The Arcades Project - Operi

All this is the arcade in our eyes. And it was nothing of all this earlier. So long as the gas lamps, even the oil lamps were burning in them,
the arcades were fairy palaces. But if we want to think of them at the height of
their magic, we must call to mind the Passage des Panoramas around 1870 : on
One side, there was gaslight; on the other, oil lamps still flickered. The decline sets
in with electric lighting. Fundamentally, however, it was no decline but, properly
speaking, a reversaL As mutineers, after plotting for days on end, take possession
of a fortified site, so the commodity by a lightning stroke seized power over the
arcades. Only then canle the epoch of commercial firms and figures. The inner
radiance of the arcades faded with the blaze of electric lights and withdrew into
their names. But their name was now like a filter which let through only the most
intimate, the bitter essence of what had been. (This strange capacity for distilling
the present, as inmost essence of what has been, is, for true travelers, what gives
to the name its exciting and mysterious potency.)
Architecture as the most inlportant testimony to latent "mythology." And the
most inlportant architecture of the nineteenth century is the arcade.-lne effort
to awaken from a dreanl as the best example of dialectical reversal. Difficulty of
this dialectical technique.
Lorgnette dealer.
In 1893 the arcades were closed to cocottes.
Music in the arcades. "Lanterne mag7'que! Piece cuneuse!' With this cry, a peddler would
travel through the streets and, at a wave of the hand, step up into dwellings where he
operated his lantern. TIle rif}iche for the first exhibition of posters characteristically dis­
plays a magic lantem.
Rage for tortoises in 1839. Tempo of flanerie in the arcades.
Names of magasins de nouveautes (most derived from successful vaudevilles): La Fille
d'Honneur, La Ve stale, Le Page Inconstant, Le Masque de Fer, Le Coin de la Rue, La
Lampe Merveilleuse, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge , Petite Nanette,
Chaumiere Allemande , Mamelouk,
Sign above a confectioner's shop : "Aux Armes de Werther." A glovees: "Au Ci-Devant
Jeune Homme" .
Olympia-continuation of the street.' Kinship with the arcade.
Musee Grevin: Cabinet des Mirages. Representation of a connection between
temple, railroad station, arcades, and market halls where tainted (phosphorescent)
meat is sold. Opera in the arcade. Catacombs in the arcade.
In 1857 the first electric streetlights in Paris (near the Louvre).