The Arcades Project - Operi

Arcades
This brief essay, dating from the summer or fall of 1927 (Gesammelte SclmJtell, vol. 5, [Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1982], pp. 1041-1043), is the only completed text we have from the earliest period of
work on Th e Arcades Prqjecl, when Benjamin was planning to write a newspaper article on the Paris
arcades in collaboration with Franz Hessel. TIle article may have been written by Benjamin and
Hessel together. (See "Materials for 'Arcades."')
On the Avenue Champs-Elysees, between modem hotels with Anglo-Saxon
names, arcades were opened recently and the newest Parisian passage made its
appearance. For its inaugural ceremonYl a monster orchestra in uniform per­
formed in front of flower beds and flowing fountains. The crowd broke, groan­
ing, over sandstone thresholds and moved along before panes of plate glass, saw
artificial rain fall on the copper entrails of late-model autos as a demonstration of
the quality of the materials, saw wheels tnrning around in oil, read on small black
plaques, in pastejewel figures, the prices of leather goods and gramophone re­
cords and embroidered kimonos. In the diffuse light from above, one skimmed
over flagstones. While here a new thoroughfare was being prepared for the most
fashionable Paris, one of the oldest arcades in the city has disappeared-the
Passage de I'Opera, swallowed up by the opening of the Boulevard Haussmann.
Just as that remarkable covered walkway had done for an earlier generation, so
today a few arcades still preserve, in dazzling light and shadowy comers, a past
become space. Antiquated trades survive within these inner spaces, and the
merchandise on display is unintelligible, or else has several meanings. Already
the inscriptions and signs on the entranceways (one could just as well say "exits,"
since, with these peculiar hybrid forms of house and street, every gate is simulta­
neously entrance and exit) , already the inscriptions which multiply along the
walls within, where here and there between overloaded coatstands a spiral stair­
case rises into darkness-already they have about them something enigmatic.
''Albert at No. 83" will in all likelihood be a hairdresser, and "Theatrical Tights"
will be silk tights; but these insistent letterings want to say more. And who would
have the courage to take the ·dilapidated stairs up one flight to the beauty salon of
Professor Alfred Bitterlin? Mosaic thresholds, in the style of the old restaurants
of the Palais-Royal, lead to a diner de Paris; they make a broad ascent to a glass
door-but can there really be a restaurant behind it? And the glass door next to
it, which announces a casino and permits a glimpse of something like a ticket