ABBY: And I especially love this neighborhood. I love the – um, well I hate the word ‘diversity’ … there’s a lot of life here, I don’t feel like I’m living in an artifact, and it’s nice not being the only, um, foreigners, you know, feeling like we are among others making a life.
Paris’s Belleville neighborhood—nestled in the hills of four arrondissements northeast of the city—is built on narrow streets and offers an eclectic cultural blend. Film connoisseurs may recognize the name from the 2003 animated movie The Triplets of Belleville, or as backdrop to the 1956 movie The Red Balloon. With one of the highest elevations in Paris (128m) near Place des Fêtes, the area rivals Montmartre for the best view of the city—but despite its visibility on screen or as backdrop to Paris, Belleville remains largely undiscovered, unvisited, and unknown.
French for “beautiful town,” Belleville was once a hilltop village known for its farms, vineyards, and countryside guinguettes—wine halls where locals would come together to eat, drink, and dance. The village was absorbed by Paris in 1860, but has retained its working-class culture and decidedly un-Parisian edge. Indeed, a 2003 Rough Guide to Paris advises travelers that Belleville is “fairly run-down and even a bit dodgy in places,” noting that one of the local parks was built “to camouflage what… had been a desolate warren of disused quarries, rubbish dumps, and shacks.”
Toward the end of the twentieth century, Belleville’s old industrial buildings and workshops began to attract local artists, who found in the low rents and large spaces potential for burgeoning studios, galleries, and ateliers—workshops that double as storefronts. Soon thereafter, middle-class French families in search of affordable homes began to settle in Belleville. Today, students exchange ideas over mugs of coffee, immigrants converse on sidewalks in their native tongues, and artists paint in storefront studios with doors wide open. The area offers sprawling outdoor markets, eccentric boutiques, artist communes, international groceries, and the hundreds of unexpected details that arise only from such a confluence of different people and cultures.
But the ever-changing population of Belleville has meant that the landscape is often in upheaval: graffiti coats many brick walls, storefronts have fallen into disrepair. Some areas are considered unsafe after dark, with newcomers and tourists deterred from exploring this part of Paris. The idyllic name, pitted against the rough, transient, and mercurial environment, speaks to both the expectation and reality of Abby and Zack’s experience in Amy Herzog’s play.
— Jennifer Clements