The Bassin de l'Arsenal was excavated in 1806 on the site of the moat of the former Charles V wall that once enclosed the city. Originally built to serve the inland port and bring water from the Seine to the Bastille, today it is a marina bordered by terraces, pergolas and a rose garden. A tunnel at one end leads to the Saint Martin canal.
Property developers have spoiled the banks with ugly glass and concrete apartment buildings, but this is still a lovely place to come in October, when dead leaves pile up in the fading, straw-colored autumn light. Teeming factories, bustling workshops, docks loaded with plaster, bargemen's bistros and penniless girls once lined the quays from Stalingrad to Bastille. The straight, 4.5-kilometer canal, which split the city between middle-class quarters on the west and working-class neighborhoods to the east, was built by hand in 1825.
Napoleon had ordered the artificial waterway dug to supply Paris with water and provide a shortcut that would avoid navigating a long, circuitous bend in the Seine. By the 1960s, traffic had dwindled to a trickle and the canal narrowly escaped being filled in and paved over for a highway. Then it was turned into a pleasure canal where Parisians and visitors enjoy leisurely boat rides, sailing through the heart of Paris from one lock to the next.
Steve Zade, a 53-year-old British-born "gastronomic refugee", is a guide aboard the Canotier, which sets out with international tourists from La Villette every day. Cars on the rue de Crimée, which bisects the canal, must often wait for the drawbridge to close as it lets his boat through. Steve entertains his passengers with an endless flow of funny commentary. "Why are Spanish tourists on the bateaux-mouches always straining their necks and looking back at monuments two kilometers upstream?", he asks. The passengers are stumped. "Because by the time they hear the Spanish translation, the landmark being described is already two or three bridges behind!" The tourists burst into laughter, certain they have made the right choice about how to spend their day.
Once a small village, in the nineteenth century La Villette became France's fourth-busiest port. A walled-up warehouse on the basin nobly stands across from a 30-story skyscraper. The warehouse was built in 1885 to store sugar, grain and wine that bargemen unloaded from their boats. On the opposite side, a vacant lot marks the spot where the warehouse's twin stood until it burned down in 1990.
At the Jaurès lock, the first of nine that compensates for the 29-meter difference in altitude from one of the canal to the other, the waterway really seems to enter Paris. The Rotonde de la Villette, a former 18th-century customs house designed by Nicolas Ledoux that once formed part of the wall around the city, stands a little further away. The names of other former customs houses are engraved in the stone.
The canal did not exist yet when the sinister, medieval Mont Faucon gallows that inspired the poet François Villon to write Ballade des pendus (Hanged Men Walking) stood at the intersection of the rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, the Saint Martin's lock, the Quai de Jemmapes and the rue Louis Blanc. A series of graceful, lacy, openwork steel bridges surrounded by lush greenery spans this stretch of the canal. The Hotel du Nord, which is famous for being the setting of Marcel Carné's classic 1930s film of the same name, stands near the Récollets lock.
The canal passes under the swing bridge on the rue Dieu and through the Temple lock before flowing underground to the Bastille. Skylights piercing the tunnel's ceiling cast an eerie greenish glow as the canal passes beneath the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir for two kilometers until flowing into the Seine at the Bassin de l'Arsenal.
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