La Samaritaine

I have always been fascinated by La Samaritaine, the grand old lady of the Right Bank. She looms in chocolate and bronze over the riverside near the Pont Neuf, no longer polished and gleaming in the sunlight but slightly tarnished, aging gracefully as the river serenely flows at her feet. Her rooms are silent, quietly abandoned. She is a ghost living out the memories of a Parisian life gone by.

La Samaritaine was a department store. It also used to be the place to take tea, with a rooftop terrace affording what must have been the city's most civilised vantage point - a view from the sky a million times removed from the brashness of the Eiffel Tower or the seventies vision of modernity encompassed in the Tour Montparnasse. Perhaps La Samaritaine was always a place caught out of time, from somewhere else altogether where things were different, nicer, more genteel, more beautiful? In any case it fell victim to modern regulations when it was discovered that it was not safe in case of fire and since 2005 it has been closed.

There is something about so big a building and particularly such a grand one just standing empty. It seems eerie. You can't help but look and wonder what's going on within. What do the deserted corridors look like? What's left in the rooms? The outside is remarkably well preserved, though some of the window panes might be slipping slightly in their frames, growing crooked with the passage of time and revealing clothes rails still stacked up behind them, barren of course. When a puff of smoke drifts through the cracks from a passing car exhaust do the walls shudder with the knowledge that this smoke could mean fire, the thing that somebody somewhere determined would be this building's nemesis? Do they tremble just a little, preparing to bring the whole thing down in a tangled mess?

It is easy to imagine such a mess at the moment, since the hoardings obscuring the ground floor and entrances are currently displaying a series of photos showing how the building was constructed. You can actually see the metal beams being lifted into place to create the central frame that the store was built around, the very thing that I had heard to be allegedly structurally deficient according to modern standards, unable to withstand fifteen minutes of fire. I've since read other explanations as to why the place was unsafe - flammable floorboards, old wiring, a propensity to fill quickly with smoke. Whatever the real perceived problem, a full evacuation of the store's occupants could not apparently be achieved within a reasonable timeframe in an emergency. So there must be no more occupants, for now.

Alongside the store's construction history you can view a plan for its future. The owners are trying to explain that they will preserve the historic traditions of a Parisian icon whilst making everything safe. This means that they have to perform a complex dance behind the original Art Deco facade (which will be retained), balancing complex financial calculations whilst also taking into account the depth of feeling for the place. The most lucrative use of this prime riverside site is, apparently, a mixture of hotels, apartments, offices and retail space, with a nod to all important social considerations in the form of affordable housing and a childcare facility. All of which sounds logical, correct, safe and sadly maybe a bit too sanitized and carefully thought out.

Parisians complain about what's happened to La Samaritaine for all sorts of reasons. There have been wrangles about ownership. People don't like the fact that it's been left empty for so long. Some see the safety concerns as a mere excuse to free up the site for development. Yet nobody can quite agree on what should be done with it. So now the plans are starting to move forward, or so it seems, overall it must be a good thing, but you have to hope that they don't lose sight of the fact that La Samaritaine just exudes something magical. It draws you in from across the river and sets your imagination off in all sorts of directions. It is another place from another time and making it all safe, new and shiny must not be allowed to take away any of the resonance that it possesses. This grand old dame, probably wearing a hat, looking out at the city, deserves the respect of a well-loved maiden aunt, otherwise maybe it would have been better for her if she had dissappeared gracefully in a cloud of smoke.