Brussels 3: The Grand-Place
On fire, frites, and one of the most gorgeous plazas anywhere.
I don’t know how to describe the street we took after the Place des Martyrs. You’ve probably been on one like it. Where the modern buildings are moderately high, and the street so narrow you can really only see the plate glass and cement of the ground floor. On one side of rue d’Argent, there was a modest hotel promising good deals, and a bar that declared itself gourmet, but mostly looked creepy. On the other side was a long loading dock, or back entrance of some kind which made me think of hospital gowns, and how they gape revealing saggy butt cheeks and suspicious moles.
Mostly it just felt grey. And long. And empty. Though it wasn’t really. There was a yoga studio. Some offices. On rue Léopold where it intersected with rue du Fossé aux Loups, (Wolves’ Pit Street) we passed a mural of a mouth that seemed to be stretched wide in a scream, which I thought at first was beautiful. Looking closer, I noticed that it nightmarishly presided over a tiny playground with swing sets and colorful slides. Nobody was playing there. I wonder if they ever did. But then, this was Brussels, where the incongruous is ordinary.
A couple streets later, the city shifted again, leaving behind the glass and silence and steel for a medieval village with skinny claustrophobic houses on narrow claustrophobic streets stuffed with tourists gaping at chalkboards offering mussels and French fries (frites), or waffles, why not a flight of tiny glasses of beer. Come on in. The air smelled of caramel and salty oil. There was music, too, coming from nearby.
Suddenly, we were propelled into the immense and gorgeous Grand-Place (webcam) which was hosting a jazz festival that weekend. It was jammed with tourists, and food trucks, people perched on every surface holding waffles dripping with cream, paper cones of frites while musicians riffed and scatted and strummed on a plywood stage.
Still, it felt like the music was just for me—the ornamentations of each phrase born of an art created a zillion miles away in harmony somehow with the cobblestones, tourists taking selfies in front of the medieval town hall, gothic guildhalls and palaces whose baroque curlicues glinted with gold leaf in the evening sun.
We ambled through the crowd to examine them all. One building had a sculpture with an inscription we couldn’t make out until we noticed the restaurant below was called Le Roy d’Espagne, in honor of Charles II King of Spain in 1697. Who pre-dated both the French and the Dutch presence here.
Several dozen ice cream-eaters and aperol-spritz quaffers later, there was a building with towers as knobby as Notre Dame in Paris. A tiny golden figure hovered at the top of one. I imagined it was a church or had been, though it was hard to tell. People hung out the windows watching the band. There was a bulletin board with activities. Google told me it was the Town Hall. Always had been. The golden figure above was Saint Michael slaying a dragon, the town’s own patron saint, who apparently protected that building but ironically not much else when the French bombarded it in August 1695, leveling most of the structures in the square.
There was a bulletin board with local information. I can’t remember what it said. Opening hours maybe, where to register your kid for school. There was a banner stretched across two pillars, the modern combination of vinyl and stone.
Beyond was the guildhall for beer-brewers, la Maison du Cygne with a big angry swan on the facade, and on the first couple of floors a bar where Karl Marx ushered in the New Year there in 1848 with the “Deutscher Arbeiterverein,” an organization he founded for German workers the year before, working out of a smoky backroom. That night the thirty-year old journalist and trouble-maker may have been celebrating a new manuscript. Only a few months later his Communist Manifesto was published in London.
We left through a street by the Town Hall where there’s this statue of Everard t'Serclaes, a local hero, lying on his side. People would go up to him self-consciously and glide their hands over him, caressing him from head to toe. Apparently it’s a kind of good luck gesture that will bring you back to Brussels. I wondered how long he’d been stuck there, submitting to their searching touch. This guy who saved the city from the Flemings in 1356. So many unwelcome visitors. The last, the Nazis I think. Not us, though. Listening to jazz. Handing over euros for our frites.
We didn’t last much longer. We were antsy. Ready to walk, but programmed a return for when the crowds were gone and we were less likely to be trampled. It was weird though, when we returned, too empty. Abandoned by the stages and food trucks, the square seemed smaller, tireder, the gold leafing vain. Like a party dress left on the floor, next to high heels kicked off akimbo.
And the history google offered wasn’t just of resistance, overcoming bombings, rebuilding, but of protest. Of punishment, too. Where protestants died at the stake. Their own mouths screaming wide with pain. It was cold. Visitors slouched in the few rays of sun. I tried to shake off the shadows. Join them in the warmth. Watched a woman position her husband in front of a building, “More to the right, yes there. Now zip your coat. When did you get such a big belly? Perfect. Now smile.”