Clyde Slick
September 23rd 04, 02:07 AM
"Jacob Kramer" > wrote in message
...
> On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 14:58:44 -0400, "Clyde Slick"
> > wrote:
>
> >
> >"Jacob Kramer" > wrote in message
> ...
> >> On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 06:44:58 GMT, "Michael McKelvy"
> >> > wrote:
> >>
> >> >I usually think of stereotype as having a negative connotation, a
> >> >generalization on the other hand is something that tends to be true,
so
> >I'd
> >> >say I was asking for a generalization, or your impressions of the
typical
> >> >Frenchman, based on your experience. Lionel's got enough negativity
> >> >floating around him, I would hope he's not any kind of stereotype or
that
> >> >his attitudes generally reflect those of the average Frenchman.
> >>
> >> Have you ever read a book about France?
> >
> >France? The country that contains Paris, one of the cleanest cities in
the
> >world?
>
> Yes, that Paris.
>
> July 19, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
>
> SECTION: Section 6; Page 14; Column 5; Magazine Desk
>
> HEADLINE: Why Paris Works
>
> BYLINE: By Steven Greenhouse; Steven Greenhouse was a correspondent
> in The New York Times Paris bureau for five years and recently joined
> the Washington bureau.
>
> BODY:
> In a hidden, walled-off area, just west of the Boulevard St.-Michel,
> Paul Rissel looks like a figure borrowed from the 19th century as he
> opens the door to the lush greenhouse. Wearing a rough brown tweed
> sport coat and a long camel-colored scarf, he pushes past some ficus
> and stops next to a dozen unobtrusive black trays. These trays, he
> points out, are one of the secrets behind the ageless beauty of
> Paris's ornate Jardin du Luxembourg, which was built for Queen Marie
> de Medicis some 370 years ago. Rissel, one of the two chief gardeners,
> explains that the trays produce seedlings for the tens of thousands of
> geraniums, dahlias and petunias that the Jardin's 80 gardeners
> meticulously replant each May around the majestic central fountain.
>
> The resplendent array of flowers gives the garden the idyllic air of a
> Renoir painting. During the gentle rains of spring, lovers stroll hand
> in hand, and when the sun breaks through, 5-year-olds scamper around
> the fountain to chase after their toy sailboats.
>
> "People just love this garden," says Rissel, with a pride nurtured by
> 38 years of working at the Jardin. "In most big cities, the natives
> lack contact with nature, and that's what we're trying to give them."
>
> A soft-spoken man with soft hands and long gray sideburns, Rissel
> heads a small army of gardeners. Each year they plant or transplant
> 350,000 flowers, and each spring they cart out 150 palm and orange
> trees, some of them 200 years old, that were lovingly sheltered from
> the winter cold.
>
> At a time when cities from Lagos to Los Angeles are afflicted by
> homelessness, crime and budget traumas, Paris's famed garden is an
> oasis from urban turmoil. Mayors around the world may be screaming for
> cash, but the Jardin du Luxembourg is awash in money. It boasts more
> than one gardener per acre, which allows for an attention to detail
> and beauty that is rare in modern cities. One gardener devoted two
> full months to scooping out the rot from the trunk of a beech tree
> that the gardeners were eager to save because it stood eloquently
> alongside a small Bartholdi Statue of Liberty. "We function like the
> gardeners of an old house of the bourgeoisie," Rissel says. "We do
> much more by hand."
>
> Rissel and the garden he nurses are just one gilded strand in the
> tapestry of cobbled streets, quaint quays and medieval churches that
> make Paris one of the world's most beautiful, best-run cities.
> Although many cities appear to be breaking down from poverty and
> decaying infrastructure, Paris seems to be improving with age.
>
> FOR MANY OF THE CITY'S 2.2 million residents and many of the 20
> million tourists who visit each year, Paris remains a magical, even
> transcendent, place. While many Americans shun their own cities as if
> they were places suffering from the plague, Paris is a city with which
> countless people still have a passionate love affair.
>
> The people who run Paris know that if their city relied on just the
> charms of its past, it would lose its magic. Thus, they have sought to
> superimpose a smoothly running, modern metropolis on the city
> bequeathed them by medieval kings and 18th-century revolutionaries.
> And they have succeeded royally.
>
> Garbage is picked up seven days a week, mail is delivered three times
> a day and all of Paris's 800 miles of streets are swept by hand each
> day. At rush hour, the subways come once every 80 seconds, and many
> Metro stops are decorated with mosaics and murals. Affluent families
> are rushing not to flee for the suburbs, but to buy apartments in
> Paris's choicest neighborhoods and to send their children to public
> schools.
>
> There is no single explanation for why Paris works so well. Rather,
> Paris has become a shining model for urban planners thanks to numerous
> ingredients lacking in many other cities: ample financing, sound
> administration, farsighted planning, technological ingenuity, a flair
> for design and an ambition to always improve.
>
> It would be wrong to single out Paris from other French cities as a
> success story, because Toulouse, Lyons, Nice, Bordeaux and Strasbourg
> have worked just as hard to keep their beauty, build a vibrant
> cultural life and remain attractive for families. Nonetheless, Paris,
> whose metropolitan area includes 10.5 million people (one-fifth of
> France's population), is undeniably the Olympus of French cities.
>
> Parisians have two major complaints. Traffic congestion has created a
> miasma of noise, pollution and stress, helping to make Paris's
> high-strung population even more irritable. The other is that crime is
> growing, although the roughest parts of Paris seem no more dangerous
> than the safest parts of many American cities. Paris had 80 murders
> last year, compared with 482 in Washington, which has about one-fourth
> the population.
>
> Homelessness is another problem, although it does not seem one of the
> Parisians' main concerns, perhaps because the city has long
> romanticized the clochards who sleep along the Seine. The homeless,
> estimated at between 6,000 and 15,000, can stay for up to six months
> in 60 government-run or private shelters where they receive free room,
> board, medical care and job training. Most go to these shelters
> voluntarily, but the police often round up sleeping drunks to protect
> them from the cold.
>
> "Paris's streets are cleaner than American cities, its garbage is
> picked up more regularly, its streets are paved more often and its
> bureaucracy is more efficient," says Michel Rousseau, an economics
> professor who studies urban problems. "But all this costs a lot of
> money."
>
> Fortunately for Paris, the national Government contributes more than
> half the city's revenues. Because the state pays so much, Paris's
> affluent families do not shoulder a huge fiscal burden of caring for
> the immigrants and poor living in the city. This is one reason Paris
> has not suffered from the middle-class flight that has hurt so many
> American cities.
>
> As one urban planner puts it: "One reason Paris has so few problems is
> that the type of people who make problems can't afford to live in
> Paris." Economic realities force the poor to live in suburbs ringing
> Paris, but even there, in the ban lieue, the levels of poverty,
> violence and drugs are a fraction of those in American cities.
>
> "Because of France's republican traditions, there is a real sense of
> solidarity, a real desire to help the less-well-off," says Roland
> Castro, director of the national Government's efforts to help the
> suburbs. "People often point to American cities as a model to avoid.
> They say, 'That can happen to us if we let things slide.' "
>
> AT ONE OF THE 50 MAHOGANY TABLES under the gaze of two austere Chinese
> statues, Francois Dupin is scribbling on a napkin to explain why his
> cafe, Les Deux Magots, remains a mecca for Paris's beau monde. "The
> Chamber of Deputies is over there," says the short, dapper cafe
> manager, drawing a short black arrow to the west. "The students come
> from over there," he says, aiming an arrow to the east. "And all the
> artists and antique dealers come from down there." His last arrow
> points north to the Seine.
>
> On the cream-colored wall behind him is a photograph of Simone de
> Beauvoir hunched over a table, writing at the famed cafe on the
> Boulevard St.-Germain. Nearby is a photo of a debonair, mustached
> young Ernest Hemingway, reading a newspaper at the cafe. Partly to
> imbibe the legend of such famous writers, partly to taste its
> flavorful coffee and atmosphere, camera-toting Japanese tourists,
> chain-smoking French intellectuals and lanky American
> Hemingway-wannabes crowd into Les Deux Magots each day. Many rush to
> the sidewalk tables, next to artists selling lithographs and in the
> shadow of the 12th-century towers of the church of
> St.-Germain-des-Pres.
>
> "We're in a privileged neighborhood," Mr. Dupin says.
>
> In one way or another all of Paris's 20 arrondissements, or districts,
> are privileged. The first arrondissement has the Palais Royal and
> Louvre; the fourth has the Place des Vosges and the Ile St.-Louis; the
> fifth has the Sorbonne; the sixth, the Jardin du Luxembourg and Ecole
> des Beaux-Arts; the seventh, the Invalides and the Eiffel Tower. The
> eighth is known for the Champs-Elysees, the Elysee Palace and
> world-famous shops like Hermes and Christian Lacroix. The ninth has
> the grandiose 19th-century Palais Garnier opera house, and the plush
> 16th is renowned for its opulent fin-de-siecle mansions.
>
> Everyone wants to live in these neighborhoods, but only the privileged
> few need apply. One reason is that Paris is small, about half the size
> of Brooklyn. Rents have been pushed sky-high by limits on building
> heights and a shortage of land for new housing, caused in part by all
> the space used for parks, businesses and government. Not wanting Paris
> to become Manhattan-sur-Seine, the city's planners have generally
> limited building heights to seven stories in the historic center and
> relegated skyscrapers to the outskirts.
>
> A two-bedroom apartment in central Paris often costs $2,500 a month,
> about the same as in Manhattan and some 60 percent more than in
> Chicago. Parking a car costs about $250 a month, roughly the same as
> in Manhattan. Cleaning a suit is around $15 and a good chicken runs
> $2.30 a pound. About the only things cheaper in Paris than in America
> are baguettes, Beaujolais and Christian Dior gowns.
>
> "I love to live in Paris -- I love the possibilities it offers," says
> Francoise Romand, a 36-year-old film maker. "The Metro is great, the
> buses are great and the city's very safe. If you get lost anywhere,
> there's hardly any risk."
>
> In her view, there is nowhere else to live in France for people in
> film. Paris gives her the cultural fix she needs day after day. She
> recently went to a dance concert by Dominique Bagouet's French troupe,
> an experimental farce about a restaurant, "Lapin Chasseur," and a rock
> concert at the Cigalle, one of Paris's hottest nightclubs. She also
> visited Sophie Calle's photography exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art
> and Nicholas Garnier's avant-garde show at an art gallery near the
> Boulevard Montparnasse.
>
> And that's not to mention exhibitions at the Grand Palais, Louvre,
> Picasso Museum and Musee d'Orsay. The money the national and city
> governments spend on Paris's cultural life is probably equal to the
> overall budgets of some third world nations.
>
> "The French remain very attached to the idea of culture and
> education," says Francoise Cachin, director of the Musee d'Orsay. She
> says that both the left and the right agree it is important to finance
> museums generously to improve Paris's cultural life and to keep the
> tourists coming.
>
> "There is a rivalry between the national and city governments about
> who can sponsor the best shows," Cachin says. "It's very positive for
> the museums and museumgoers."
>
> Notwithstanding the impressive array of museums and municipal
> services, Parisians' local taxes are not astronomical. The reason:
> L'Etat, the national Government, pays 40 percent of the city's $23
> billion operating budget. The national Government also pays half of
> most large projects, like schools, sewers and day-care centers. In
> addition, the state finances Paris's public hospitals, covers almost
> all welfare costs and pays the salaries of Paris's 24,650 teachers and
> 26,000 police officers and firefighters.
>
> "In almost every European country, the central Government plays an
> important role in supporting the cities," says Leo van den Berg,
> director of the European Institute for Comparative Urban Research at
> the University of Rotterdam. "Europe's cities are very dependent on
> central money, and not so much on local fiscal circumstances."
>
> That the cost of running Paris is spread throughout France means the
> city's residents are not socked with exorbitant taxes, although
> overall the French pay a greater share of their income for national
> taxes than Americans do. Indeed, the main taxes in Paris -- the
> apartment tax and the business tax -- are lower than in many country
> towns, causing some provincial politicians to complain that they are
> subsidizing Paris's elite.
>
> Paris is probably far more spoiled by the state than are other
> European cities because it is the seat of Government and the capital
> of French finance, industry, entertainment and mass communication. Not
> only that, it is the cradle of French culture and history, the city of
> Voltaire, Napoleon, Pasteur, Hugo, Proust, de Gaulle and Sartre.
>
> No one will ever see a headline like "Mitterrand to Paris: Drop Dead,"
> because one of President Francois Mitterrand's preoccupations is
> adding new baubles to the capital. The French press has dubbed him
> Mitterramses I because of the huge monuments he has built, including
> the $400 million Bastille Opera, the I. M. Pei glass pyramid at the
> Louvre, the gigantic new finance ministry and the 350-foot-tall Grande
> Arche de la Defense. And that doesn't include the $1.3 billion
> Bibliotheque de France that Mitterrand has commissioned, which is
> slated to be the world's largest library.
>
> Mitterrand's presidential projects, with a price tag of $3 billion,
> follow similarly grandiose schemes by his predecessors: Valery Giscard
> d'Estaing masterminded the Musee d'Orsay and the Cite des Sciences
> museum, while Georges Pompidou fathered the Pompidou Center, the
> hugely popular art museum.
>
> Although many critics deride these buildings as monuments to
> presidential egos, these projects have undeniably increased Paris's
> stature as a city of art, culture and architecture. The Musee d'Orsay,
> for instance, attracts almost four million visitors a year, and art
> critics from around the world have hailed its recent exhibitions on
> Seurat, Munch and Gauguin. The museum, which used to be a train
> station, was slated for demolition until President Giscard d'Estaing
> moved to save it. "It was a project that couldn't be done without the
> will of the State," says Cachin, the museum's director. "I can only
> rejoice."
>
> TOURISTS strolling along Quai de Montebello near Notre Dame often pass
> a man in a green uniform who is intently sweeping the street with what
> looks like a large twig broom. Street cleaners like him are ubiquitous
> in Paris -- of the city's 38,000 employees, 4,500 are sweepers, most
> of them Arab or African immigrants. They sweep each of Paris's streets
> daily, and heavily trafficked business and tourist streets are swept
> twice.
>
> All this work by hand shows Paris's efficiency, obsession with detail
> and willingness to spend money to achieve its goals. Each year Paris
> spends 10 percent of its budget, or about $2.2 billion, on
> cleanliness, which translates to $1,000 for every resident.
>
> "The broom remains irreplaceable," says Alain Le Troquet, technical
> director for Paris's department of sanitation and the environment.
> "You can't do everything with a machine."
>
> Astute observers will notice a curious thing. The brooms no longer
> have crude brown branches, but instead bright green plastic fingers.
> Engineers in Paris's sanitation department had long appreciated how
> efficiently peasants' twig brooms swept debris along, but they were
> frustrated by how much the brooms cost and how often the twigs broke.
>
> So Paris's sanitation department, considered Europe's most innovative,
> asked manufacturers to develop a broom that used sturdy plastic
> fingers rather than wood. The new plastic brooms cost one-fifth as
> much as the wooden ones and last seven times as long.
>
> This is just one way Paris's administrators have demonstrated their
> technological ingenuity. The city's water system churns out a
> foot-wide stream that runs alongside the city's curbs to wash away
> litter. Paris has worked with industry to develop a vehicle to clean
> up the animal oil left from all the poultry, rabbit and beef sold at
> open-air markets. Voila, the Gyrolave squirts steaming, swirling soapy
> water onto the pavement and then sweeps the street.
>
> Another truck shoots compressed water under cars to remove the litter
> beneath them, while a second vehicle has long arms with five joints to
> pick up leaves. The newest vehicle has an elephantlike trunk that
> vacuums up sidewalk litter. The city soon hopes to introduce a
> robotic, unmanned version of this contraption.
>
> "You have to give the French credit for being innovative," says van
> den Berg, the urban expert in Rotterdam.
>
> Parisians say the city has become much cleaner since 1977 when Jacques
> Chirac became their first democratically elected mayor in a century.
> Previously Paris had been run by a prefect appointed by the Interior
> Minister, but residents often argued that a mayor held accountable in
> regular elections would be more attentive to their needs. (The prefect
> still runs the police department.)
>
> When Parisians talk about cleanliness, their main complaint is canine
> excrement, notwithstanding the city's vaunted new motor scooters that
> vacuum up dog droppings. Not wanting to alienate dog owners, who
> represent a powerful voting bloc, the city for years refused to fine
> owners who did not clean up after their poodles. But with complaints
> growing, Philippe Galy, director of the department of sanitation and
> the environment, started ordering fines in May: $110 for the first
> offense and $230 for the second. "It's absurd," he says. "With all the
> serious environmental problems, like global warming, the ozone layer,
> Chernobyl and nuclear waste, it's unbelievable that the No. 1 subject
> of conversation at every Paris dinner party is dog doo."
>
> PUBLIC HIGH school like Lycee Janson-de-Sailly, built with busts of
> Pascal, Hugo and other luminaries along its majestic 200-yard facade,
> simply does not exist in an American city. The 109-year-old
> institution is in the 16th arrondissement, the Paris equivalent of
> Park Avenue, and the bankers, diplomats and high government officials
> who live there scurry to send their children to Janson.
>
> Janson has 3,200 students, a lengthy waiting list and a substantial
> number of students from Paris's rich western suburbs, who are
> attracted by the school's reputation. The school has 250 teachers,
> several of them accomplished novelists and historians. Janson's alumni
> include former President Giscard d'Estaing, former Prime Minister
> Laurent Fabius and the Attali twins -- Jacques, president of the
> European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Bernard, chairman
> of Air France.
>
> Its paint may be peeling, its long, primitive desks may be gnarled
> from decades of use and abuse, but its student body continues to
> excel. About 95 percent of Janson's graduates pass the forbidding,
> all-important bacca laureat examination that is the ticket to a
> university.
>
> "The school is excellent in many ways," says Francoise Rietsch, who
> heads one of Janson's parent associations. "There is a lot of
> discipline, self-discipline, among the students."
>
> Sitting behind the old wooden desk in her tidy office, Yvonne Cluzet,
> the school's earnest principal, makes clear that her main concern is
> academics and not the woes often associated with urban schools.
>
> "Drugs just aren't a problem here," she says. "And we don't have
> problems with teen-age pregnancy. Our students are mature." The
> biggest problem she could think of was that two years ago bands of
> teen-agers from the suburbs stole pocketbooks, wallets and expensive
> coats from Janson students as they left school. The police quickly
> stopped it.
>
> Janson and other Parisian schools do not suffer from a vicious cycle
> in which the middle class pulls its children out of public schools,
> tilting the balance toward poorer immigrant children and causing more
> middle-class families to send their children elsewhere.
>
> Jean-Marie Demade, manager at a metallurgy company, moved his family
> from Rueil-Malmaison, a suburb, back to Paris so his son Julien could
> attend Janson. "I returned because of the quality of the education,"
> he says. "And life for children is more interesting and lively in
> Paris, with the movies, museums, theaters and concerts, than it is in
> the suburbs."
>
> Twenty-four percent of Paris's high-school students go to private
> schools. Parents choose those schools because they want their children
> to receive a religious education or because they have underachieving
> children and think that private schools will be stricter. The
> overachievers are sent to public schools like Janson, which, good as
> it is, doesn't even rank at the top of Paris's public lycees. Most
> teachers rate Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV even higher.
>
> "The middle class flocking to private schools just isn't a problem
> here," says Michele Gendreau-Massalou, the rector of Paris's school
> system. "In terms of passing the baccalaureat, public schools produce
> better results than private schools."
>
> Schools are just one of the quality services that keep families in
> Paris. The city has begun building moderately priced three-bedroom
> apartments because many couples have complained that once they have
> two or three children they can no longer afford Parisian rents. The
> city issues a "Paris-Famille" card to parents of three or more
> children entitling them to $400 in annual discounts on a range of
> activities, including transport, school meals and college tuition.
>
> Another magnet for families is the city-run day-care system, which
> cares for 20,000 children a day, attracting rich and poor alike. The
> day-care center at 54 rue St.-Maur is typical of the 250 city-run
> centers except for its bold architecture: it has a spiraling concrete
> facade that resembles the Guggenheim Museum. Its front is windowless
> to keep out street noise and pollution, while its back is filled with
> sun-drenched floor-to-ceiling windows.
>
> The center on the rue St.-Maur has a staff of 25 to watch over 87
> children, aged 3 months to 3 years. Each of its three floors has a
> glass-enclosed nap area, and the staff has painted pink and blue
> rabbits and stars on the see-through walls. Each week, one of the
> center's aides stages a marionette show; the city offers special
> courses to teach day-care workers how to do such shows.
>
> "I can afford my own au pair, but I much prefer the day-care center,"
> says Patricia Fayet, a radiologist, as she watches her 1-year-old son,
> Yann, play in a bright blue plastic tub filled with hundreds of
> striped balls. "At the day-care center, the children get professional
> care and learn how to live with others."
>
> Each center has a director who lives on the site and is trained as a
> licensed nurse and specialist in early child development. All the
> day-care workers must have spent a year in college studying care of
> children under age 3. A doctor visits each center once a week.
>
> At the center on the rue St.-Maur, parents can leave their children
> from 7:30 A.M. to 6:30 P.M., but France Galas, the director, chides
> parents who leave a child for more than eight hours. Payments are on a
> sliding scale, ranging from $30 to $400 a month per child, with the
> city picking up half the cost of running the centers.
>
> The centers are so successful that there is a waiting list of
> thousands of children, and the city is struggling to keep up by
> building one new day-care center a month.
>
> "A few years ago mothers thought it was bad to put their children in a
> public day-care center because they felt guilty they weren't doing
> enough for their kids," says Elisabeth Allaire, director of social
> services, children and health for Paris. "Now mothers have heard so
> many good things about our day-care centers that they think they are
> bad mothers if they don't send their kids to our centers."
>
> IN MANY WAYS, Paris is a tale of two cities. There is the Paris of the
> travel guides: the city of three-star restaurants and Yves Saint
> Laurent boutiques, the city of the 2.2 million privileged souls who
> live within the 22-mile ring road, the Boulevard Peripherique.
>
> Then there is the other Paris, the outer ring where the working
> classes live, often in anonymous 1960's tower blocks. These are the
> suburbs where gangs of immigrant teen-agers clash with the police,
> where the sons of Algerian and Moroccan workers have a 25 percent
> jobless rate and where the native French tilt heavily toward
> Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right, anti-immigrant leader. These suburbs
> include Sartrouville, Montfermeil, Mantes-la-Jolie and Gennevilliers.
>
> "One important reason why Paris is successful is that it's a
> fantastically elitist city," says Christopher Brooks, an economist
> specializing in urban issues at the Organization for Economic
> Cooperation and Development in Paris. "While a lot of people would
> like to live there, lots of people can't afford to. The social
> composition is skewed as a result. The poor are forced to live in the
> outskirts."
>
> The Quartier du Luth in Gennevilliers is neither the worst nor the
> best of the banlieue. It is a United Nations of immigrants from
> Algeria, the Antilles, the Ivory Coast, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey,
> Zaire and a dozen other countries. About 40 percent of its 10,000
> residents are immigrants, and fewer than half the children finish high
> school. Teachers complain that they find syringes near the school
> gates.
>
> "This isn't the greatest neighborhood," says Ahmet Ersoy, a
> 30-year-old unemployed refugee from Turkey. "We'd like to move on to
> another neighborhood eventually." Ersoy lives in a nondescript,
> 14-story, 500-yard-long block that could have won a Stalinist design
> contest. Its graffiti-splattered walls say "Momo" and "Chaka Chaoui."
> Social agencies steer immigrants to districts like the Luth, four
> miles northwest of Paris, because they have the cheapest housing in
> the region. A modest two-bedroom apartment is $350, about one-seventh
> the cost in central Paris.
>
> In the Luth, France's activist Government works hard to improve living
> conditions. There are playgrounds with bright red swings and slides,
> and an office has been set up where four social workers counsel the
> Luth's residents.
>
> The district has been designated a "Priority Education Zone." This
> means its schools receive extra money and teachers to help integrate
> immigrant children and provide special help to the laggards. At Guy
> Moquet Middle School, Claude Naveau, the principal, is proud that his
> school, filled with Botticelli and Manet posters, has a computer room
> and its own radio station.
>
> "We have a lot of children who don't have a good family environment,
> who don't have someone asking them, 'Are you doing your homework?' "
> says Naveau, whose heavy glasses and thick beard make him look like an
> archetypal intellectual. "Children love our school because it's an
> oasis from the chaos outside."
>
> To be sure, Paris proper also has its less chic neighborhoods, most
> notably the 18th, 19th and 20th arrondissements in the north and east.
> These have a large North African population, much of it second
> generation, many of whom work in small businesses, especially
> textiles.
>
> The epicenter of Arab Paris is Barbes-Rochechouart, the intersection
> of two bustling avenues, which seems a cross between a Moroccan souk
> and Manhattan's 14th Street. Elevated trains rumble by as people
> squeeze past a 200-yard line of sidewalk stalls. Nearby, young toughs
> wait until sundown to begin their purse snatchings.
>
> "A lot of young kids come up from the Maghreb, can't find jobs and
> start creating trouble," says Youssef Karoui, who runs the Eslem
> restaurant.
>
> The problem in these neighborhoods, residents say, is not violent
> crime, but purse-snatchings, burglaries and car thefts. Fortunately
> for Paris, crack has not made inroads and drug addiction is far less
> prevalent than in American cities.
>
> THE ENTRANCE TO THE concrete, 1960's building on the Boulevard
> Bourdon, 250 yards south of the Bastille, could not be more
> nondescript. There isn't even a nameplate. But deep inside, behind the
> security guards, is a cavernous room filled with display panels and
> flashing lights that looks like the Pentagon's war room.
>
> Welcome to the central command post for Paris's subway system, an
> intricate web with 434 stations, 686 escalators and 1.6 billion riders
> a year.
>
> At rush hour, 560 trains snake through the city, and on the command
> center's 13 display panels, each as long as a baseball scoreboard,
> orange lights show the location and progress of every single train. If
> there is a subway fire or someone jumps in front of a train -- there
> are about 150 such suicides each year -- a subway line manager leaps
> up from his console and runs to his display panel to switch off power
> for his line.
>
> "We have already extended this display panel to include some new
> stations that we still haven't opened," says Jean-Pierre Renard, a
> longtime manager at the command center. The panel shows two stations
> to be added when line No. 1 is extended under the Seine to La Defense,
> the ultramodern office district west of Paris.
>
> Probably better than anything else, the Metro demonstrates Paris's
> devotion to constant improvement: to improve through planning, bold
> engineering and a willingness to spend money. The Metro recently added
> a conductorless train that connects Orly Airport with the main subway
> line. The express suburban rail system, known as the R.E.R., has been
> extended east to Euro-Disneyland, which opened in April. There are
> plans for a six-mile-long tramway that will connect blue-collar
> suburbs north of Paris and for an express subway connecting the
> southernmost part of Paris to the St.-Lazare train station on the
> right bank.
>
> The budget for these and other transit projects -- which are selected
> by a regional transportation board -- will total $3 billion over the
> next five years. The financing comes from ticket revenues and from the
> city, regional and national governments.
>
> Thanks to a solid flow of funds, the subway cars undergo maintenance
> once a week, and as a result mechanical failures are responsible for
> less than a third of line shutdowns. Usually the problem is human
> failures, like fights between passengers or pranksters pulling the
> emergency cord.
>
> "If our trains ran without passengers, we'd hardly have any problems,"
> jokes Renard, a short, dapper man in a blue bow tie and
> charcoal-striped suit.
>
> Like many Parisian civil servants, Renard exudes an extreme pride in
> his work and his city. He boasts about a new varnish that helps keep
> the Metro graffiti-free. He brags about the system's safety record,
> saying he cannot remember the last time there was a fatal accident.
>
> "I'm a modest man, so don't expect me to say that our Metro is the
> best in the world," he says, with a twinkle in his eye. "Let's just
> say it's one of the best.
>
> "We plan to keep it that way."
>
> GRAPHIC: Photos: Along the Seine, near Notre Dame, a new broom (its
> bristles are plastic) sweeps clean, while a couple celebrates love the
> old-fashioned way. (pg. 15); The city is ingenious about cleaning up
> after itself. Here, near the I. M. Pei glass pyramid at the Louvre, a
> modified motor scooter scoops up after a dog's visit. (pg. 14);
> Washing down the Place de la Concorde. (pg. 16); Its vacuuming of
> Montmartre completed, this elephantine street cleaner heads for the
> garage. As the Metro goes, so goes Paris -- efficiently. And often
> artfully. At the Louvre-Rivoli station, a street musician serenades
> Nakhthorheb. (pg. 17)(Photographs by Michel Setboun/J. B. Pictures for
> The New York Times)
>
> LOAD-DATE: July 19, 1992
Wow, NYT, and its some anecdotal comments
'about having a few gardens and garbage pickups
scheduled seven days a week.
here are some other points of view:
http://www.varsity.co.nz/travel/articles.asp?id=3657
http://www.lifeadventures.com/paris.htm
http://tinyurl.com/6z2ms
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