be dispersed as well. The economic life of the city is to be decentralized and integrated with that of the suburbs.

Already the process is under way. The Citroen auto factory on the Left Bank, one of Paris' biggest employers, is moving to Aulnay-sous-Bois. Its 50-acre riverfront site near the Eiffel Tower will enlarge the area known as "Front de Seine," a complex of high-rise apartments, supermarkets and offices. To relieve the housing shortage elsewhere, 70,000 new apartments are being built in a half-dozen major developments--all of them high-rise--scattered on the outskirts of the city.

The most ambitious project of all is at La Defense, almost three miles west of the Arc de Triomphe. There a forest of towers is being built to provide offices for 100,000 white-collar workers and homes for 2,100 families. Some 12,000 people already work at La Defense for big companies like Esso and Dunlop. When finished in 1977, it will be a satellite worthy of any city, complete with parks, elevated pedestrian walkways and shopping centers.

"In France," Baron Haussmann said confidently in 1859, "a good act well explained is always an act sanctioned." Alas, not all of the present planners' changes are "good acts." Nor do they all cohere. Where Haussmann had almost dictatorial control over his efforts, six separate government agencies share responsibility for the present rebuilding program. As a result of poor coordination, mistakes do happen, like the 35-acre Maine-Montparnasse project. It violates the intent of the Grand Design by adding to an already congested part of Paris 1,000 apartments and offices for 7,000 workers in a 62-story tower. The damage that the Montparnasse tower has done to Paris' proud profile has caused the largest outcry of all the rebuilding in the city--and helped move Paris Prefect Jean Verdier last week to announce new rules to reduce the permissible height of new buildings in the heart of Paris to 80 feet.

Haussmann had taste as well as authority. His successors often lack his sense of design. Most of the new buildings are as bland and expressionless as a child's wooden blocks. (The new sports stadium at Pare des Princes in Boulogne is an exception.) Commented L'Express: "There is no excuse for the wretchedness of French architecture."

Vandalized. As Parisians are learning, poorly designed buildings harm more than their immediate surroundings. The city's great visual axis, from the Place de la Concorde through the Arc de Triomphe, will be vandalized by the satellite city of La Defense. Not only will Defense's tall towers clumsily bracket the magnificent arch, but the development authority last week announced a new office complex that will actually block the view through the arch. It is like drawing a curtain across one of Paris' most famous vistas. Because the project is official, it apparently will not be stopped.

The authorities are responding to some outcries, however. A hotel project on the fashionable Right Bank has been shelved, and plans for the expressway on the Left Bank have been modified so that it will be hidden. These belated actions point toward a new attitude about urban grace. If its promise is realized, the Paris of the future will be a vastly different, and more manageable city than it is today. The suburbs will be the bustling, growing, changing centers of activity. Central Paris, the Paris of lovers and tourists, will remain much as it has been for a century, its improvements largely invisible and underground, its newly scrubbed monuments intact and inviolate.

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