Pigalle: the battle is lost, but who won the war?

According to the New York Times, the charm of the Pigalle district has been destroyed by a recent influx of American trendsetters. Pigalle may be defeated, but the guilty party is not fashions but instead simple economics.

Thomas Chatterton Williams’ article for the paper, ‘How hipsters ruined Paris’, is a smartly observed piece which managed to get under the skin of both Parisians and imported Americans – quite an achievement in itself. It is however let down by a glaring oversight. The writer laments the falling of one of the city’s bastions and yet seems completely unaware of the fact that he is a soldier in the invading army.
Chatterton Williams’ major gripe is the area’s ‘loss of grit and character’, which seemingly equates to pharmacies, dry cleaners and most importantly, the once ubiquitous bar à hôtesses. He has a point. Although the Pigalle district has never been anything other than transient and based around a fluctuating night-time economy, something a little different is happening today. What he is observing is the creeping hand of gentrification.

Unfortunately Chatterton Williams is not clear about his own role in the downfall. He wants the trappings of an urban middle-class lifestyle; a safe place for his family, a place to buy Pouilly-Fumé wine, but he also wants the exotic. Like the ‘hipsters’ he decries though, he only wants this as a visual, a sound or an odour.

A classic - and refreshingly ordinary - brasserie tabac in Pigalle, probably a prime location for a future installation.

His article can be read as a form of self-loathing, but the target he picks for his attack is not the right one. The ‘hipsters’ – let’s call them instead the educated middle-classes - are not to blame for the transformation of Paris. They are merely a symptom and not the cause of the disease.

As Social Geographer Anne Clerval points out in her recent book ‘Paris sans le peuple’, Paris is changing because the inhabitants of the city have changed. And this is not a new phenomenon.

The golden age of Paris according to Chatterton Williams was the 1920s, a time when people from “the well-heeled to the creative to the horizontally employed — collided.” This fact was not born from fashions and the identity of a district but because of economics. Until the latter half of the 20th century  much of Paris was still affordable to the majority. Rents were controlled, social housing was encouraged, communities were built, unskilled jobs were widespread - all of which meant that residence in the city wasn’t necessarily linked to an individual’s income.

Indeed, as Anne Clerval pointed out in a recent interview, this situation continued up until the early 1980s. In 1982, 42% of all Parisians were from the lower classes. By 2008, this figure had dropped to 27%. Today even the middle classes are struggling to afford to live in the city. Most of this is directly due to key decisions taken at both national and local level.

Perhaps more than the sex shops and the bar à hôtesses, the decline of which is probably linked more to changes in consumption patterns, it is the closure of area's historic music shops which is more indicative of the economic factors at play. Rather tellingly, this one is alongside a Pigalle-branded bar.

There is an invisible battle in Pigalle and elsewhere, but it part of a class war that dare not speak its name. And yet there are some who are happy to turn it into a mere food fight. Revelling in the victory of bourgeois good taste, the Paris by Mouth website has compiled a list of spots in the district provided by the kinds of people Chatterton Williams was attacking. If the tongue of this particular mouth is firmly in its cheek, it is a perfect illustration of what has happened to the city.

The blindspot of this feature is not to see that gentrification – represented here by good food and well-mixed cocktails – cannot co-exist with more ‘populaire’ establishments. As Anne Clerval again points out in the same interview, “la mixité sociale à Paris est une notion hypocrite” (social diversity in Paris is a hypocritical concept). The Paris by Mouth article argues that this gentrification can only be a good thing – but as the new bars replace the bar à hôtesses, the dry-cleaners and long-distance telephone stores, so the desirability of the neighbourhood increases. This in turn means sharp rises in property values, and by definition, exclusion.

Where Chatterton Williams is strongest is when he points out the fundamental dishonesty of the most recent transformations in Pigalle – namely the absurd rebranding of the neighbourhood and the hijacking of the district’s symbols. ‘Pigalle’ has become a visual brand, with the Causses grocery store even adding ‘Sud Pigalle’ to its own-labelled goods (although this Pigalle seems to be a place without an Est, Ouest or Nord). The deceit reaches its apogee at Dirty Dick, a bar which has kept the identity of the neighbouring and fast disappearing bar à hôtesses. This is safe sleaze though, with book clubs replacing bondage.

The Dirty Dick bar. I'm sure the are very happy that I accidently caught the reflection of a sex shop in one of the windows.

It is difficult to argue that a bar à hôtesses is better for a neighbourhood than an organic food shop, especially when you see that one such bar in the Rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle has been closed down for 6 months for peddling prostitution. However, if the new ‘hipster’ bars, restaurants and shops have chosen this location it is because of the area’s vestiges of sleaziness - the ‘whiff of dirt and sex in the air’ as Chatterton Williams puts it. By merely existing though they are helping to kill off this identity.

For the Pigalle brand to work they need the neighbourhood to keep its edge. As the brand grows though it cleans up everything around it, leading to just one logical conclusion – it will eventually eat itself. This has already happened elsewhere in Paris – primarily on the left bank – the result being the creation of sterile and bourgeois districts.

In reality the battle in this neighbourhood was lost a long time ago, and is perhaps best summed up in the transformation of the Sans Souci bar. From the 1930s to 1960s, this was a centre of criminal activities in the area. In 1960, its owner, Georges Rapin, was even executed after being found guilty of murdering his mistress, a local stripper. Today the bar – still operating under the same name - is quiet and tastefully decorated, peopled not by strippers and gangsters but designers and architects.

“When I first showed up, the only really good restaurant in the neighborhood was the lamentably now-gone Casa Olympe, but during the last few years, this patch of Paris has really shined up its gastronomic credentials” says Alex Lobrano in the Paris by Mouth feature. Perhaps it was difficult to find a decent meal in Pigalle in the past, but at least people could afford to live there.