Belleville

Neighborhood · Belleville (19th and 20th)Paris,France

A hill in eastern Paris settled by wave after wave of newcomers, its shop signs changing language every hundred metres, a village until 1860.

Belleville is a hill in eastern Paris where the shop signs change language as you walk up it. Boulevard de Belleville holds a North African market two mornings a week; a hundred metres higher the signs are in Chinese. Armenians, Greeks and Polish Jews came first, then Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans, then families from Wenzhou in eastern China, and the streets they settled run into one another instead of dividing into separate quarters. From the park at the top you see the whole quarter at once, with the city behind it. Belleville was a town of its own until 1860, when Paris annexed the whole ring of villages and split this one between two arrondissements, which is why its main street changes district as you climb. Its people stayed working-class, and the last barricade of the Paris Commune, the workers' uprising of 1871, fell in one of these streets. Painters and sculptors took the empty workshops when rents were low, and enough of them remain to make one of the city's densest clusters of studios.

Worth knowing

Good to know

It is a hill, so walk it from the bottom up — Everything worth seeing runs from the crossroads at the bottom to the park at the top, so start low and climb.
The market packs up by early afternoon — Miss that window on a Tuesday or Friday and the central strip is a wide empty walkway with benches instead.
The good eating here is North African and Chinese — This is a quarter of small family kitchens, and the places people queue at have plain fronts that give nothing away.
The park terrace faces west — Late afternoon and sunset are the time to be up there, with low warm light. At midday the sun is overhead and the view goes flat.

Things to do

1
Walk up rue de Belleville and watch the signs change
Start at the bottom, at the crossroads where four arrondissements meet, and walk uphill. For the first stretch the shopfronts are Tunisian and Algerian. Then they are Chinese. Higher up they stop belonging to any one community at all. Nobody planned the order, and there is no line on the ground where one stretch ends and the next begins.
2
Go up to the top terrace of Parc de Belleville at the end of the day
Parc de Belleville climbs the hill in terraces, and the highest one is a stone platform facing west. From it you look out over the whole city, with the Eiffel Tower on the far side. The people up there are usually locals rather than visitors. Come about an hour before sunset.
3
Walk rue Denoyez slowly and look at the layers of paint
The lane runs off boulevard de Belleville, and every surface on it is painted: shutters, bollards, the pavement itself. Walk it slowly and look at the places where the paint has flaked back to earlier coats. Then look at the plain new housing at one end, which stands where the painted lane used to carry on.
4
Go to the boulevard market on a Tuesday or Friday morning
The market runs down the middle of boulevard de Belleville under the plane trees on two mornings a week. It is a food market for the people who live here: bunches of mint, whole fish on ice, spices by the scoop, and very little aimed at anyone passing through. Walk its length once before buying anything.