we had four social clubs that had formal dances, and there used to be the Roanoke Auditorium. We used to go dancing there, and hear Ella Fitzgerald, Erskine Hawkins, and Cab Calloway, all those fellows. They used to come to Roanoke and we used to go to those dances and have a ball. The Hotel Dumas had a private band, that is where the music center is now. And they had a private band and you could go and dine more elegantly. And we used to go there. And of course there was the Royalton, where they used to have the Red and White Ball. We would go there.
[I settled at] 402 Chestnut Avenue, Northwest. It was just a close-knit neighborhood. The neighbors were, okay, I’ll give you an example. My daughter, and she is really my stepdaughter, my husband had her before we got married. I have a son and he has a daughter. But when she went to college she said that somebody took her bag with all of the clothing that she could wear at that time, because it was September, and it was hot. And she called back home crying. My neighbors across the way started buying clothes for this girl, and gave them to me so I could take them down there to her. That is the kind of neighborhood I lived in. It was just, “What can we do?” You know? And she wanted to come home, you know. She didn’t want to stay at college, but I was determined that she was going to stay there.
Now people weren’t always in each other’s homes, I don’t mean that. But it was just a lot of love and caring. But I’m going to tell you something, it’s the same thing in this community. I have been lucky and thankful that people have a sense of belonging. And in Northwest, there was a lot of pride of ownership, pride of belonging. Our families and our schools and our churches, all were sources of pride. I shall never forget when Four Sounds sang down at Roanoke Auditorium. And everybody applauded them. They were just magnificent. You have never seen anything like it. We were so proud we didn’t know what to do.
One day I was on Chestnut Avenue, looking out the window of my beauty shop, and I said, “I am going to get my degree.” I called Lawyer Muse and told him my situation, and he said, “Mrs. Ferguson, you stay on the line, and I will put my secretary on, and I am going to dictate a letter to Mr. Wilkerson,” I think his name was, the superintendent of the state. And, he did that. He said he would get my diploma papers for me, and he did it. And when I got them, I decided, I will never argue with anybody about a high school diploma. I went to Virginia Western Community College, and I enrolled and I graduated from there. And then for my last two years I went to Hollins. And I graduated from there in May 1972.
Nothing could stop me. I just made up my mind I was going. I said I would do whatever I can, and I did that. I just made up my mind; when things are going bad, I just get going.
Cities are always growing or shrinking, hence remaking themselves. Sometimes this reordering is haphazard, and sometimes it is planned, carried out according to the agendas of those paying for the improvements. The messy, medieval city of Paris came in for such planned improvement, and it was the first capital city to be rebuilt without a massive fire first clearing the land. The coup d’état that made Louis Napoleon Bonaparte emperor of France in 1852 gave him the absolute power needed to undertake the massive renovation of Paris. He had three major goals: to bring water into the city and to improve the circulation of air among the buildings; to unify its parts; and to make it more beautiful. A powerful administrator was needed, given that this massive project was to be carried out while the busy life of the capital went on around it. In 1853, the emperor selected Georges-Eugène Haussmann, whom he made a baron, to be that man.1
Though Haussmann’s name is the one attached to the changes in Paris and many other French cities, he was not the person who created the ideas. Rather, the plans drew on wisdom acquired during several hundred years of city making. Years earlier, kings of France, eager to make their capital as beautiful as Rome, had begun deciphering the strategies needed to achieve that end. The leaders that followed them added to those aesthetic concerns the need to control frequent epidemics, such as those caused by raw sewage running in the narrow alleyways of the city. As the years passed and modes of transportation changed, the people of Paris found that they couldn’t move through the narrow medieval streets squeezed between the tightly packed buildings; street widening became a pressing goal of city beautification.
Over the years, a concept evolved. At its heart was the creation of wide avenues called percées (“pierced”), because they were to cut diagonally through the old city’s massive blocks of housing. By the mid-nineteenth century, a few of these avenues had been created with great success. Their width permitted light and air to enter the city and their style added to its beauty.
Haussmann’s job was to apply these proven techniques on a scale large enough to transform the city. At the same time, while the streets were being carved out of the old city, sewers could be installed. A new street face was installed, incorporating buildings, street lamps, pissoirs, and other “street furniture” carefully designed to create unity in the “look” of Paris as one traveled from arrondissement to arrondissement, ward to ward.
In the series of figures shown here, we see the section of Paris that was “pierced” to create Avenue de l’Opéra, one of the greatest of the Haussmann boulevards. In the first map, we see the outlines of the tight and somewhat random streets of the old Paris. In the second map, we see the proposal for a boulevard to cut diagonally through the urban tissue. In the final map, we see the Paris of today, with Avenue de l’Opéra successfully built.
Lithographs drawn while the piercing was in progress show the deep trenches that were dug to permit the placement of the sewers. We also see the sorrow of those who were moved away. Although most of the housing destroyed in the center was eventually replaced, its costs were prohibitive for the poor, who were forced to move to outlying areas that were added to the city during the Haussmann period.
Fig. 3.1. The strategic design of renovations in Paris in the area of the Avenue de l’Opéra. Upper plan: the area as it appeared under Louis XV, 1773. Middle plan: the plan for the new avenue overlaid on the existing street grid, in 1876. Lower plan: actual construction (in 1929). REPRODUCED FROM L’ILLUSTRATION, 1929.
It is not, I think, an accident that social critic Victor Hugo—one of thousands of republicans exiled under the Empire—used the images of sewers to animate the persecution of Jean Valjean in his 1861 masterpiece, Les Misérables. Nor was it an accident that the new boulevards became a central character in the paintings of the Impressionist school and on the picture postcards of the era. The city’s transformation aroused the pain and the wonder of the population.
In 2000, I spent two months living in a neighborhood bounded by two great Haussmann boulevards—Boulevard Saint Michel and Boulevard Saint Germain des Prés. Every day I walked through the old city into the new, examining the manner in which Haussmann had cut the great boulevards at an angle through the urban fabric and had pasted the new Paris over the old.
Fig.
