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Article: France: Paris Rising; Can the City of Light escape the shadow of its past and get its groove back?
- Article from:
- Newsweek International
- Article date:
- August 16, 2004
- Author:
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Byline: Eric Pape (With Marie Valla and Tracy McNicoll)
It was supposed to be a modernist marvel, an architectural icon of the space age. Nowadays most Parisians don't see the sprawling shopping center known as Les Halles quite that way. They call it "Hole of the Halles," a slur on the grimy, subterranean 1970s monstrosity whose outside spaces smell of urine and where drug dealers lurk in the shadows. "Weed? Coke?"
Contrast this with the sublime geometry of historic Paris. The still-innovative needle of the Eiffel Tower. Gothic churches with jagged angles and ancient stone buttresses. The twin-winged Louvre and the verdant Tuileries garden, not to ...