The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (8 page)

The saddest physical and cultural loss on the rue des Martyrs occurred in the early 1970s, when developers razed the nineteenth-century circus complex at the boundary of the Ninth and Eighteenth Arrondissements. Named Cirque Fernando and then
Cirque Medrano, it was housed in a grand sixteen-sided structure and became a showpiece for some of the world’s most gifted clowns. Poets and painters drew inspiration from it. Edgar Degas painted
Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando,
which depicted an aerialist hanging from a rope by her teeth. One of Georges Seurat’s most famous works,
The Circus,
has at its focal point a young woman in a yellow tutu balanced on one foot atop a galloping white horse. Renoir painted acrobats and female jugglers from here, Toulouse-Lautrec a rider on horseback. Buster Keaton, the American actor, comedian, vaudevillian, and stunt performer, and his wife, Eleanor, performed at the Cirque Medrano for several years after World War II. Until the circus closed, the roar of lions filled the street, and when the wind blew, the smell of hay and animal dung permeated shops, homes, and schools.

As television grew more popular in the 1960s, the lure of the circus faded. For a while the structure survived as an auditorium for beer festivals and theatrical productions. In 1972, it was torn down. “So much sadness in these ruins—a bit of Paris has died, has left us, taking forever one of Montmartre’s many charms,” a television newscaster announced in somber tones, as black-and-white footage showed the wreckage at the site. An eight-story concrete horror of apartments atop a Carrefour supermarket replaced it.

One day my husband spotted a “For Sale” sign on the top floor. “Hey, there’s an apartment for sale!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t this a prime example of the Brutalist school?”

I had never heard of the Brutalist school, although the building certainly fits the name. Andy said Brutalist buildings were fashionable in the mid-twentieth century. They often mixed family housing and shopping centers and looked like concrete fortresses.

He got that right.

“We could have a great view of Montmartre,” he said.

“Sure,” I replied. “And live in the ugliest building in Paris.”

NOT ALL HAS BEEN LOST
on the rue des Martyrs—not yet.

Maybe it’s because progress has come slowly to this part of Paris. Annick Poulain, a young professional who lives with her husband and son at No. 23—in an apartment her grandparents bought in 1914—told me her grandmother lived without a refrigerator until 1970. She never had the luxury of a bathtub or a shower but washed herself in a basin in an alcove off the kitchen until she died, in 1974.

Maybe it’s because, until recent years, the street was neither elegant nor trendy. From his childhood, Thierry Cazaux remembers two butchers who sold nothing but horse meat and two others who sold only organ meats, like kidneys and tripe. Streetwalkers outnumbered children. Thierry met his first prostitute as a schoolboy; she took up her post every morning on the rue des Martyrs outside the gate of the Cité Malesherbes, where he lived. “It was her spot, her territory,” he said. “We always said hello to each other as I went to school, and she called me by my name. I don’t know how old I was when I realized what she was doing there.”

Maybe it’s because new isn’t always bad—and is, occasionally, quite wonderful. The
pata negra
at the Spanish ham shop is, well, as close as you get to a gastronomic orgasm, and it did push a second-rate men’s clothing store out of business. (The old-time food merchants agree that any initiative for the sake of gastronomy, however chichi, is all for the good.) The salted caramels at
the Henri Le Roux chocolate shop transport those who try them to the sea off the coast of Brittany. And the olive oil shop? One of the best Mother’s Day presents I ever received was a selection of six varieties of olive oil in sweet little tins, each with its own spout.

The street has been adapting, fighting, and succumbing to change for more than a century. It wins one and loses one. The net result is that something essential remains unchanged. The rue des Martyrs has been spared much of the chainstorification that has culturally homogenized other Paris streets as rents have soared, artisanal work has been devalued, and the city has become more prosperous. There are few tourists, except around the Abbesses Métro station, the closest stop to Sacré-Coeur. Yes, we have Antoine & Lili, Les Petites, and Maje—three small, classy, ready-to-wear fashion chains—but no Zara, H&M, Starbucks, or Sephora.

For every threat of a chain store, there is a new artisanal merchant. For every building that disappears, there’s the discovery of a marvel once thought lost.

A hardware store has been at No. 1 since 1865.

The café–bistro–wine bar has been a café at No. 2 for more than a century.

A butcher shop at No. 3 has been run by the same family since 1899.

A pharmacy at No. 4 appears in Paris archives as early as 1848.

No. 10 has been a bakery since 1868; No. 48, a cheese store since 1915.

Often one food shop replaces another selling the same item. The Delmontel bakery, at No. 39, for example, is in an Art Nouveau building that has housed a bakery since 1902.

The law is on the side of continuity on the rue des Martyrs.
Paris passed the Local Urbanism Plan law in 2006 to improve the quality of life, reduce income inequality, and preserve the city’s architectural heritage. It gives zoning protection to more than sixty streets, including this one.

Ground-floor artisanal shops producing or selling food or crafts can be replaced only by other artisanal shops. No big chain or clothing stores are allowed. The bottom of the rue des Martyrs (up to the rue Victor-Massé) enjoys this designation, as do the nearby rue Cadet and rue Richer; the rue Mouffetard, in the Latin Quarter; the rue Montorgueil, on the Right Bank; and the rue Cler, not far from the Eiffel Tower.

The law prevented Monoprix, a major chain that sells food, clothing, and cosmetics, from taking over a decades-old pastry shop on the rue des Martyrs. Monoprix paid about 700,000 euros for the space, with the intention of opening a beauty emporium, and pledged to install a manicure service to give it artisan status. At that point, Jacques Bravo, then the neighborhood mayor, intervened. He broke the Monoprix deal and persuaded Sébastien Gaudard, one of the fanciest (but one of the best) pastry chefs in Paris, to move into the shop. Gaudard makes all of his pastries, breads, ice creams, and chocolates on-site.

Bravo was widely respected for his accomplishments as mayor of the Ninth from 2001 to the spring of 2014. But the Socialists’ era ended when Bravo’s deputy mayor, Pauline Véron, lost the mayoral election to the center-right candidate by 159 votes, less than 1 percent. Younger, conservative voters, it seems, care more about wealth accumulation than Socialist projects like low-income housing and free home health care for the elderly.

Of all the recent changes in the neighborhood, this political one may prove to be the most far-reaching.

NOW,
THIS
IS BUTTER!

. . .

I’ve noticed that people who know how to eat are rarely idiots.

—G
UILLAUME
A
POLLINAIRE
,
Le flâneur des deux rives

T
HE RUE DES MARTYRS HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT COMMERCE,
especially the sale of food. I am inordinately passionate about food. This feeling has a lot to do with my father, who taught me the importance of eating well long before I moved to France. From the time I was five years old, he owned a store selling Italian specialties to working-class Italian-Americans in Niagara Falls, New York. I take his spirit with me every time I step out onto the rue des Martyrs.

Tony Sciolino was honest, faithful to my mother, and a good provider. I admired his commitment to paying bills in full on time. “You’re only as good as your good name!” he’d say, an expression he had learned from his father. But he was not an easy man.

He demanded obedience at home and the highest grades at school. My strongest childhood memory of his affection is from
when I was about seven; he carried me from the car to the house after I had been to the hospital. His idea of an ideal Sunday outing was to pile my sister, my brother, and me into the car for a long ride and tune the radio to a Yankees game. There was little room for conversation. To this day, I cannot hear a radio broadcast of a baseball game without getting a headache.

My father was the first-born and only son of Sicilian immigrants. He beat the odds and graduated from college during the Depression. During World War II, he was drafted into the army and was assigned for a while to work as a mechanic in an airplane-engine factory in Buffalo, a cushy job that allowed him to go home every night to his mother’s cooking and his own bed. Eventually the Army Air Corps shipped him to Italy and Morocco, as a sergeant. He never saw action, but he managed to sneak in a visit to Sicily to meet some long-lost relatives. He gave them cigarettes and chocolates. They fed him well.

After the war, my father worked as a tax inspector for the IRS, married, and moved with my mother into an upstairs flat in his parents’ house. Every evening, he filled a bottle from one of two oak barrels in the basement that held the wine he and my grandfather made in the backyard every summer. He read Buffalo’s evening newspaper, ate the meal my mother cooked from scratch, and drank his wine.

On a commercial street several blocks away, my mother’s brothers ran Columbia Market, an Italian food store so big and prosperous that it served as the neighborhood supermarket. They proposed that my father open a branch store twenty miles away, in Niagara Falls. In 1954, he became the owner and manager of the new store, but after a falling out with his brothers-in-law a few years later, he struck out on his own. He changed the store’s
name to Latina Importing Company, did his own product selection and buying, and eliminated the middlemen. The brothers opened a new Columbia Market a few blocks away. They and my father never spoke again.

My father’s “office” was a shellacked piece of pine balanced on two empty olive barrels under the stairs. A two-hundred-pound provolone cheese sat on one of the store’s counters. For years, he used his 1957 Plymouth station wagon as both family car and delivery truck, and he loaded it every morning with still-warm Italian bread from a bakery near our house. He sold two varieties: a quick-rise loaf for seventeen cents, and one made with sourdough leavening for nineteen cents. When I lived at home while going to college, I delivered the bread early on Saturday mornings. I also managed his correspondence, paid his bills, and worked at the cash register. He paid me ten dollars a day. The job was not optional.

My father communicated with many of his customers in a rough Sicilian dialect and taught me the art of delivering small pleasures through food and conversation. No matter how cold the winter, how deep the snow, how bad the economy, how serious the problem, he believed anyone could find comfort in a family meal, even one as simple as penne with bacon, onions, and a can of Progresso cannellini beans. “Everybody has to eat!” he would say.

Because most of his customers were working-class, he had to keep prices low. He sold dried beans, grains, and spices in open bins, not because it was fashionable but because he could provide better value and better quality without industrial packaging. He sold macaroni—it wasn’t called “pasta” in those days—in ten-pound bags. He showed customers how a macaroni-making machine could do double duty as a paper shredder.

He never bought retail. “Chisel them down!” he told me and my siblings as he taught us how to pay less. He bartered with merchants at the open-air market next door: Italian cheeses, salami, olive oil, amaretto cookies, and other delicacies in exchange for fresh produce, strip steaks, even lobsters. At Christmas, his two female employees assembled gift baskets overflowing with candied fruits, nuts, panettone, and pastries for delivery to people who had done him favors.

In 1991, a local merchant group honored him for his “entrepreneurship.” Another year, he won a Caribbean cruise for being the number one wholesale distributor of a brand of hot sauce. Once, when he installed a new window in our house, he left behind his signature in black marker on the aluminum frame: “Tony the Food King.”