Our Lady of Paris II

Something happened this month that remined me of this post published on the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing.

I noted at the beginning of the piece that the 1960s was a decade filled with life defining moments as far as national and world events were concerned.

Today the news outlets call it "breaking news", but in the competitive business of reporting the news 24/7  these days, "breaking news" can refer to anything from an assassination attempt to the proverbial cat stuck up a tree. 

Not so in the sixties when these words:  "We interrupt this program to bring you a news bulletin..." meant serious business, often the preamble to what would become one of those life-defining moments. And the news that followed those ominous words, was usually bad. 

Except once. 

I still get chills whenever I think of Walter Cronkite's reaction the moment when from almost three hundred thousand miles away, the voice of Neil Armstrong came through loud and clear: "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."

Talk about a life defining moment. I feel privileged to have been around to experience it, old enough to appreciate it, but not old enough to be cynical about it. 

This month's re-opening of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris after a 2019 fire nearly destroyed the 900 year old treasure, was another of those life defining moments for me. 

You can read why in this post, written shortly after that devastating fire. 

In addition to being one of only a handful of pieces of good news in a very challenging year, I've found other parallels between the restoration of the cathedral and the moon landing.

The most profound similarity is that both accomplishments are sterling examples of triumphs of the human spirit.

Today I'm too old to be cynical about it, but not nearly old enough to not be able to fully appreciate it.

I imagine many of the folks who sat on the Rice University football field one hot Houston September afternoon in 1962 listening to President Kennedy proclaim his intention to successfully send astronauts to the moon (and back!) by the end of the decade, must have thought he was crazy. 

Maybe it was the heat. 

Granted we had already sent astronauts into space four times, but the difference between the Mercury missions of the time which orbited the earth, and the Apollo missions which would land men on the moon, is a little like the difference between driving in Chicago rush hour traffic, (no small accomplishment) and climbing Mount Everest. 

In his speech which you can read here, Kennedy mentioned that the "missile" required to send a spacecraft out of the earth's orbit and on to the moon, would need to be as tall as the football field they were sitting upon was long. And it would need to be constructed out of metal alloys that had not yet been invented. 

Obviously, those were only two of the hurdles necessary to accomplish Kennedy's goal.

Given the timeline, this must have seemed an impossible task to anyone paying attention. 

No doubt that was the response of many who heard on April 15, 2019, the words of French president Emmanuel Macron who proclaimed as he was standing before Our Lady of Paris while it was still ablaze, that the cathedral would be rebuilt, and would reopen in five years. 

It turned out that with five months to spare, the crew of Apollo 11, backed by tens of thousands of dedicated individuals, maybe more, carried out Kennedy's goal.

And here, in photographs ripped off the internet, is how the cathedral looked inside and out earlier this month, just over five years after the fire, thanks to perhaps the same number of dedicated individuals:

If you've ever been there, it doesn't look exactly as it did before, does it? Gone is the austere look of centuries' worth of grime and soot, it's now bright and shiny, almost good as new. So much so it's actually a little jarring. To get an idea of the transformation, the sculpture at the lower right interior shot above is "The Virgin of Paris" a work from the 14th Century. You can compare it to my photograph of it made in 2010, seen in the post linked to above. 

The restoration will still take several more years, but just like when it was first built back in the Middle Ages, the cathedral will be open during the construction.

Just like the moon missions, there were detractors. 

Aren't there always?

Obviously, a good chunk of money went into the restoration, money which some believe, like the moon missions, would have been better spent elsewhere. I dealt with that subject in both my post about the moon landing and the one on Notre Dame, so I won't go into it here.

Suffice it to say, I disagree.  

All I'll add to that is this: if monumental treasures such as Notre Dame, the Pantheon in Rome, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Taj Mahal are not worth saving, then quite frankly, nothing is. Yes, these were all buildings built to serve a particular religion, but because of their beauty, their historical significance, and their status as indelible symbols of the place in which they reside, they have all transcended their original function and today belong not to any one country or religion, but to the whole world. The loss of any of these irreplicable works of art, and others that I don't have the space to list, is a loss for the whole of humanity, even for people never fortunate enough to step inside of them. 

Finally, I know there are some who would say the herculean task of restoring Notre Dame in little more than a blink of the eye, is nothing short of a miracle. 

Again, I beg to differ. While I did toy with the notion (not entirely tongue-in-cheek) that given the timing of the fire, perhaps some superhuman force (you'll have to read the post to see which one), was at least partly responsible for the catastrophe, its rebirth, like the moon mission, is entirely a human effort. From the Paris Fire Department whose quick thinking and flat-out heroism prevented irreparable damage, to the fundraisers and those who contributed money to rebuild the cathedral, to the architects, engineers and artisans who employed in their work techniques many thought had been lost for centuries, to the construction workers, laborers and the folks who fed them, and everyone I'm leaving out who made the plans a reality, to President Macron who set it all in motion, and to the people of France who demanded the cathedral be rebuilt exactly as it was meant to be, all their efforts are a lasting testimony to the fact that when a critical mass of human beings work together for a common goal, almost anything is possible.

I think that's a splendid thought we all should take into 2025.

Happy New Year.

Our Lady of Paris

"The Virgin of Paris" Early 14th Century,
a masterpiece of late Gothic art,
in the transcept of Notre-Dame de Paris

Ever since the day I first walked from Manhattan to Brooklyn across its pedestrian walkway in 1979, I've had a love affair with the Brooklyn Bridge. A work of tremendous beauty, that magnificent 19th century structure is the perfect blending of structural engineering, architecture, and history, especially the heartrending  story of the contibutions of the thousands of individuals who built it, not a few of whom who gave their lives (including its chief designer John Roebling), during its construction. That, combined with ts loaction in the heart of New York City makes the walk across it over the East River between the two boroughs in my opinion, the single greatest example of the urban experience.

One day about twenty five years ago, I found myself on the Brooklyn side of the bridge. It was a difficult time in my life, filled with loss and the confusion that follows. As I gazed upon that magnificent creation, I took comfort in the thought that despite the painful loss I was going through at the time, the Brooklyn Bridge, and all it had meant to me over the years, would always be there.

Some years later, the unthinkable happened. Two hijacked commercial jets, one coming from the north, the other from the south, deliberately slammed into the two towers of the World Trade Center, just a stone's throw from the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Back in Chicago, 780 miles away, I watched on TV in horror with my wife and infant son as the South Tower then the North Tower collapsed taking with them the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people.

Weeks after the initial shock and mourning for the lives lost that day, for their families and for the City of New York, I recalled that moment at the bridge and realized how foolish I had been. Perhaps it was because I had lived a sheltered life in a world that for a good part of my existance had been relatively peaceful, at least on my side of the globe. Violence and destruction of that magnitude in a place I loved and was intimately connected to was inconceivable. If the mighty Twin Towers could flatten like pancakes thanks to the diabolical efforts of a handful of men, nothing, not even that beloved bridge was safe. After 9/11, my new mantra became, "take nothing for granted."

The cathedral as seen from the Left Bank in January, 2005.
This week's fire destroyed the entire roofline and
the 19th Century spire at the transcept.

Here at the outset,  I must I point out there is absolutely no parallel between the September 11 attacks and what happened last week in Paris. The fire that destroyed much of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in that city was an accident, of that I am certain. Not one life was lost (at least as far as we know at this moment) and there were few serious injuries, none of them life threatening. For that we should be eternally grateful. 

The comparison is a personal and purely superficial one. Once again I was caught off-guard. You see, if there is any work of human hands in the world that means as much to me as the Brooklyn Bridge, it would be the Cathedral of Paris. Long before I set foot inside, an obsession with Medieval Gothic architecture drove me to study Notre-Dame de Paris inside and out from front to back, every nook and crannie of it. For many years to me it was without question the greatest building on earth, the perfect combination of heart breaking beauty, magnificent craftsmanship, brilliant structural engineerng, the moving story of the fierce devotion of the community of believers who built it, its role as the symbolic heart and soul of the nation of France and its people, and of course by any standard, a great work of art. Words cannot describe how I felt as I learned the news on Monday that the cathedral was in flames. In denial, I assumed when I saw the early images of the fire on my computer at work, just as I did when I first saw smoke coming out of the hole in the World Trade Center punctured by a plane, that the emergency responders on the scene would soon have everything under control.

Then I saw a photograph of the great 19th Century spire above the transcept consumed in flames. At that moment a colleague at work, himself from France and well aware of the situation, came back from lunch and told me the spire had already collapsed into the church. I was broken hearted. Something I dearly loved, a place that gave me great joy during my formative years, a sense of peace in troubled times, (I visited it for the first time the same year as my Brooklyn Bridge epiphany), and a place I visited so often that it became a dear friend, would soon be no more...

The West facade of  of Notre-Dame  de Paris

...or so I thought.

The fire worked its way to the north tower (the one on the left in the photograph above) where firefighters worked valiently to halt its spread. Had they failed and the tower's structure become sufficiently weakened, the massive bells in the tower's bellfry would have broken free and collapsed to the ground. With them, all hope for saving the building would have been lost.

Catastrophic as the damge to the building was, thanks to the quick thinking and hard work of the firefighters, the tower and its bells remained intact.. Expecting the worst when I woke up Tuesday morning, the news was encouraging. Allthough the spire and timber roof where the fire began were destroyed, the stone vaulting directly underneath the roof survived nearly intact. Early morning photographs showed the interior covered with debris, a little worse for the wear, but still intact. The most remakable news of all was that most of the stained glass including the two magnificent rose windows pictured below, one on either side of the transcept also survived.

The North Transept Rose Window

The South Transept Rose Window

The fire brought out the most remarkable display in people, a veritable rainbow of hues, luminances, and saturations of human nature, in all its glory and well, not so much. The night of the fire, thousands of Parisians lined the quais on the Left Bank of the Seine to watch in disbelief as their cathedral burned, mournfully singing hymns as the flames illuminated the towers of the church and the surrounding neighborhood in an eerily beautiful light. 

The following day, President Emmanuel Marcon declared the church would be completely restored, practically good as new in five years, presumably in time for 2024 when Paris is to host the Summer Olympic Games. Even before the French president opened his mouth, tens of millions of Euros were already pledged by weathly individuals and corporations to rebuild Notre-Dame. By Thursday morning, two days after the fire was officially declared extinguished, over one billion Euros had been pledged, yes indeedy some of it believe it or not, coming with strings attached, mostly in the form of demands for extreme tax breaks in return for the contributions. 

St. Joan of Arc, 19th Century sculpture
by Charles Desvergnes

That display of spontaneous philanthropy turned heads and triggered significant consternation from all corners, ranging from historical preservation groups who questioned the irony of why raising funds for the necessary restoration of the cathedral before the building was nearly lost was almost as difficult as trying to draw blood from a stone, to advocates for practically every charity on the face of the earth who threw up their hands in disgust at the record amount of money raised in the blink of an eye for an effort they deemed so much less worthy than their own. 

It didn't take long for conspiracy theorists to come up with the idea that the cathedral was torched, conceiving of plots to destroy the church carried out by folks whom those theorists do not like, more often than not, Muslim extermists. And people of faith got into the act by proclaiming it was nothing less than an act of God which spared the church  from total destruction. Unfortuantely for those fine theories, facts, physics and common logic explain how the fire started unintentionally, and how despite the serious nature of the blaze, most of the church managed to survive intact, even without the direct intervention of the almighty.   

Portal of the Virgin, West Front of the Cathedral.
Originally installed between 1210 and 1220,
many of these stone figures were behaded during the
French Revolution and retored during the mid-19th Century.  

All evidence points to the source of the fire as being the result of restoration work carried out in the transcept of the cathedral. Ironic as they are, devastating fires such as these, resulting from the heat producing tools necessary for restoration work, in close proximity to the highly inflammable materials the buildings are constructed of, are painfully common. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three such fires here in Chicago in recent years, two of which left only the walls of historic churches standing, and the third in our own Roman Catholic cathedral which was saved only through a little luck (that the fire was caught in time), and the remarkable efforts of firefighters.

That Notre-Dame didn't suffer more damage is due to the fact that the firefighters there managed to contain the blaze to the wooden roof which can be considered a separate structure from the main body of the building. Beneath that roof as I mentioned earlier, is the stone vaulting which one sees from inside the church, the majority of which withstood the flames and the heat of the fire. The great weight of that vault is transferred to the enormous flying buttresses, one of the building's most distinct features, which flank the outside of the cathedral. Had the vault been severely compromised, the delicate balance between the downward force of the vault counterbalancing the lateral force of the flying buttresses might have dramatically shifted, causing the buttresses to crush the outer walls of the cathedral. That this did not happen is a testament to the brilliance of the Medieval builders of Notre-Dame, and to the wise approach that was taken to combat the fire.

However there is one thing about this event than cannot be explained away so easily: its timing. The April 15, 2019 Notre-Dame de Paris fire took place during the midst of the biggest existential crisis in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, in one of that institution's most recognizable symbols (perhaps second only to St. Peter's Bascilica in Rome), AND during Holy Week no less, the single most important week of the year in the calendar of the Church.

The nave of the Cathedral
In this photograph you can see part of the
stone vaulting and the magnificent organ
which itself dates from the 19th Century
but contains components which date
back much earler.

A non-believer can easily dismiss all this as pure coincidence. But to someone who takes his or her faith seriously, especially a Catholic for whom symbols mean a great deal, the timing of this devastating fire certainly has to give one pause to think.

As a Catholic myself, it pains me to say that the institution I love is rotten to the core, at least the administration of it. If there is a God who takes a personal interest in the goings on of this planet, He, She (or They if you prefer), must be supremely pissed at the Church who claims to be His, Her, or Their representative on earth. For even naive Catholics who once assumed that the sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests, dreadful as it is, was only a rare and isolated occurrance, it has now become terribly obvious that the scourge is pandemic in the Church. Much as I like and respect the current Pope Francis, he has done very little to instill the faith in his flock that the Church will unequivocally do everything in its power to end that unspeakable and despicable crime, as well as many other abuses of power in the Church. Culpability, knowledge and most damning, the failure to act upon this cancer in the Church goes all the way to the top to the point where it is impossible to give anyone in any position of power in the Roman Catholic Church a pass.

Clearly the Church needs a radical reboot in order to survive and what better time for this message to come to us than the week before Easter?

The Gospels describe an event that took place in Jerusalem the week before Jesus's crucifixion, where he turned over the tables of the profaners of the Temple, evicting them from the sacred place and telling the perplexed authorities: "destroy this Temple and I will raise it again three days." Can anyone honestly say that at this point in its history, the Roman Catholic Church doesn't need God to come down and do the same thing?  You might think I'm crazy to say this (and I'd be the first to agree with you), but maybe, just maybe that is exactly what happened last Monday.

Christians recognize the Friday before Easter as the holy day when we commemorate the day Jesus died, yet we call it "Good Friday", Those who are perplexeed by that name, forget the fact that without Jesus's death, there could be no Resurrection hence, without Good Friday, there would be no Easter, the central tenet of the faith.

Shrine devoted to Our Lade of Guadalupe from 1949,
the only such shirne in Eurpoe 

Believers or not. I think we can all agree that good things have come out of the horrible fire at Notre-Dame de Paris last week. Because of it, people have come out of their slumber about our sites of cultural heritage, those places around the world that define who we are as a people and as a civilization. The point has been hit home that once they're gone, they can never be replaced. Perhaps we'll all learn not to take any of them for granted.

For an ever so brief a moment, in fact it's probably over by now, the fire brought much of the world together, Catholic or not, in universal sorrow for the potential loss of such a treasure. Not that I ever want to test this out, but one could only hope that were such a catastrophe to befall a cultural heritage site that is not a Christian church, for example the mosque known as the The Dome on the Rock in Jeruslaem, the Hindu/Budhist Temple Angkor Wat in Cambodia, or the Taj Mahal in India, that we of the Christian faith will respond in kind.

Perhaps the most appropriate and heart warming thing that happened last week was that three modest but historic African American churches in Louisiana that were torched by a white supremacist young man in the past month, all reported significant spikes in contributions to their own re-building programs, presumably in response to the fire in Paris.

Clearly, the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris was catastrophic, but it was in no sense at all tragic. All the good that has and will certainly come as a result of it without the loss of a single life is truly a miracle. Despite President Macron's overly optimistic timeline, the cathedral will be restored, that is for certain. As far as I'm concerrned,  I may never set foot inside my old friend again, and that is perfectly OK with me. As long as my children and God-willing their children, and theirs and hopefully the dozens of generations of children to follow will have the opportunity to set foot inside the magnificent cathedral that truly belongs to the enitre world, something which at this moment looks very likely, wherever I am, I will be pleased.

Our Lady of Paris is very much alive.
Joyeuses Pâques, Happy Easter!

POST SCRIPT: I'm very happy to report that unless otherwise noted, everything shown in the photographs in this post has survived the fire.

Simple Answers to Difficult Questions

We once had a priest who gave the shortest homilies (sermons) possible, sometimes they would consist of only two or three sentences. Somehow he always managed to get the point across in those few words better than his colleagues could with their multiple page dissertations. You might say I could learn a lesson or two from him when it comes to writing blog posts.

The truth is, it's possible to sum up the core principles of any faith, or for that matter ideology, simply and briefly. Hillel the Elder, a rabbi who lived at the time of Christ, is responsible for some of the most profound utterances distilling the true essence of faith into a few words:

If I am not for myself, who is for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

The legend goes that one day, a skeptic came to Hillel with this challenge: if Hillel could recite the Torah while standing on one leg, the man would become a believer. Hillel's response while on one leg was the following:

What is hateful to you, do not do unto your neighbors. That is the whole of Torah, the rest is commentary. Now go study.

Which the man did.

The problem with religions or ideologies is that the commentary often becomes more important than the core values. To put it another way, the letter of the law becomes more important than the spirit of the law. Anyone who has ever read the Christian bible, (the first five books of which are a translation of the Torah), knows that when passages are taken out of context, they can be used to justify virtually anything.

That explains thousands of sects of Christianity, each one claiming the Truth to be found exclusively in their own interpretation, and the ultimate favor of God, only for themselves.

The same is true to varying degrees in Judaism, Islam, Buddism, Hinduism Zoroastrinism, Paganism, Atheism (which is also when you think about it, nothing more than a faith), and every other belief system that has ever been devised.

Yesterday, unspeakable acts of violence committed in the name of God took place in Baghdad, Beirut and Paris. It is my sincere belief that religion is not responsible for these despicable acts, rather the perversion of religion.

Fear and hatred are among our basest, basic instincts.. Religion, at least my own experience of it, seeks to teach us a higher level of existence, as expressed through love, forgiveness, and compassion. These things don't come naturally to us, they are taught. Hatred by contrast, does not need to be taught, it just happens. We all experience fear and hatred, and hopefully teach ourselves to overcome those instincts.

We have seen all too frequently that unchecked hatred combined with an overdose of religious indoctrination based upon ideas cherry picked out of scripture is a lethal combination.

As usual, I've gone on too long. These ideas have been better expressed in a meme that's been making the rounds of social media lately. I'm not much for re-posting these quite often smarmy platitudes on the human condition, but I did yesterday as this one seemed to be particularly appropriate. Here is what it said:

A Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, a Pagan, and an Atheist all walk into a coffee shop and they talk, laugh, drink coffee and become good friends.

It's not a joke, it's what happens when you're not an asshole.

Assholes above all, seek to have power over other people. It's very difficult to achieve power by affecting a great many people's lives in a positive way. It takes commitment, self-sacrifice, patience and the will to do good. It's very easy to achieve the power to affect many lives negatively, all it takes it a weapon and of course, the will.

We've seen that the sadistic assholes of Daesh (ISIS) not only seek to achieve power, but also take a great deal of pleasure in afflicting pain and suffering upon others. They do it in the guise of faith but let's face it, you don't need religion to be an asshole. Case in point, there were a whole bunch of assholes in Central Europe in the mid-twentieth century whose hatred was fueled by not by religion , but by nationalism, revenge, and political ideology. Around seventy million people died as a result. Today there are assholes roaming the streets of Chicago who apparently believe in nothing other than nothing is sacred, not even the lives of innocent children.

Late yesterday evening, a remarkable image was broadcast. It showed a group of perhaps a couple hundred thousand individuals gathered in Paris's Place de la Republique with a sign that read in English, "not afraid." That happened early this year after the massacre in the offices of the satire magazine Charlie Hebdo. After that horrible event, millions of Parisians of all colors and faiths marched in the streets of that great city. Expect to see more demonstrations of a similar nature today, tomorrow and in the days to come.

Today we are in solidarity with the citizens of Baghdad, Beirut and Paris, as we should be everyday for people everywhere who want peace, regardless of their creed, color or nationality. Fortunately there are more of us than the assholes, regardless of all the attention they get through the suffering they are willing to inflict upon civilization.

We cannot and will not let them win.

Time Travel

Walking to the train the other night, I was thinking about how much I'd love to step into a time machine and visit State Street in its heyday, if only for a few hours. By sheer coincidence, when I got home, my wife suggested we watch Woody Allen's latest movie, the time travel fantasy; Midnight in Paris.

In case you don't know the premise, it's about an American named Gil who falls in love with Paris while on a trip with his fiance and her rich, staunchly Republican parents. He's a Hollywood screenwriter who would gladly give up his big salary to move into a garret in Montmartre and write novels. His dream falls on the deaf ears of his pathologically insensitive girlfriend. As she is wined and dined by her folks and by an insufferable professor with whom she openly has a crush, our hero wanders the streets of the city, losing himself in its charms. One night, at the stroke of midnight, a vintage Peugeot pulls up and out come some drunken revelers who beckon him to join them. The car turns out to be a time machine that takes him to a place he's always wanted to visit, Cafe Society of 1920s Paris. Two of his fellow passengers in the car turn out to be Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In fact the entire population of his destination is made up of a who's who of celebrities who set foot in Paris in the 1920s, Piccaso, Matisse, Cole Parter, Josephine Baker, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, just to name a few. Gil gets a few pointers on his craft from Ernest Hemingway, who refuses to read the novel the time traveler is working on, but suggests he take it to his friend Gertrude Stein for some ideas. I have to admit I had some difficulty with the fact that nowhere in this fantasy does Gil meet the likes of ordinary Parisians like Jacques LePlombier, but what the heck, it's Woody Allen's fantasy, not mine.

Anyway, the real star of the movie is Paris, the contemporary city that perhaps more than any other can equally serve as the setting for a movie set in the present, the 1920s, or the Belle Époch of the 1890s, a period the film briefly visits. Time hasn't exactly stood still in Paris, not by a long shot, yet there is a timelessness to that city, a seamlessness between the past and the present that I never experienced anywhere else. Paris is Paris, what more can one say, it's just as lovely as it appears in the photographs and paintings, perhaps the most photogenic city in the world.

Yet where London and New York are cities of endless variety, Paris is a city of almost stultifying regularity. I can think of no better illustration than the opening sequences of two Woody Allen movies. Midnight in Paris opens with a series of shots of the city accompanied by a song played the great Sydney Bechet. You can view it here. Lovely isn't it? Clearly Allen loves Paris madly.

Compare it to his love letter to New York City, the opening sequence of the film Manhattan, (in my opinion Woody Allen's one truly great movie). In Manhattan, Allen's voiceover as well as the images, reveal conflicting feelings about his hometown. I think it's one of the most beautiful opening sequences in all of film, in less than four minutes he does a masterful job describing the urban experience in all its flavors, from awe and wonder to the tawdry and decadent. By contrast, in the opening of Midnight... , every shot is more beautiful than the the one that came before it. If there is a darker side to Paris, we don't see it.

This is not the Paris of Sydney Carton or Jean Valjean. Of course that's not Woody Allen's fault, their city is long gone, destroyed by the mother of all urban renewal projects, Georges-Eugéne Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. Much of the Paris we know today, the boulevards and traffic circles, the railway stations, the Bois du Bologne, the Opera, are a result of Baron Haussmann's plan which itself was a great influence on Daniel Burnham's plan of Chicago of 1911. Had the Burnham Plan been fully realized, Chicago today would look a great deal like Paris.

But I digress. Haussmann was commissioned by Napoleon III to rebuild Paris. Ostensibly it was an attempt to modernize the city by introducing new technologies such as the railroad, improve the flow of traffic, and ridding the city of filth, disease and poverty. The old meandering streets from Medieval times and the ancient, dilapidated apartment buildings were replaced by modern buildings and systematically planned boulevards. In that vein the project was not unlike the urban renewal projects that took place in the United States during the mid twentieth century. Another, less publicized goal of the project was to improve the security of the government. The great boulevards served as conduits to facilitate the mobilization of troops in the event of insurrection, (an ever present threat at the time), and also reduced the number of hiding places for the insurrectionists. The effort accomplished all its goals, the old city was gone and with it went the filth and disease. Haussmann's plan solved the problem of poverty in Paris by replacing existing housing with middle and upper income level housing, thereby dispatching the less fortunate to the outskirts of town where they remain to this day. Depending on which side you are on, Haussmann either saved Paris, or destroyed it. An idea of what was lost can be had from checking out the work of photographer Charles Marville who was commissioned to document the soon to be lost city.

What cannot be denied is that Hausmann's genius triumphs, given that 150 years after the execution of his plan, Paris remains a charmingly beautiful city and, despite the notorious French bureaucracy, the old contraption still runs splendidly after all these years.

My first experience of Paris was in 1993, when I had the great fortune of being able to take my half sister Eva, an artist who lived her entire life in Czechoslovakia, for her first visit. Like Gil, she dreamed of Paris, but for obvious reasons, was never able to go. We wasted no time, after getting off the train from Prague at the Gare de l'Est, our first visit was the Louvre. You enter the museum through the contemporary I.M. Pei Pyramid then descend into an underground passage which takes you into the museum proper. Nothing prepares you for the jolt you receive when you emerge from the passageway and find yourself in a cavernous gallery filled with paintings by David, Ingres, Girodet and a slew of other great French masters, each painting about the size of a mid-sized room, hung salon style, covering the entire four walls of the gallery. Laying her eyes upon the room, my sister broke out in tears. Her dream had finally come true. I'll keep that moment with me the rest of my life.

Eva, right, with our friend Sabrina

My own dream would come true later that day when we visited heart of Paris, the Île de la Cité. For years I had an interest in Gothic architecture and yearned to visit the cathedrals of Europe, especially the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, which I had known at least theoretically, inside and out. But I did not know as well the jewel of Sainte-Chapelle, the high gothic chapel built for the palace of King Louis IX (Saint Louis) in the thirteenth century to house some of the most precious relics of Christiandom. The chapel proper sits in the middle of a complex of government buildings and the view of the exterior has been obscured in recent times (by Parisian standards) by those buildings. Since it's government property, you must pass through stringent security, no doubt much worse today than when we visited. But like entering the Louvre, the inauspicious start makes the payoff all the better. You enter Sainte Chapelle through the lower chapel which is devoted to the Virgin. Openings for small stained glass windows made possible by low vaulted ceilings held up with finely crafted columns, make for a space which defines the very character of Gothic architecture. Impressive as it is, the lower chapel doesn't come close to preparing you for what's to come. A blast of multicolored light awaits you as you ascend the narrow stairway that leads to the upper chapel. Here the stained glass windows extend from a few feet off the floor, up nearly five stories to the ceiling, and are divided by only the narrowest of columns. A magnificent rose window adorns the west wall. Opposite is the apse with its high altar also held up with only minimal support. The space is etherial, it's almost as if the whole thing were supported by angel dust, which for all we know, it very well could be. One of my distinct memories of the chapel was standing near the stairway and listening to the gasps of the visitors as they saw it for the first time. It was as if those folks, myself included, were catching their first glimpse of heaven.

When Eva visited Chicago about 25 years ago, she had a few surprises. One day she asked me with a straight face: "Where are all the gangsters?" There are no such surprises in Paris, you can find every stereotypical image imaginable, from a boy sitting on the back of his mom's bike carrying a baguette, to the guy wearing a beret, smoking a cigarette, and playing the concertina on the banks of the Seine. One of my most humorous moments was attending an organ recital in the cathedral and in between music by Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen the organist played, I'm not kidding, variations on the theme of the song Alouette.

Paris may be predictable, but that doesn't mean it doesn't wildly surpass your expectations. No photograph or description can capture its true beauty. For that reason I didn't take pictures inside Sainte Chapelle, there was simply no point. As you might expect, there's no better city on earth to fall in love, I did that at least twice during my first visit. Years later, my wife (whom I hadn't yet met before my first trip, in case you were wondering) and I had a very romantic few days there, sans kids. Any other place in the world it would sound trite to say: "this is a city where you fall in love with life." But not Paris, every cliché you've heard about the place is true, and with a vengence.

One needn't step into a time machine like Gil to visit the past, it's all around you, not preserved as a museum, like it is in Florence, but as much a part of life as the Parisian air or the wine they drink. You can dine at the same establishments that Hemingway and Picasso did in the 1920s, even the ones that Gaugin and Toulouse-Lautrec did in the 1890s. The servers, yes they're still predominantly men, wear the same uniform they did back then, and you still call them "boy" (garçon). And yes they still dance the cancan at the Moulin Rouge, although mostly just for tourists these days. In Paris you can worship in the same church where people worshiped over 1,000 years ago (the locals don't do much of that either), and the most impressive structure in town is still M. Eiffel's 120 year old Tower.

If you are searching for the soul of the city, short of going and seeing it for yourself, read Balzac, Zola and Hugo. For a more rounded cinematic experience than Woody Allen's postcard version, you have many choices. Since to me Paris will always be in black and white and set in the sixties, a good place to start would be with the French New Wave directors. Breathless, by Godard and the wonderful The 400 Blows by Truffaut are two classic films from that remarkably fruitful period. If you're looking for a more contemporary take on the city, by all means see the 2006 film Paris Je t'aime, an anthology of 18 five minute films each by a different director and each set in a different arrondisssement around town.

There may be other cities I prefer, still I can't help but think what a poorer place our world would be without Paris. In a famous scene from an old movie, Rick Blaine says to his beloved Ilsa as she is about to board a plane with her husband, leaving him and Casablanca behind for good:

"We'll always have Paris."

Thank God for that.