The Slow Pace of Bercy Village

There’s a neat spot, a little off the beaten track, in Paris that I have some fond memor­ies of. It’s an oasis, small in scale and slow in pace. It’s not the sort of place that you find in the tour­ist dir­ect­or­ies and its not envel­oped by the legend of Paris vaca­tion­eer­ing. Bercy Vil­lage is a trendy upscale redevel­op­ment pro­ject in the 12th which fea­tures little shops, a cinema, bars and res­taur­ants, situ­ated within and without of a old wine mar­ket. Metro 14 — Cour St-Emilion lands you right in the vil­lage.
The set­ting is one of calm, coolth and leis­ure. The Bercy area seems a step removed from Paris proper.
Tan­gent starts here: I stumbled across it one day when I wondered what the area to the east of Paris was like. I took the metro fur­ther in that dir­ec­tion than I had before, plan­ning to walk back towards the centre of town. I got off at ‘Les Ardoines’ metro sta­tion in a sub­urban indus­trial area (why? i am always trust­ing in serendip­ity) that was not quite the pretty pic­ture of the city of light that one might asso­ci­ate with Paris. It was gritty, for­eign and cer­tainly authen­tic. The area clearly was of mixed use with factor­ies inter­spersed with res­id­en­tial areas and small corner snack bars where loc­als glanced with some incredu­lity at someone, clearly a tour­ist, traipsing through their neigh­bour­hood. Now, such excur­sions in the past have got­ten me within a hair’s width of trouble. But I wandered a bit. The factor­ies were dingy and many seemed aban­doned. Per­haps not all as dingy as I might sug­gest. I found this one quite impress­ive in fact. I walked for a while and even­tu­ally determ­ined that the area was authen­tic, but not that much more excit­ing that wan­der­ing though a Cana­dian sub­urb and cer­tainly not the tour­ist scene. I hopped back on the metro and back­tracked get­ting off the metro, for whatever reason, at the Bib­lio­theque Fran­cois Mit­ter­rand (sorry for lack of appro­pri­ate accents, still work­ing on this).
The bib­lio­theque itself is one of the most impress­ive research lib­rar­ies I have ever used. I ended up work­ing there more extens­ively later on, but at first blush, the four nar­row mod­ern­istic towers emer­ging from sunken gar­dens were quite an impress­ive con­trast to the indus­trial area I had been wan­der­ing in. I checked out the lib­rary and made plans to get accred­it­a­tion and come back later. Then I cam across the pub next door. The Frog at the Brit­ish Lib­rary is part of a <a href=http://www.frogpubs.com/” target=“_blank”>chain of english-style pubs in France that offer an assort­ment of micro­brews. In time I became quite fond of the Inseine and the Dark de Tri­omphe. After being suit­ably way­laid for lunch at the Frog pub, I strayed across the river and came across Bercy Vil­lage. Tan­gent ends here.
As I men­tioned earlier, the vil­lage was developed out of the vari­ous stor­age vaults and out­build­ings of a wine mar­ket. The archi­tec­ture is of ori­ginal stone masonry taste­fully mixed with new glass and black steel con­struc­tion. Cobble­stone yards ground the vil­lage and fea­ture care­fully retained signs of the past use such as iron tracks for trans­port­ing casks, crates and the such. The stores are def­in­itely upscale, but make for ser­i­ous brows­ing. There are res­taur­ants and bars, and in par­tic­u­lar a second Frog Pub. In this case, The Frog at Bercy has a lush green patio and the same col­lec­tion of micro­brews as its com­pan­ion across the river. These fine estab­lish­ments have most recently begun an innov­at­ive pro­gramme that allows one to log onto the Frog web­site and treat someone in Paris to a drink at on of the bars. Cool.
The cinema is one of those large mega­plex types run by UCG, but it is care­fully hid­den at the one extreme of the vil­lage and not extern­ally impos­ing. It allows it to ful­fill its func­tion and offer a wide selec­tion of cine­matic diver­sions without detract­ing from the ambi­ance of small vil­lage of boutiques and shops.
For me the lux­ury of being able to research at the Fran­cois Mit­ter­rand, and to inter­sperse this with a trip to the cinema or to the pub made makes for a won­der­ful exist­ence. Now, if I could find a deal on a condo in the area and an appro­pri­ate research pos­i­tion to fund my life­style, life would be sweet indeed. Could Bercy Vil­lage be situ­ated any­where else in the world, abso­lutely. There are prob­ably Bercy Vil­lages all over the world, but that hardly detracts from a thought­fully craf­ted urbanspace that offers a won­der­ful diver­sion on a fine after­noon.