What it is
Vieux Lyon is the medieval and Renaissance city on the right bank of the Saône, at the foot of the Fourvière hill. It is really three quarters in a line: Saint-Paul to the north, Saint-Jean around the cathedral, and Saint-Georges to the south.
Lyon did something most European cities did not: instead of rebuilding its centre on top of the old one, it kept moving — to the Presqu'île, then across the Rhône — and left this quarter standing. Neglected and dismissed as a slum in the nineteenth century, it was rescued from the 1880s onward and is now protected and part of the UNESCO-listed historic site of Lyon.
What to look for
The houses were built by merchants and bankers when Lyon was one of the great trading cities of Europe — tall, narrow, with stair towers and galleried courtyards hidden behind plain street fronts. The way in is through the traboules.
The cathedral of Saint-Jean anchors the middle of the quarter, the Hôtel de Gadagne holds the city's history museum, and the funiculars leave from beside the cathedral for Fourvière.
Getting it right
The main street, rue Saint-Jean, is lined with restaurants aimed at visitors. The quarter is better on the side lanes and in the early morning, before the shops open.
Many courtyards are private homes. Where a door is open to the public, go quietly — people live upstairs.
Three quarters, three characters
Vieux Lyon is really three neighborhoods strung along the river. In Saint-Georges, to the south, look for the church of Saint-Georges and the little Place de la Trinité. Saint-Jean, in the middle, is the best known because of the cathedral; its main street, Rue Saint-Jean, runs the length of the quarter. Beside the cathedral, the former archbishop's palace has been the neighborhood library since 1972, and the Gadagne museums on Place du Petit Collège cover the history of Lyon and the art of puppetry.
Several houses are worth seeking out in Saint-Jean: the Maison du Crible, known as the Tour Rose, at 16 Rue du Bœuf; the Hôtel du Chamarier at 37 Rue Saint-Jean, home of François d'Estaing between 1489 and 1496; and the fifteenth-century courtyard of the old Croix d'Or inn at 60 Rue Saint-Jean, which housed the bar association until 1990 and is now a museum of miniatures and film sets.
Saint-Paul, to the north, gathers around its church and the Saint-Paul railway station, opened in 1876 for the Azergues valley line. At 2 Place de la Boucherie stood the house where Laurent Mourguet, the creator of the puppet Guignol, lived from 1795. The Loge du Change, the old exchange building, was built between 1747 and 1749 by the architect Soufflot. Bertrand Tavernier set his film L'Horloger de Saint-Paul here, with the watchmaker's shop on Rue de la Loge.
A dead quarter
For most of the nineteenth century Lyon looked down on its old town. The taste of the time despised Gothic buildings, and guidebooks gave the quarter a few lines at most: twisting, dirty, "Gothic" in the insulting sense. In 1833 the writer Louis Boitel called it a dead quarter. Its residents were butchers, dyers and the poorest silk weavers, and the doctors who described their housing conditions helped persuade the city's health council to recommend, in 1850, sweeping demolitions and rebuilding.
Romanticism and the work of Viollet-le-Duc slowly changed minds. In 1898 a municipal commission for Old Lyon was formed to inventory what survived, and in 1901 it commissioned the Lyon photographer Jules Sylvestre to record the streets and buildings before they disappeared; his albums are kept at the Gadagne museum.
The twentieth century started badly. Rents were frozen during the First World War, so owners stopped maintaining their buildings. On the night of November 12–13, 1930, a landslide on the Fourvière hill destroyed six buildings, and demolitions increased through the 1930s. As late as 1950 some homes still had no sewer connection, running water or electricity.
How it was saved
The turning point came from residents. On October 18, 1946, François Pallasse founded the association Renaissance du Vieux Lyon to stop postwar demolitions. It campaigned against an expressway planned through the quarter, pushed for the first municipal protection order in 1960, and the quarter's designation as a protected historic district in 1964 ended the threat. The association also inventoried every building, trained volunteer restorers and, in 1980, alerted Prime Minister Raymond Barre to the grime on the cathedral, which led to its restoration.
At the association's request, the quarter was made pedestrian in 1979. From 1991, agreements with owners began opening private courtyards and traboules to visitors, starting with the passage from 54 Rue Saint-Jean to 27 Rue du Bœuf and the courtyard at 8 Rue Juiverie. Since then the population has been growing again, up 7 percent between 1999 and 2014, and the quarter is part of the UNESCO-listed historic site of Lyon.
Sources
