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The 13th district is located in the south of Paris. It's a 7.15
km2 quadrilateral (the 3rd largest district, excluding Bois de
Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes) on the left bank of the Seine. Population
was 171,533 in 1999 (5th most populated district). It looks like this:
5th Austerlitz\ \
\ \
Pitié \ \
Gobelins \ \
\ \ Bercy
14th ######\ \
Pl. ## \ S\ 12th
d'Italie ## BNF\ e\
## \ i\ (right bank)
######\ n\
Butte-Aux Chinatown ######\ e\
Cailles ######\ \
######\ \
######\ \
Pt. d'Italie ######\ \
\ \
Gentilly Ivry-sur-Seine \ \
In the map, everything in italics is outside the district. 5th, 12th, 14th are
other Paris districts. Gentilly and Ivry-sur-Seine are suburban
towns.
From the Latin Quarter to Place d'Italie:
If you go south from the Panthéon in the middle of the 5th district, you get down to the former valley of the Bièvre,
and enter the 13th district through the Avenue des
Gobelins. There you can see on the western side of the avenue the
Manufacture des Gobelins, which was founded in 1664 by Colbert,
minister of Louis XIV. That factory still makes some of the most famous
French tapestries. You may turn round the Manufacture for a very pleasant
sunset walk on rue Berbier du Mets, where you can find a couple of medieval
houses in courtyards.
Then you get to Place d'Italie, an imitation of the Place de
l'Etoile: this large circle is the heart of a star formed by nine streets
and avenues. The most important ones are: Avenue des Gobelins, Boulevard
Blanqui (which belongs to the 2nd boulevard ring and goes
westward), Avenue d'Italie (which goes southward), Avenue de Clichy (the
beginning of the Chinese quarter), Boulevard Vincent-Auriol (another part
of the 2nd boulevard ring that goes eastward towards Bercy)
and Boulevard de l'Hôpital (which goes to Gare d'Austerlitz).
Place d'Italie and Avenue d'Italie are the starting point of the
National Road n.7, which goes straight to Italy, hence their name.
Along the Seine
If you take Boulevard de l'Hôpital, you'll walk along the gigantic
hospital of la Pitié-Salpêtrière, just before arriving at Gare
d'Austerlitz, one of the least remarkable train stations in Paris, named
after Napoleon's 1806 victory.
From the Gare d'Austerlitz to the boundary of Paris, along the
Seine, the Seine-Rive-Gauche area (the ##### area on the map) is one of
the largest building sites in France. The most remarkable building so far
is the Bibliothèque Nationale de France François-Mitterrand (BNF on the
map), also known as TGB (Très Grande Bibliothèque, or Very Large
Library). The bulding consists of four distant towers which look like open
books and a weird garden with tall pines in the middle. The
Seine-Rive-Gauche project aims at covering the entire area with new
avenues, apartment and office buildings and a university. It's really
fascinating to see a new Paris quarter rising month after month.
Art in the 13th district
The 13th district is one of the most living spots on the Parisian art
scene. In the Seine-Rive-Gauche building area, check out the Entrepôts
Frigorifiques, also known as "les Frigos" (the Refrigerators), an unused
cold store where artists decided to settle with no authorization a few
years ago. Since that time, other groups of artists invaded half a dozen of
non-used buildings all over Paris. A few blocks away, the rue Louise-Weiss
hosts avant-garde art galleries.
The Southern quarters
The Butte-aux-Cailles is the highest spot in the district. Small
buildings and cafés have established a very living and friendly
atmosphere, particularly in the evening. It's also one of the few areas
with very few tourists in Paris, at least until I wrote this writeup. The
first flying men, Pilâtre de Rosier and the marquis of Arlandes,
landed on Butte-aux-Cailles in a montgolfier on November 21, 1783,
between mills that only exist in street names nowadays. They had taken off
at the Bois de Boulogne, in a 10-km leap for mankind over Paris.
South of the Butte-aux-Cailles, the curious visitor may have a look at
the strange little houses around the Place de l'Abbé Georges Hennocque,
which colors do not match the usual Parisian taste, or to the Cité Florale,
a small quarter where the flowers almost hide the houses.
The Paris Chinatown is located between rue de Tolbiac, avenue d'Ivry
and the Olympiades, a large streetless concrete area built with tall
apartment buildings in the 60s or early 70s. Avenue d'Ivry and avenue de
Choisy are filled with Chinese, Vietnamese or Thai restaurants which
stay open very late. Asian immigrants concentrated in the 30-floor
buildings of the Olympiades during the 70s and made it the Paris
Chinatown. I recently discovered that the concrete podium did not replace
the streets that existed before the 60s. These streets still exist under
the podium, like the Baglioni quarter under the Rocca Paolina in
Perugia, and they're used as car parks. You can even find a buddhist
temple in one of these underground streets.
The Bièvre
If you ask a Parisian about the Bièvre, he may tell you that
President Mitterrand had an apartment in rue de Bièvre, or that the
Bièvre is a river somewhere in the suburbs. Actually, the Bièvre used to
join the Seine in the middle of Paris. You can still guess its path if you
pay attention to the elevations and undulations of the streets. The Bièvre
used to enter Paris in the Southern part of the 13th district, west of
Porte d'Italie, then it passed west of Butte-aux-Cailles and Manufacture
des Gobelins, where the workers used its water to dye clothes or
fabrics. Then the Bièvre cranked between the 13th and 5th district and
finally got to the Seine somewhere near rue de Bièvre in the 5th
district. The river was so polluted by the end of the 19th century that
it was integrated into the sewer system at the beginning of the 20th
century.
In short, the 13th district is one of the least interesting districts of
Paris for most tourists. But I happen to live in that district.