T Magazine: Marseille, the Secret Capital of France

Despite an ambitious face-lift with gleaming new architecture and a refurbished waterfront, Marseille remains a stubbornly glorious melting pot of seediness and sun — which is precisely why it's so wonderful.

THIS YEAR MARSEILLE is a European Capital of Culture, so new museums have opened, the streets have been spruced up for tourists, and there's a yearlong arts festival. The city has also been remaking its port — its historic identity and bygone glory — and trying to become a regional business hub, refurbishing abandoned and decrepit buildings around the harbor and erecting glamorous office towers.

It gleams, where the money has been spent, although just in the shadow of Zaha Hadid's new skyscraper along the waterfront lie some of the poorest inner-city neighborhoods. Marseille remains a patchwork sprawl of rich and poor neighborhoods, a melancholy, compelling mess of corruption and sun — the anti-Paris and secret capital of a France that doesn't pretend the country is race-blind.

SLIDE SHOW

The Real Capital Of France

Despite recent development, Marseille remains a gloriously seedy and lively city, characterized by sun, sea, and abundant contrasts. More…

I returned recently to check out the face-lift. What makes Marseille special isn't the new architecture or the upscale downtown shopping boulevards, which seem to me interchangeable with streets in Rome or Vienna or other cities; it isn't even the beaches and the bouillabaisse.

I'm drawn back by the lifeblood of the neighborhoods: by the old embedded culture of the city — and by the new culture, too, the one that isn't cooked up for tourists. Marseille has always been a big village, with its distinct dialect and style, a slow, noisy, rough but cool magnet for bohemia, like Berlin, except hilly and sun kissed, open to the world, with its own sad stories. It has cultivated a local rap music, which, like the soccer team, is supported in local clubs and on local radio stations and has come to link Marseillais across race and class. Rappers in Marseille celebrate the city's melting-pot heritage. When suburbs outside other French cities rioted several years ago, Marseille remained calm. The poor neighborhoods belong to the city, so poor Marseillais, unlike young immigrants forced to live outside Paris or Lyon, feel connected to it, bound together by a civic identity.

Nevertheless, the number of murders in the city has spiked in the last few years. Another spate of revenge killings this summer provoked Le Monde to declare that Marseille is spinning "out of control," despite its makeover. All of France wrestles with decline now, the country's economy sputtering, its population aging and social safety net fraying. In Marseille, the problem is exaggerated by drug trafficking — on top of poverty and joblessness. "We are dealing with young outcasts who behave as if gang law matters more than the law of the Republic," an appalled Eugène Caselli, president of the Marseille Provence Métropole urban community and a Socialist candidate for mayor next year, recently told the Catholic newspaper La Croix.

Marseille is France's second biggest city, with 850,000 people, about a third of them Muslim, more than a third under 30; the unemployment rate tops 13 percent. (The national average is around 10.5 percent.) It is estimated that a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. The hard fact is that the new museums and rejuvenated port still can't provide enough jobs.

But Marseille and its surrounding region had 52 homicides last year. Baltimore, with a smaller population, had 217. The drug trade warps the poorest quarters of Marseille, where it's said to be the major employer. But Paris by various measures is more violent. Marseillais also like to exaggerate the crime; it's part of their contrarian nature, burnishing the city's tough image. "Marseille loves its gangsters," as Philippe Pujol, who covers crime for the newspaper La Marseillaise, told me. "Since the 1930s, there have been on average maybe between 10 and 20 murders a year."

BY THE TURN of the last century the city had become Europe's busiest port, a thronging refuge for immigrants from everywhere, exchanging mountains of merchandise and armies for the riches of Africa, the Americas and Asia. It was "the Detroit of France," as Jean Viard, a sociologist at the Center for National Scientific Research in Paris, put it, "in the sense that the colonies were its single industry." By 1914, about a quarter of Marseille was Italian. For a while, the mafia ran the city; then the communists took over.

When most of France's colonies gained independance in the 1960s, the city hemorrhaged jobs. Increasingly, immigrants who could afford to move, left. The poorest of the poor remained. Viard believes the city's future now depends on becoming more of an economic partner with Provence, which has prospered thanks to new tech hubs as well as tourism, while Marseille struggles. He welcomes the new waterfront development.

Two of the new public buildings, built with regional help, occupy a sanitized stretch of rebuilt harbor on the once abandoned J4 pier. One of them, the Villa Méditerranée, designed by Stefano Boeri, the Italian architect, cantilevers over a reflecting pool. It's a conference center for economic, environmental and urban planning in the region, with space for exhibitions. Just beside it, the main building of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, by Rudy Ricciotti, is cloaked in a decorative screen whose patterned design suggests shimmering water. I looked around just before the place opened in June. The lineup of historical and art exhibitions seem geared to the usual tourists and schoolchildren. The two fancy buildings are like a pair of preening models colliding on a narrow runway. Not far away, J1 is another one of the remodeled old piers, its empty top story of concrete pillars and floor converted last year to make room for yet more exhibition spaces and a restaurant. The architect is Catherine Bonte. She took me to the windows to see the ferries and the sea wall. The view was spectacular.

Further up the quai, along the Rue de la République, chain stores have been moving in, old businesses closing down, rents rising. Robert Attardo is the owner of Le Phocéen, an old bar-tabac with torn red banquettes and a murky aquarium. A few elderly patrons nursed coffees on the patio the morning I dropped in.

"They promised us that a lot of things would happen with the cultural capital, but now no one walks around here and the workers are gone," Attardo said. He meant the construction workers were gone, having built the new buildings; they've been priced out of the neighborhood.

THE CITY IS ALWAYS trying to move the poor out and become more bourgeois," Minna Sif, a writer in Marseille, Corsican-born to Moroccan parents, said. "But Marseille resists becoming bourgeois by its nature. Back in the '60s there was a push to get rid of the North Africans, but then another wave of them arrived and reclaimed Marseille. People who settle here are like me. In the end they no longer regard themselves as Moroccan or Corsican first; they become Marseillais. The politicians are building museums and fancy houses without considering the reality of the city. It is a poor city. Its soul is multicultural."

Drive north, and some of the poorest neighborhoods command some of the best views of the sea. The middle-class enclave of L'Estaque looks as it does in Braque's paintings: a pretty fishing village and Cubist jumble of palms, red roofs and stone, climbing a steep hill.

To the south, there's the Vallon des Auffes, a picturesque harbor jammed with small boats and old restaurants, and Périer, home to the consulates and plastic surgeons, along with Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation, the glory of French high Modernism. But not much further on is La Cayolle, full of 1970s social housing blocks, where dealers sell drugs on deserted street corners.

And back in the center of the city, steps from the Old Port, Noailles is a crowded casbah of Lebanese bakeries, Moroccan spice marts, African wig shops, Chilean hairdressers, couscous joints, hookah cafes, Caribbean eateries and housewares bazaars hawking washing machines alongside baskets of cheap espadrilles. The quarter is proof that Marseille keeps its melting-pot identity close to its heart. Crowds line up night and day at the Marché des Capucins, Noailles's marketplace, for cheap slices of anchovy pizza at Charly; Tunisian men gossip at long, beaten-up tables, drinking sweet tea at Le Rif, while across the square, fishmongers bark to the customers at the Poissonnerie du Lamparo and fill paper cones with fried sardines.

From there it's a short hike to the Cours Julien, where the bobos dress toddlers in hand-sewn sailor caps, roll cigarettes and drink organic cola with their kale gnocchi at outdoor cafes. This is the Williamsburg of Marseille, but it's still got a healthy mix of tumbledown comic-book stores and tattoo parlors to balance the tourist traps.

La Cantinetta is one of the neighborhood's stylish Italian restaurants. Waiters tote plates of just-sliced prosciutto and yeasty bread. There's a pretty garden. The place is always jammed. The overburdened young owners are Stéphanie Nardoca and Pierre-Antoine Denis. When I finished dinner at the bar one night, Nardoca came over.

I love Marseille, I told her.

Marseille is a nightmare, she said, a familiar refrain. Her husband, the chef, slaves day and night. She wastes hours a day tracking down deliveries that never arrive, workers who go AWOL.

"It's something about the air, the sun, the sea," she told me. "It's impossible to get anything done in this city. We would leave in a second if the opportunity were right."

I nodded sympathetically, turning back at the front door to wave goodbye. And through the scrum, I saw her still behind the bar, one arm around a waitress, lost in conversation with customers.

She was roaring with laughter.

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