Paris Rive Gauche
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Paris Rive Gauche
From the Gare d’Austerlitz right down to the boulevard périphérique, almost every stick of street furniture and every square meter of tarmac in the Paris Rive Gauche area is shiny, spanking new. Ultra – modern traffic lights and provisional road signs, and still-under populated cafés and apartment blocks give the area a frontier-town feel that’s strange so near to the centre of Paris, the other-worldly impression exacerbated by the quarter’s isolation between rail tracks and river. That said, the railway lines are slowly being roofed over, and a new €21 million footbridge, the Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir, now spans the Seine between the Bibliothéque Nationale and the Parc de Bercy in the futuristic double-ribbon design. Built by the Eifel Company – a descendant of the original – it had an early case of the wobbles but is now an exciting (and now stable) addition to Paris’s fine roster of bridges.
The most recent development is the northernmost of all: the former warehouses on the Quai d’ Austerlitz are currently being transformed into Docks en Seine, a fashion, shopping and entertainment space. The structure will typical of current trends, with glass and lots of open space, including a piazza and a “vegetalized” terrace on the top, which is expected to the house restaurant and bars. A projected fashion institute inside is still on the drawing board. Heading upstream, a new swimming pool, the Piscine Josephine Baker, actually floats in the Seine between the Pont de Bercy and the Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir. Upstream of a new footbridge come two unusual barges, which have made the area a nightlife attraction in its own right. The ex-lighthouse boat called Batofar, and the Chinese barge La Guinguette Pirate, in particular, are excellent venues for a gig or a night’s low – key clubbing. And just west of the library, near métro Chevaleret, a few small but cutting-edge art galleries are now well settled on rue Louise Weiss and round the corner on rue Chevaleret.
South of Mitterrand’s library, the brash new apartments and offices gradually fade out into busy buildings sites towards the périphérique. Only a handful of landmark industrial buildings survive. Immediately south of rue Tolbiac, the giant, decaying warehouse of Les Frigos was once used for cold-storage of meat and fish destined for Les Halle’s, but was taken immediately after the market’s closure by artists and musicians and has been run as an anarchic studio space ever since, with open-door exhibitions once or twice a year, a bar/restaurant for the artists and on-site gallery. The site’s recent purchase by the city of Paris is supposed to guarantee its future in the face of the brave new commercial world that now hems it in.
South again, the massive Grands Moulins de Paris and Halle aux Farines have been ambitiously rebuilt for the University Denis Diderot, aka "Paris 7", which has flown from its cramped, decrepit old site in the Quartier Latin. Just short of the périphérique, another early twentieth –century industrial – era site, the handsomely arched SUDAC compressed-air building, is now the home of a new school of architecture.
