ERIC B ON SPACE & CITIES

PARIS: WHEN LIFE WAS DEFINED BY A CERTAIN DISTANCE

I say this with affection and regret: Paris is like a tough old whore. Not one of those who market themselves on the Internet, but a woman who stands in a doorway for hours, smoking cigarettes and screaming out to people across the street. She is plump and sweaty, old enough to be your aunt.

There are fewer street hookers around these days—victims of changing tastes and government crackdowns. They can be found in the dusty streets near the rue Saint-Denis, where they service men above cut-rate dress shops and agencies that sell plane tickets to places like Cameroon. From a distance the hookers look like spots of colorful paint flicked down from above. Up close, their yellow hair, red clothes and blue eye shadow don’t look quite bright enough. Drabness, like time, is their enemy, and with each day they get a little paler. When one of them gives out and disappears from the street, no one takes her place.

The pleasure lanes near rue Saint-Denis and Les Halles used to have names like rue Tire-Boudin (“Sausage-Puller street”) and rue Trousse-Nonain (“Tumble-Nun street”) and rue de la Pute-y-muse (“Idling Tart street”). The streets are still there, but their names were changed long ago to rue Marie-Stuart, rue Beaubourg and rue Petit-muse. By the time the German Baron Haussmann was done redesigning the city in 19^th Century, the collection of streets whose names evoked “shit”—the rues Merdeuses, Merdelet, Chieurs and Chiards—had disappeared. Paris was becoming hygienic.

Haussmann went much further than sanitizing street names and installing sewers. The thousands of buildings he put on the city’s boulevards are all about people’s relationship with shit. The prime living spaces were put on the third floors, called the étages nobles, where there were tall windows, spacious apartments and ornate balconies. The idea was to let the wealthiest tenants live as far as possible far from the piles of wet manure on streets while still not having to climb too many stairs. The further up you went past the étages nobles, the smaller and stuffier the apartments became. In a city where horses were still everywhere and there were no elevators, quality of life was defined by one’s distance from shit.

All of that has changed. The top floors are now the most valuable, both for their light and their distance from car noise. There are toilets in apartments and the smell of shit is gone. So are most of Paris’s native street whores, called traditionnelles. The tight doorways that functioned as their offices on the rue Saint-Denis and its tributaries are unoccupied. The doors are their gravestones. French-born hookers now make their connections online and take cabs or the Métro to meet dates. They don’t need to stand out in public, so they wear the same clothes as everyone else. The remaining street trade is left to women from places like Kosovo and Sub-Saharan Africa, who are willing to put up with a higher risk of violence.

No matter how pretty Paris’s streets are now, all of them have tasted blood. The ancient neighborhoods of Les Halles and Saint-Denis are soaked in murder, which no amount of urban renewal can erase. The slaughterhouses have been replaced by an indoor shopping mall and the mass graves in the Cimetière des Innocents are gone. But the traditionnelle spirit remains. It glows like a pink ghost in the evening sky; it calls from the music in porno DVD and tattoo shop; and, in the cold looks of cops, it still frightens.

With their wicked and dangerous attractions, the French street hookers of this quarter were a core element of Paris life. The few who are left are like the last living speakers of a dying language. Once they are gone, the tongue is extinct.

[This piece is a contribution from Eric Bewrkowitz.]