Rue de Lévis
This street's design—its intimate, conversational quality—makes it feel like a place for the daily social life of the neighborhood residents to unfold.
"I live in Villiers."
No, I don't live inside a Métro station. But Parisians almost never refer to their local zones by naming one of the four quartiers into which City bureaucrats have divided the city's 20 arrondissements (districts). Rather, they just name their nearest Métro stop. This cuts to the chase in this city where neighborhood names and boundaries are fluid and ever-changing.
After much fumbling about with trying to describe my own location ("in Batignolles, but sort of on the edge of it, across the railroad tracks, really sort of Monceau, but not that fancy, and on the less posh side of Malesherbes.") I adopted the practice of referring to my local Métro station: Villiers. It's inconveniently located in western Paris, whereas most of my social life is in the city's eastern quarters, but is very conveniently located where Lines 2 and 3, two of the city's best, meet.
The Métro station lies at the foot of rue de Lévis, and exploring that street helped me find the identity of this neighborhood. Just four blocks in length, Lévis is the commercial heart of Villiers.
At least 120 businesses line the 1,800 feet of rue de Lévis and serve the neighborhood near the Villiers Métro station.
The street's first two blocks, which plunge from the busy Métro station into the neighborhood's heart, are fully pedestrianized and jam-packed with shops. The two blocks farther from the Métro stop are quieter but still lively. Along the street's 1,800 or so linear feet are at least 120 businesses that provide every possible need and convenience for residents of the surrounding blocks.
The vitality of this street, relative to its diminutive size, is remarkable. Compare to a typical New York Street: the two blocks of West 72nd Street between West End Avenue and Columbus Avenue. Seventy-second serves a similar purpose for the Upper West Side as rue de Lévis does for Villiers: a stretch of neighborhood-oriented commercial services outside a transit station. This 1,700-foot section of 72nd is about as long as rue de Lévis, and serves the same commercial purpose, so comparison is apt.
West 72nd Street is a similar length, and serves the neighborhood surrounding the 72nd Street subway station, but its oversized design fails to produce the conviviality of rue de Lévis.
I lived a few blocks from West 72nd Street and know it well, though I never developed the love of that street that I have for rue de Lévis. I chalk this up to something more than Parisian charm versus New York grit. The design of the streets yield different uses and a very different feel.
There are about 100 businesses on 72nd (compared to 120 on Lévis). This might be because everything in New York is bigger. The cross streets are wider (Amsterdam is about 93' between frontages whereas rue Legendre crosses rue de Lévis in just 40).
The narrow cross-streets along rue de Lévis make the street feel like a continuous place, whereas the wide streets crossing West 72nd Street make its blocks feel disconnected from each other.
The business frontages in New York are also wider, and chain business frontages are much wider. The Monoprix chain (a sort of Target for France) takes an unusual 96' of coverage on rue de Lévis, whereas Bloomingdales takes 110' of frontage on 72nd. Larger building frontages means fewer businesses on each block. Residential entrances to buildings are also generally narrower in France, leaving more space for commerce on the commercial street.
Monoprix has the largest retail frontage by far on rue de Lévis, but it keeps a relatively low profile despite its width.
Bloomingdales is one of several chain stores on West 72nd Street with wide frontages. The blank window at left, and the long stretch without a building entrance, deadens this stretch of the street.
The streets themselves are designed to vastly different proportions. The tall buildings that frame either side of Seventy-second Street are about 100 feet apart, whereas those on rue de Lévis span about 36 feet. The effect this has on the experience of public space is critical. I've sat at a café on one side of the Parisian street and chatted with a grocer standing on the other, whereas in Paris we'd have to see (and shout) over several lanes of noisy and fast-moving vehicle traffic. It would be unpleasant at best, and more likely impossible. And it's the intimate, conversational quality of the Paris street which knits both sides of it together and makes it feel like a place for the daily social life of the neighborhood's residents to unfold.
Just 36 feet wide, rue de Lévis feels intimate. Its narrow, human-scaled dimensions invite social life and discourage vehicle through-travel.
West 72nd Street is nearly three times as wide as rue de Lévis. Its buildings are tall, and its two sides are separated by six lanes of vehicle traffic and parking, with nowhere to cross for a long stretch. There's no intimacy here, no knitting together of the street's two sides into a single place.
Yes, street width might be an unfair comparison when we're talking about New York and Paris. Seventy-second is a major cross-town street, and rue de Lévis is a neighborhood thoroughfare (it's more 73rd, say, than 72nd). But consider that on the Upper West Side the wide major cross streets (57th, 72nd, 86th, 96th, 103rd) and the wide avenues (Broadway, Amsterdam, Columbus) are the neighborhood-serving commercial streets where all the life is. The narrower streets between them are reserved for residences with the occasional dry-cleaner or small restaurant. So, regardless of their significant width, what happens on those streets matters very much for the social life of the neighborhood.
This brings to mind the vast difference in zoning approaches between the cities. New York, like most American cities, strictly regulates and separates uses; even mixed-use neighborhoods are in fact micro-zoned to keep different activities separated. In Paris, in contrast, everything happens everywhere.
Narrow rue de Lévis ends at two very wide thoroughfares, each of which is brought down in scale by thoughtful street design and tree plantings.
Rue de Lévis ends at the busy junction of Avenue de Villiers (97' in width) and the Boulevard de Courcelles (115' in width). These streets exceed the 100' width of 72nd Street, but they feel much more pleasant than 72nd does, because the Parisian streets are so different in cross-section.
Boulevard de Courcelles and Avenue de Villiers are lined with broad sidewalks and enormous, beautiful street trees, lending them a much more pleasant and inviting quality. The boulevard de Courcelles is further broken up by a series of pedestrian walkways, planters, and building access lanes. The actual remaining space devoted to the roar and stink of automobile through traffic on each street is relatively limited: 31' for a lane in each direction on Villiers and 29' for one lane in each direction on Courcelles, versus 45' for two lanes in each direction on 72nd Street. These are about as wide and busy as Parisian streets get, and though they're so geometrically similar to major New York streets their lived experience is vastly different.
Each side of Boulevard de Courcelles features sidewalks, a separate space for bikes and vehicle access to buildings, and a modest space for vehicle through-travel. The addition of street trees makes this boulevard feel calm despite being one of the city's major thoroughfares.
West 72nd Street also features street trees, but the vast majority of space is given to vehicle through-traffic. Note the absence of bicycle lanes.
And nobody would confuse the Avenue Villiers or the Boulevard Courcelles for neighborhood-serving commercial streets. They're thoroughfares and grand boulevards lined with monumental architecture, but they were added when the city's Haussmann-era renovation jammed such rigorous grandeur through its ancient and rambling quarters. The heart of the city's street life—the pâtisseries and boulangeries and fromageries and boucheries and bistros and tabacs that neighborhood people frequent every day—are on these little interior streets, as they have been for centuries.
So let's wander off the big boulevards and back to rue de Lévis. The width of the street itself, and its cross streets, makes all the difference for how it feels as compared to 72nd Street. Its narrowness (about a third of that of 72nd Street) gives it intimacy and life. A person can easily cross back and forth along the street, buying cheese on this side and a chicken on that side, doing so without walking to a crosswalk or waiting for passing traffic. The two sides of the street are tied together and become a singular experience. Nobody would dream of crossing busy 72nd Street this way, and in any case the rushing traffic and the parked cars and the clutter of sidewalk sheds and the sheer distance make it too difficult to see what's on the other side. On 72nd you choose one side or the other, and that's where you are, and the next crosswalk is just too distant to make it practical to cross to the other side.
Rue de Lévis: a calm and vibrant pedestrian space that invites strolling, shopping, and socializing. This is a space designed at a human scale and programmed for human delight.
The intimacy of the experience of Lévis is especially evident on its two-block pedestrianized section nearest the Métro (and, as luck would have it, nearest our apartment). It isn't pedestrianized in the strictest sense. Service vehicles often make their way, with utmost care and at the slowest possible speed, down the street. But they're clearly secondary to the whims and delights of people, who take up the entirety of the street and this section and stroll with ease, paying little heed to the delivery van struggling to make its way through. Businesses spill into the street, too; I could buy almost all of the supplies I need for a week, and even flowers and lasagne for a cute dinner date at home, without actually setting foot inside a shop.
The result is a lively atmosphere at all times of day and throughout the week. The grand Haussmannian affairs like Courcelles and Villiers are nice to stroll down on a sunny day, but it's streets like Lévis that give the city its life, personality, and soul.