Rue Dénoyez: Belleville's Painted Street
Why is it significant?
Turn into the narrow cobbled lane and colour explodes all around you. Every wall, every metal shutter, every drainpipe and bollard is painted, tagged, stencilled or pasted over, layer upon layer. Come back in a month and half of what you see today will have vanished under something new.
Key Facts
| Place | Rue Dénoyez: Belleville's Painted Street |
|---|---|
| Address | Rue Dénoyez, 75020 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.87170, 2.37850 |
| Part of Walk | Rebel Hill: Buttes-Chaumont, Belleville & the Secrets of Père-Lachaise in Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Turn into the narrow cobbled lane and colour explodes all around you. Every wall, every metal shutter, every drainpipe and bollard is painted, tagged, stencilled or pasted over, layer upon layer. Come back in a month and half of what you see today will have vanished under something new.
Rue Dénoyez is a living gallery, and the rule here is simple: nothing lasts. Artists work openly in daylight, often with spray cans and stepladders, and the paintings change week by week. Some are polished murals, some are political slogans, some are just a name in big bubble letters. If you see someone painting, watch quietly... and ask before you take their photo.
The name of the street is a clue to what Belleville used to be. In the nineteenth century the Dénoyez family ran one of the most famous dance halls and taverns on this hillside, the kind of place where Parisians came up from the city to drink cheap wine outside the tax wall. The street just around the corner is named after Jean Ramponeau, an eighteenth-century tavern keeper whose wine was so cheap and whose cabaret was so packed that his name became a byword for a good time. This whole slope, the old Courtille, was the pleasure garden of working Paris.
Rue Ramponeau has another place in history. Tradition says that the very last barricade of the Paris Commune stood there, on the 28th of May 1871, held for a while by a single defender after all the others had fallen. Whether it was one man or several, it marked the end of the uprising.
Belleville has always been the first address of newcomers: workers from the provinces, then Armenians, Greeks, Jews from Poland and North Africa, Algerians and Tunisians, and later a large Chinese community, many from the region of Wenzhou. Walk back out to the boulevard and you will hear half a dozen languages in a minute. Now follow the Rue Ramponeau and climb the steps of the park on the slope above, all the way to the top terrace.