diverse population in the streets reflects these distant locales, and an array of languages floats through the air. In addition, you’ll stumble across avant garde art galleries, trendy cafes and restaurants and new music venues created from repurposed warehouses and broken- down storefronts.


for making and showing art. At this time, Belleville was still rough around the edges.


A 1988 New York Times Travel article introduced American readers to this corner of Paris, with a stern


Belleville, Paris Belleville, Paris


Les Bellevilloises Belleville’s longstanding openness to new residents has made it a vibrant hotbed of countercultural activity. Independent of Paris until 1860, it was originally a rural wine-making village, famous for its tavern and its rebellious residents who fought on behalf of Paris Commune Belleville


government in 1871. As retained its working class


chaotic character. With the twentieth century came waves of foreign immigrants, oſten seeking safety from persecution. Greeks and Armenians arrived in the 1920s, Eastern European Jews in the 1930s, Algerians and Tunisians in the 1960s and, most recently,


the Chinese.


Natives of other countries, including Poland, the French West Indies and Senegal, have also shaped what it means to be a Bellevilloise.


By the late 1980s, the Parisian bohemian bourgeois, known as


the bobos, began to trickle into the neighborhood in search of lower rents and new venues 4


warning: “One should not visit Belleville with cameras, expensive watches or jewelry in evidence. It is better to dress modestly and keep a low profile.” Yet pickpockets and petty crime did not deter young artsy types from setting up camp amongst the diverse Bellevilloises—in fact, for them the danger seemed to be part of the area’s charm—and in the last few years, the bobo population of Belleville has surged. Te ominous warnings of the past few decades have soſtened as more of the bobo crowd flaunt their fashion-forward tastes without harm.


it urbanized, and somewhat


Belleville aujourd’hui Unlike


other demographics have


Parisian been


neighborhoods completely


whose changed by


gentrification, this part of Paris has kept its diverse inhabitants, and in general harmony, too. No one has been forced out of Belleville due to skyrocketing rents, thanks to plentiful public housing in the neighborhood. Te peace in Belleville seems singular compared to the riots that have surfaced in Paris’s


suburbs—les


banlieues—in recent years. Indeed, for all its jumble of ethnicities,


its scruffiness and relative obscurity


to tourists, Belleville has become a hidden respite in Paris for its residents, and those who love its specific charms find a permanent and welcome home here. —Amy Boratko and Alex Ripp. Notes originally published by Yale Repertory Teatre, 2011


http://www.flickr.com/photos/25634696@N06/4876188805/


http://www.flickr.com/photos/philsnoopy/7632186922/


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