How a storied layer of authentic Paris is being wiped out

The northern edge of Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement, near the Place Pigalle, was once known as “la Nouvelle-Athènes,” both for the neo-Classical flourishes of its most graceful blocks and for the creative geniuses that swept in to inhabit them and the surrounding streets.

This was the original “gay Paree” on display in Edouard Manet’s “Bar at the Folies-Bergère”: a Bohemia of near-mythical proportions in which every tier of society - from the well heeled to the creative to the horizontally employed - collided and electrified one another in the district’s cafes, theaters and cabarets.

It was the Paris of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Gustave Moreau and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Since Roman times, Paris has been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor. The area around Pigalle in particular - which American G.I.'s aptly called “Pig Alley” - has long been a consummate admixture of both, its seediness informing the artistic production and spirit of numerous generations of inhabitants. You can see it in Edgar Degas’s brush strokes and hear it in Edith Piaf’s voice. But it’s disappearing.

Today, the neighbourhood has been rechristened “South Pigalle” or, in a dishearteningly straightforward aping of New York, SoPi. Organic grocers, tasteful bistros and an influx of upscale American cocktail bars are quietly displacing the pharmacies, dry cleaners and scores of seedy bar à hôtesses that for decades have defined the neighbourhood. These “hostess bars,” marked by the barely dressed women perched in the windowsills, are the direct descendants of the regulated brothels that thrived here from Napoleon’s time until the postwar purge of the 1940s. The French daily Libération reports that as recently as 2005 there were 84 such establishments around Pigalle. Today there are fewer than 20. Their disappearance is a watermark of the quarter’s rapid loss of grit and character alike.

When my wife and I first moved into a crumbling apartment on the Rue Henry Monnier in 2011, steps from the neon of Pigalle, I wasn’t sure what to make of living in the middle of a functioning red-light district. Our neighbourhood, though safe and well on its way to gentrification, remained funky in the original sense of the term. In addition to cigarette smoke and baking bread, there was the whiff of dirt and sex in the air. It took awhile for me to get used to the tap-tapping on windows - or on mild days the hissing and tongue clicking from open doors - that would greet me as I passed the little bars on my way to fill a prescription or buy a bottle of Pouilly-Fume.

I have never quite got used to the transsexual hookers who traipse the Boulevard de Clichy outside the area’s various sex shops and with whom I must share the carnivalesque sidewalk on my way in and out of the post office. Frankly, they make me uncomfortable.

Tawdry patch

But I have come to see that unease is a good thing the longer I stay in this corner of France, a country where the world’s oldest profession continues to enjoy a special patrimonial status and where, try as it might, the government can’t seem to un-sew that tawdry patch from the national quilt. (Having recently relaxed the ban on passive solicitation, the government of President François Hollande is now floating the idea of criminalising johns, which has prompted a number of incensed writers and luminaries to pen a spirited manifesto in protest.)

Directly opposite, beside a dilapidated DVD shop, bouncers clad in black assemble a velvet rope each night in front of a pristine new bar called Glass. It is the brainchild of a polyglot team of N.Y.U. grads who have decided (correctly, judging by their success) that what Parisians want most these days are tacos, hot dogs and homemade tonic water in their G & Ts.

Two storefronts down, Le F’Exhib - the lone holdout on the block, where the girls and the ravaged exterior seemed to age in tandem - finally closed its doors this fall. Over a chilled glass of Ron Zacapa, I asked Scotty Schuder, the friendly American owner of the Dirty Dick, what he thought might take its place. “It’s going to be a really nice cocktail bar,” he said, shaking his head.

And so a vivid and storied layer of authentic Paris is being wiped out not by Nimby activism, government edict or the rapaciousness of Starbucks or McDonald’s but by the banal globalization of hipster good taste, the same pleasant and invisible force that puts kale frittata, steel-cut oats and burrata salad on brunch tables from Stockholm to San Francisco.

Drifting through these streets, as they are scrubbed clean and homogenised before my eyes, my thoughts turn to Blaise Pascal, who once wrote “a man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.” The same, of course, could be said of neighbourhoods. The nicer this one gets, the more it seems to feel like the one I left behind in Brooklyn.

If it’s a commonplace to say you had to be in Paris in the '20s or New York in the '80s, the sad truth of our contemporary moment seems to be only that you no longer need to be anywhere in particular anymore. The brunch is all the same.