course utilized everywhere as temporary homes and shops, even as churches or cinema palaces. The French have an apparently deep-set distrust of frame dwellings, and only in this emergency do they take to them, with a shrug of the shoulder,
going back to something more substantial as soon as opportunity affords. The housing question in Soissons was so acute that something drastic and immediate had to be done, resulting in a whole new city of small dwellings on the outskirts. But drastic” would be a feeble expression with which to characterize these steep, angular, ugly little cement cubicles, cast like so much “Jello,” and as yet, lacking the remotest trace of a homelike feeling. It is asking a good deal of a hearth-loving Frenchman to live in one of these, but naturally it is preferable to a rusty iron shack. Allow a few years and there will be vines over the place and neat flower beds on all sides, and it will look appealing despite its gruesome lines.
The larger towns naturally present problems of greater magnitude and complexity. The whole of Fismes, and practically all of Soissons, for example, are growing up anew, often on different foundations, due to the widened streets. Many a roof tree has been hoisted, with the consequent champagne for the workmen, hut hardly a building is completely finished. Thronged with foreign laborers, saturated with fine white dust, daily
invaded by flocks of curious tourists, these towns can hardly be very homelike places for the natives.
In Reims, however, one has the best view of the vast amount of work going on. Scaffolding of
long poles, imbedded in mounds of concrete;, shoots up everywhere; Italians are as thick as they are on Boston Common; heaps of sand, rails, lumber, bricks of a thousand colors, hollow tile, I-beams and what not fairly clog the streets. The laborers get twenty francs a day, spend most, of their two hours at noon sleeping under a shady bit of wreckage, and their evenings singing hilariously in any one of a hundred dingy barrack cafes.
There is much of the old, laborious, hand-tohand passing stuff here, a squad of Italians madly mixing concrete on the cobbled pavement, while another slowly moving chain of them passes a bucket along until it is finally poured into the mould. Rattling concrete mixers there are, though none too
Sunshine and Scaffolding on a new building in Reims
Farm building near Fismes
Quite decorative in itself, but far from lacking in utility as it is used for a tool shed on the ground floor, a hayloft above and a dove
cot under the shining new roof
Type of new house in the “Cite-Jardin”—Reims
Striking principally in that it resembles a thousand American
dwellings of the same type
going back to something more substantial as soon as opportunity affords. The housing question in Soissons was so acute that something drastic and immediate had to be done, resulting in a whole new city of small dwellings on the outskirts. But drastic” would be a feeble expression with which to characterize these steep, angular, ugly little cement cubicles, cast like so much “Jello,” and as yet, lacking the remotest trace of a homelike feeling. It is asking a good deal of a hearth-loving Frenchman to live in one of these, but naturally it is preferable to a rusty iron shack. Allow a few years and there will be vines over the place and neat flower beds on all sides, and it will look appealing despite its gruesome lines.
The larger towns naturally present problems of greater magnitude and complexity. The whole of Fismes, and practically all of Soissons, for example, are growing up anew, often on different foundations, due to the widened streets. Many a roof tree has been hoisted, with the consequent champagne for the workmen, hut hardly a building is completely finished. Thronged with foreign laborers, saturated with fine white dust, daily
invaded by flocks of curious tourists, these towns can hardly be very homelike places for the natives.
In Reims, however, one has the best view of the vast amount of work going on. Scaffolding of
long poles, imbedded in mounds of concrete;, shoots up everywhere; Italians are as thick as they are on Boston Common; heaps of sand, rails, lumber, bricks of a thousand colors, hollow tile, I-beams and what not fairly clog the streets. The laborers get twenty francs a day, spend most, of their two hours at noon sleeping under a shady bit of wreckage, and their evenings singing hilariously in any one of a hundred dingy barrack cafes.
There is much of the old, laborious, hand-tohand passing stuff here, a squad of Italians madly mixing concrete on the cobbled pavement, while another slowly moving chain of them passes a bucket along until it is finally poured into the mould. Rattling concrete mixers there are, though none too
Sunshine and Scaffolding on a new building in Reims
Farm building near Fismes
Quite decorative in itself, but far from lacking in utility as it is used for a tool shed on the ground floor, a hayloft above and a dove
cot under the shining new roof
Type of new house in the “Cite-Jardin”—Reims
Striking principally in that it resembles a thousand American
dwellings of the same type