Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis in Paris is dying like everything that was once beautiful

Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in Paris. When I spontaneously bought a train ticket to Paris in the early 1970s and travelled to Paris with virtually no luggage, I found accommodation in this street. Why spontaneously? I was allowed to enter the upper school of a grammar school in Gelsenkirchen-Buer and was placed in an advanced French course against my will, even though I had hardly any knowledge of French from my old school. So I bought a train ticket and off I went to Paris, I didn’t need a hotel because I knew the so-called clochards who slept under bridges over the Seine from movies. After arriving at the Gare du Nord, I went straight there. On the way there, I met a Swiss man who had found accommodation in a shared flat that was partly unoccupied because the students living there were on their summer holidays. I was allowed to stay there for free and got to know and love Paris and the French language. In addition to the obligatory disgruntled Madame concierge of our house, the famous singer and actor Serge Reggiani also lived in this street. Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis was the epitome of France for me at the time. Today the street is a kebab shithole (I learnt this painfully from google maps) and is dying like everything that was once beautiful.