[URBAN NOTE] "‘A Nice Little Place With Cheap Beer’: Where ISIS Attacked"

[rfmcdonald]

At The Atlantic, Feargus O'Sullivan writes about the neighbourhoods in Paris attacked on Friday. They actually sound a lot like the neighbourhoods I regularly inhabit here in Toronto, like Bloor Street West and The Annex and Queen Street West and Parkdale.

[V]isiting the attack sites, what was striking was their normality. Except for the Bataclan, with its gaudy paint job, the cafés and restaurants the terrorists struck are places you might walk past without giving a second glance. They were still unquestionably places at the heart of a community. Asking my Parisian friends if they knew of or ever visited the places that were attacked, the answer was clear: Yes, we knew them all. Yes, we went to them all the time.

The Petit Cambodge’s reputation for good, affordable food regularly had people queuing out the door on Friday nights. The Carillon, the bar opposite, was a nice little place with cheap beer, one friend told me. It attracted everyone from neighborhood old-timers to hipsters, who would spill out to smoke in front. A 15-odd-minute walk south, the Belle Équipe, another attack site, is a pretty but unremarkable café on a nice street—France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls lives round the corner—run by three women. The Bataclan, site of the worst of Friday’s carnage, is a charming old theater that’s long been run as a club and concert venue. Hosting parties and gay nights as well as live music, it’s known locally for having a great program—one whose quality arguably exceeds that of its sound system.

“Why here?” everyone is asking themselves, looking around at places that were the unremarked backdrop of so many lives. It is a horribly surreal experience to see bullet holes riddling shop windows around somewhere as ordinary-looking as the Casa Nostra pizzeria; the sidewalk where at least five people were killed is now strewn with sand. Daesh, as the terrorist group ISIS is being referred to here, claims that it has struck at symbols of French perversity, but as you would expect from murderous zealots, their definition of the perverse (pizza?) seems preposterously broad.

The zone where the attacks took place is nonetheless a highly distinctive, specific one. This fast-changing part of Paris is a sort of unofficial buffer area, wedged between the long-expensive, gay-friendly Marais district and the poorer Chinese and North African communities of Belleville. It’s at the forefront of what the Libération newspaper calls hipsterisation avancée, but it doesn’t necessarily appear so to an outsider’s eye. Certainly there are expensive little boutiques and gluten-free bakeries sneaking in here and there, and attractive youngish people hanging around. But the overall feeling is nonetheless still that of a quartier populaire—a working-class neighborhood with shabby but likable corner cafés, laundromats, cheap grocery stores, and a crowd on the streets that’s as diverse as anywhere in in the city. Like much of Paris, it doesn’t have the best reputation for street safety, but it feels great. Alive, authentic, dense. It’s everything you might hope Paris to be.