Chatelet Les Halles

For many visitors to Paris, the first glimpse of the city is the gloriously scruffy transport interchange at Chatelet Les Halles. For those living in the city, it is an almost unavoidable hub, welcoming 750,000 passengers a day. Creaking, crumbling, peeling and slowly falling apart, it somehow still manages to be efficient.

Welcome to the underground – the deep underground. The principal Metro and RER interchange is a submerged network of platforms and tunnels which itself sits underneath an underground shopping centre. This is the largest underground train station in the world, positioned beneath the largest underground shopping centre in the world.

Laying deep beneath the surface of the city, it is unsurprising to find a lack of natural light. It is a city of hundreds of thousands of fluorescent lamps and yet it remains brightly polychrome. This is a child of the 1970s, a creation from a time when colour was considered an essential element. The colours are codes if only we could follow them, but in today’s monochrome world we’ve forgotten how they work. Soon the whole system will be renovated and the colours will go; the red benches, the blue tiles, the yellow walls. In their place will come the standard, uniform aseptic white environment.

Chatelet – Les Halles is not loved, but it works. Back above ground, the district in which it is situated has been adopted by the communities who gather here, notably young people from the surrounding suburbs. In a report commissioned by the city of Paris on this theme based around interviews with this young population, the results point towards the maintaining of the current layout. Architects and urbanists have been queuing up to make their mark on this tender heart of Paris, but who would they be working for?

A typical comment from a suburbanites is that it would be impossible to make it better. The transport interchange works, the shopping centre is successful and the concrete gardens outside provide areas where young people can relax and not feel judged. If Parisians find the area ugly and the young people threatening, well they’ve still got Saint Germain, the Marais and just about the whole of the rest of the city for them.

A concept that appears in this report is ‘reparisianisation’. There is a fear amongst the young people interviewed that by renovating the area (work is scheduled to start in 2010) and making it fit more into a more typical Paris feel, the spirit of the place will be destroyed. It is a project based largely around esthetics that have proved not to be pleasing to Parisians, but is this not purely a bourgeois judgement on a part of the city that has never belonged to them? This is the famous ‘belly’ of the city, the previous home of a centuries old market that reeked of animal carcasses and alcohol. Today the population is another kind of proletariat, but Chatelet – Les Halles is still a celebration of diversity and a joyous display of colour in the face of what is often stifling conformity.

La Colonne Médicis – a mystery for Halloween

In a city that has been investigated and documented as much as Paris, not much remains that has a glimmer of mystery. Alongside the Bourse de Commerce near Les Halles though stands a 31 metre high column for which there are two unanswered questions; what was it used for and why is it still there?

The column itself is the only remaining vestige of a royal palace know as the Hôtel de la Reine. This palace was built for Catherine de Médicis in 1572, with the column being added three years later. It seems that Catherine de Médicis was a great believer in the divinatory arts, and employed an astrologist called Cosme Ruggieri, who she consulted before taking important decisions. This column may have played an important role in those decisions.

According to some evidence, the column was used by Ruggieri, primarily as an astrological observatory. Ruggieri had a workshop at the top of the tower, but interestingly it could also be accessed directly from Catherine de Médicis’s apartment in the palace via a spiral staircase. What exactly took place in Ruggieri’s workshop is not clear, and neither is the exact role astrology played in the life of Catherine de Médicis, an incredibly powerful woman, who was Queen from 1547 to 1559, then Queen Mother and advisor to three of her sons during their reigns.

Catherine de Médicis died in 1589, but the tower has survived long after her. Ruggieri continued with his work in his room, but made many enemies in the church and the court. When he died in 1615 he was refused a decent burial, and instead his body was dragged through the streets of the city and left on the wayside. Is it surely for this reason that there have often been reported sightings of a dark figure at the top of this column on stormy nights.

After the death of Ruggieri, it is probable that the column became purely decorative or possibly defensive. The column was sold separately from the rest of the palace, thus saving it from destruction, although it is not known why this was the case. It was eventually sold on again to the city of Paris, and has stood firmly in place whilst first the palace was demolished, then two other buildings were built around it (initially the Halle aux Blés, then today’s Bourse de Commerce).

The column looks curiously out of place today, even if the Bourse de Commerce that blankets it was designed in a similar classical style. It looks like an extravagant chimney, or a rather absurd decorative feature, but given this, it is still easy to overlook it in the congested landscape of Les Halles.

Does it still serve a purpose today? The staircase still exists inside the tower, but today there are no echoes of footsteps mounting and descending the steps. The doorway on the ground level is now firmly closed, and nobody stands at the top anymore – do they?