La Rochelle Blues

Regrets, I have a few...

In writing France in Between, my mission is to present original yet useful insights into France’s overlooked small to middling cities. My trips are entirely self-funded, but if you wish to support my work, comments and questions are greatly appreciated!

In a grey-sky, nostalgic, waning-summer way, I keep wanting to grab back my time in La Rochelle.

I whiled away too much of it sipping beverages in cafés and savoring meals – a tell-tale sign that I have, indeed, become French.

And certainly, instead of trudging around seafaring vessels at the city’s Maritime Museum, sweaty and claustrophobic in the bowels of a 1958 weather station ship, I should have been digging deeper into two parts of the city:

1.      Les Arcades

Formerly known as Les Arceaux, literally “the hoops,” the arcades protect many of La Rochelle’s downtown shops from the elements – as they have for centuries.

In the Middle Ages, merchants built wooden pillars and makeshift rooves to cover their wares. Little by little, wood was replaced by stone, and as trade enriched La Rochelle, proper buildings went up.

In order to benefit from the shelter provided, merchants paid an extra tax – but the increased business from protected retail space was no doubt worth it, given nobody had umbrellas then.

I swept through the mysterious Arcades in a disorderly fashion, often speeding along to another destination, but occasionally stopping to capture their unpolished side:

I discovered, too late, that they were magnificently illuminated at night, and wished I had dined at one of the few restaurants along them; maybe here, at Le Café de la Paix, a Rochelais institution:

Traces of shops past are visible on a few outer façades, and as soon as I got home — alas, a bit late — I started obsessing about earlier incarnations of the arcaded storefronts.

I took a closer look at my 1930 tourist guide to La Rochelle.

14 bis rue du Temple used to peddle Radiola brand radios; now it’s a frozen yogurt shop called Yogurt Factory, because we’re in France.

32 rue du Minage boasted its position as the only place in town to get “glaçage américain.”

What could that be? Any relationship to frozen yogurt? (All right, I found a few traces online, and it seems to be a type of fabric finishing.)

2-Le Marché Central

“Make sure to visit [French town name] on market day” is such a frequent injunction that I find it a cliché. No need for it here — in La Rochelle, every day is market day, thanks to Le Marché Central.

Built in 1834 and expanded in 1893, it was designed by the official municipal architect Antoine Brossard.

The brick wings were likely part of the 1893 expansion, and on the outside, they house narrow cafés.

The structure is getting a bit long in the tooth — for this very reason, I immediately fell in love with it. Compared to the sleek, shiny stands in the newly-renovated Halles in Cahors, La Rochelle’s were deliciously vintage.

I left thinking how delightful this old-style covered market was, and hoping the city wouldn’t be revamping it anytime soon.

So it was with some sadness that I learned that plans for renovations are afoot, with the goal of “redynamizing” and “requalifying” it – whatever the heck requalifier even means for a food market.

I hope it won’t mean putting in a Yogurt Factory

And I regret not coming home with a photo of every single stand as it looks today.