Thursday, 20 October 2005
Neighborhood Watch
So that building down the street from my office - you know, the one I wrote about before - has been undergoing construction for a few months. Abandoned for I don't know how long, then a squat, it's now shaping up to be a very nice-looking building.
The restaurant on the ground floor in the corner was completely gutted (as were the floors above, I would imagine). The new interior is quite nice, lots of wood and stone. It's still the same pizza restaurant as before, but now it looks much nicer. The workers are just getting started on the commercial space next to the restaurant, so that'll be interesting to follow.
The building exterior was cleaned up, French-style: the stone is ground and scrubbed down, pocks and pits are filled in with a similarly colored cement. Best of all, they've removed a very ugly concrete addition (probably a result of some quickie work in the 60's or 70's) on the side of the restaurant. It's now roughly the same texture and color as the rest of the building's stone, the concrete having been stripped away and the underlying stone repaired (within the limits of how much you can repair stone).
The building proper will become logements sociaux, or low-income housing. This is good news, as there were a rash of fires this summer in buildings filled beyond capacity. There was an outcry at the time that the people running Paris were ignoring the needs of the large number of poor (typically immigrants). I'm sure this is a drop in the bucket; but from the looks of this building, Paris certainly isn't ignoring the poor who need housing.
So everyone wins: Low-income families get housing in a pretty nice location; a cheap-looking pizzeria is revamped to the extreme; and a largely vacant building is once again useful, with a very nice-looking exterior. And life in the city moves on...