For decades, until 2001, the town of Pantin on the northeast edge of Paris was a working-class stronghold of France's Communist Party. Today, like many other suburbs that ring around the French capital, it is rundown, rusty and plagued by crime and unemployment. Most of its factories, which once produced things like matches, straw hats, chocolate and rope, have shut down. Its housing projects, state-of-the-art architectural creations when they were built in the 1950s, have become havens for petty criminals and drug dealers.
But last month, the magazine L'Express named Pantin "the new sexy suburb" of Paris. The reason was the opening of a vast exhibition space by the art dealer and gallery owner Thaddeus Ropac. Ropac wanted to create a magical space to show monumental artworks that was accessible by Métro. He found a cluster of decrepit, leaky industrial buildings, including a 19th-century landmarked heating works factory, and transformed them into a 50,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art gallery. His debut show featured oversize new works by the German artist Anselm Kiefer and a re-creation of Joseph Beuys's performance "Iphigenie."
In mid-October, 40 artists, 25 museum directors and several fashion designers including Haider Ackermann, Christian Louboutin and Kris Van Assche were among the 300 guests who celebrated the gallery's opening at a Champagne-drenched inaugural dinner. Last Saturday, art collectors and curators visiting Paris for the annual International Contemporary Art Fair FIAC turned up in chauffeur-driven black sedans to inspect the site.
"A guy from Vogue said to me the other day, 'This could be the new Brooklyn, the Brooklyn of Paris,'" said Marcus Rothe, the communications director for the Ropac galleries. "The gallery is a major step in breaking down the psychological barrier of the 'Périphérique' that divides Paris from the suburbs. But Pantin needs another five, six years to become Brooklynized."
For foreign visitors and even Parisians, it can be daunting to venture beyond the city limits. Except for Versailles, whose chateau is at the top of every tourist's to-do list, the suburbs on the other side of the Périphérique — the beltway that rings Paris — are rarely thought of as destinations.
The suburbs, or banlieues, fall into two categories: the "chic," like Neuilly to the west, where former President Nicolas Sarkozy was once mayor, and the "troubled" like those in Seine-St.-Denis, or Department "93," to the north and east, which won notoriety as an area rocked by riots and car burnings in 2005.
On the "troubled" end is Seine-St.-Denis, home to the least appreciated religious gem in the Paris area: the St.-Denis Basilica. Forty-three kings, 32 queens and 63 princes and princesses were buried here. The actual bodies of the royals were put into a mass grave during the French revolution, but their marble tombs remain in the basement of the basilica.
In recent years, other "troubled" suburbs have sought to reinvent themselves as alternatives to the Louvre-Eiffel Tower-Versailles tourist axis. Accueil Banlieues (Welcome to the Suburbs), run by local volunteers, gives guided walking tours of the "93," as well as cut-rate lodging in private homes (guided tour included). Greeters, modeled on the cross-cultural, volunteer tour group Big Apple Greeter in New York, offers what it calls "alternative tourism."
The tourism office of the "93" lists more than 500 walks, including visits to architecturally intriguing (if rundown) high-rises and closed factories.
"We want to reach people who feel negatively towards the lower-class neighborhoods and show them the diversity of the living spaces, show them that there are more than barred windows and crumbling high-rises on the other side of the Périphérique," Mathieu Glaymann, a volunteer tour guide, told Le Monde. Then there are new and planned cultural spaces.
Earlier this month, the art dealer Larry Gagosian opened a gallery for large-scale art in a 17,760-square-foot industrial warehouse built in the 1950s on the grounds of what was once Le Bourget airport. In September, the film director Luc Besson inaugurated his Cité Européenne du Cinema, a filmmaking center, in a former power plant in Saint-Denis (with nine film sets, an office complex, film production facilities and two film schools).
Jean Nouvel's Philharmonie de Paris in the Parc de la Villette, the largest cultural park just inside Paris, and bordering Pantin, will open in 2014. Nouvel is also designing an arts complex in a former Renault auto factory on the Île Seguin which is technically part of Boulogne-Bilancourt (one of the "chic" suburbs). It will include gallery spaces, art studios, production facilities and exhibition halls and open in 2016.
Despite these signs of renewal and reinvention, the suburbs are still not the easiest places to visit. In Pantin, for instance, a walk around town requires a good map, a spirit of adventure and careful planning to avoid wandering into an unsafe neighborhood. Unemployment in this once-industrial enclave is still high; more than 30 percent of Pantin's 54,000 residents live in subsidized public housing.
But there are signs of new life. French companies have opened offices and workshops in Pantin, lured by cheaper rents and easy access to Paris. Hermès makes upholstery and luxury luggage and handbags (including its Kelly and Birkin bags) at ateliers here. Bourjois, Gucci and Agnès b. also have operations here; Chanel is expanding its presence. A tramway connecting Pantin to Paris and other suburbs will open at the end of the year.
The Canal de l'Ourcq, which divides the town, is beginning to attract retail businesses and restaurants. Summertime water shuttles, like mini-Bateaux Mouches, offer rides up and down the canal. The Italian restaurant Brunello, opened two years ago by a Sicilian chef on the canal, offers excellent and well-priced pasta dishes and quaffable Sicilian wine (but disappointing pizzas). Nearby is La Famille de Lily, a Senegalese-French bistro and grocery that prepares dishes like carrot flan and chicken in preserved lemons and spices.
The Ropac gallery, located in an industrial no-man's land on a grim highway, has no cafe or restaurant and few parking places. The only sitting area is the Clubhouse, a private living-room-like lounge with a fireplace, a conceptual D.J. station, vintage designer furniture and an espresso machine, accessible to collectors and special guests. A bookstore is planned, along with conferences, screenings and musical and dance performances. Fashion designers have asked to rent the space for their shows, but have been politely turned down. "We don't want to give away our soul too easily," Ropac said in an interview.
My favorite place in town is La Dynamo jazz and blues center, which hosts the "Banlieues Bleues" concert series in a 200-seat auditorium. On one side of the center is a courtyard that's bordered by an apartment building where the Surrealist writer André Breton once lived and abandoned horse stables decorated with red bricks and ceramic turquoise tiles. The doors to the stables have been sealed with cement blocks. But the courtyard is big enough for a cafe. Or better, a wine bar. Xavier Lemettre, the director of Banlieues Bleues, told me that secreted a way in one of the stables is a superb private collection of wine. Maybe that's a metaphor for the potential hidden all around the suburbs of Paris.
Emerik Derian contributed reporting from Paris.
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