Liège, Or What's Your Average City?
Picture a standard European city: What might you see? One candidate...
The Ordinary Fascination
Liège sits on the Meuse river, in the east of Belgium. It is as far north as you get while staying in Wallonia, the French part of Belgium, a sleepy lowland of Europe, rolling hills and small cities, a Rust Belt in miniature as the coal industry undergirded and then caved in under the region’s economy. The city is a 3rd or 4th tier European city, a population around 200,000 people per the basic Google search, ranked near Burgas (Bulgaria) or Le Havre (France) on a list by city population, and up with Sintra (Portugal) and Brno (Czech Republic) by metro population.
Liège is in many ways an unremarkable European city. In sports there’s the concept of a ‘replacement player’, the average player against which all other players can be measured (one stat is Wins Above Replacement, for example). Liège is the replacement European city, for me.
Liège sticks with me not in spite but because of that, because Liège’s particularities as a city are interesting in and of themselves and as a representation of the typical European city, the stand-in for all of the quasi-anonymous places that don’t reach tourists’ travel plans.
A Fashionable Gateway
We start with the train station. At first, it seems to be unique and special to Liège. On further inspection, it becomes clear it’s just another common stamp, a fashionable arm tattoo that has swept the continent and the world and that, like any tattoo, comes with its costs.
The Guillemins TGV Railway station looks like a roosting spaceship crossed with the Sydney Opera House: latticed white pipes that form curving roofs and ceilings and that in their joint assembly look like a visitation from a glistening future, though up close carry a faint note of plain PVC piping. It was designed by Santiago Calatrava. Calatrava is considered among our greatest architects. His signature style, those gleaming white pipes and pleasing curves, is reflected in the TGV Railway station and around the world, in a bridge leading into Jerusalem or a tower in Sweden, in the Milwaukee Museum of Art or the City of Arts and Sciences complex in Calatrava’s hometown, Valencia. Look at the works together and you can imagine their controversial nature in the way so much modern art or architecture is controversial, as it stretches beyond the confines of classical through early 20th century norms.
The truer controversy of Calatrava’s work is not in its bold appearance but underneath. His projects take a long time and often run over budget. Liège’s train station took 13 years to complete. The City of Arts and Sciences entailed cost overruns, implications with local political corruption (that eventually took down the center-right national government in 2018), canceled projects, and after completion, facades falling off of the opera house, leaks in the concert hall, and ongoing work on the Agora.
According to one of the sites I found dedicated to detailing Calatrava’s record, Calatrava has had at least six projects go over budget by more than $100M. Another site was called “Calatrava will screw you”; after he sued, the site changed its url to “Calatrava won’t shut us up.” Calatrava’s defense for all this is to say, “There’s the sketch, a competition, and awarding of the contract. And from there, you hope you have a fair price. But it’s very difficult because there are a thousand variables that nobody can control.”
I like some of Calatrava’s work. Living in Valencia, I like the City of Arts and Sciences and the Alameda metro station that echoes it. In a bridge, Calatrava’s style can be a striking update of the suspension cable form. The Liège train station is impressive, cavernous, and it left me literally cold, since it felt less than well insulated, but it makes for a good photo. And it appears to have avoided calamities, long building time aside. I couldn’t find any reporting around cost overruns, the building appears to be popular, and Calatrava developed a “fondness for the city after spending nearly 11 years bouncing in and out during the construction,” which is nice.
Guillemins is an impressive structure, and pleasing to the eye. Is it an actual destination such that some people will consider, “a stop in Liège just to admire and wander around this station,” as one of the writers linked above said? I doubt it. And for all that, the new station broke from the past and the surroundings, rather than bringing them along.
A Place Where War Started
Scan a Liège history and you’ll see typical Western European beats - foundation in the 8th century C.E., martyred bishops, the holy roman empire, warring factions, fortunes built and destroyed through war and pillage, and a slow slog towards modernity. The industrial revolution arrived, and coal and zinc mines in the region powered Liege forward through the 19th century. After World War II, the region’s industrial equipment was found to be old, the capital lacking, and the costs high, leaving Wallonia’s prosperity to be “nothing more than a memory”. The specifics only remind us how much Liege fits into the broader narrative.
The great 20th Century conflicts ran through or around Liège. The last gasp Nazi attack came in the Battle of the Bulge, said bulge cresting to the south of Liege, in the Ardennes. The city was a major American supply center by then, and site of a general hospital and ancillary fighting. The allied forces pushed back the Germans and resumed the march into the Nazi homeland, so Liège could be said to be near the site that effectively ended WWII in Europe.
I say it that way because of its mirroring with World War I, where Liège plays a much more interesting role: where that war’s fighting began. As described in Barbara Tuchman’s classic history, Guns of August, in August 1914, fresh of new declarations of war, the Germans asked and then pressured the Belgians to step aside and let the German army through so they could carry on to the real war in France. It was obvious to all parties involved that the German army was vastly superior, and that resistance would indeed be futile. Belgium nevertheless held out, with forts to the east of Liège picking off attackers and warning of the massacres ahead in 20th century warfare. Outraged, German soldiers attacked citizens in the area and launched their own warning: the first air bombing of a European city in the 20th century, from a zeppelin of all things.
Germans finally overtook the fort with the help of massive siege guns. But the time the Belgians bought for the Allies, especially France, was critical to bringing their defenses into line, and France has remained eternally grateful, at least in a way. One used to drink a cafe viennois - a coffee with coffee flavored ice cream and whipped cream, but that smacked of the enemy, so the drink became a cafe liégeois. There is also a chocolat liégeois, though some confusion reigns, at least for me, over the difference between this and a chocolat viennois - 79K google results for chocolat liegeois chocolat viennois attests to that (the liégeois, I believe, contains a scoop of chocolate ice cream along with the hot chocolate and whipped cream).
Climbing Up That Hill
I visited Liège in 2011, over Thanksgiving weekend. My friend Ben had visited us in Luxembourg. We hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for friends, and then took a train on Saturday to make a one-night visit. We had come for a Standard Liege football game, but amidst the planning I learned the game was actually on Friday and we would miss it. We had no grand intention beyond that - we wanted a close destination from Luxembourg, and Liège won out over Nancy (France). That’s all.
So we did what one does without a plan in a European city - we climbed a hill. Or: we gawked at the Calatrava station for a moment, walked through a few squares and across the Meuse to our hotel, dropped off our bags, walked past the opening weekend of the Christmas markets - ice rink and wooden cabins and gluhwein and the like - and found the stairs that led up the hill to the citadel that overlooked the city, and then we climbed the hill. And we looked at Liège.
We achieved the heights right around sunset, and thus a view of a re-luminating city, bulbs dotting the buildings and the bridges, the city coming alive at night. This is a pattern for travelers, a pattern for me anyway, to approach a city, learn of its highest point, whether a building or a hill or something else, and achieve that point so as to see the city. The views are all the same and each different, the buildings agglomerating so that even a small city like Liège reminds you of the enormity of the world, of what 200,000 people really means, the river winding through the city in an echo of places we’ve seen before and, like all water, something new and unique at each point. We climbed the hill with decent light around us, we took photos as the city passed into darkness, and then we descended.
Beneath that hill there were the Christmas markets, and there was chocolate. Late November in this part of Europe, with the hushed temperature and the bubbling beginning to the Christmas season, is a cultural touchstone, a heritage that stretches south to the Alps or thereabouts, that each city addresses with its own spin, but essentially the same. A fair, warm things to drink, sweets and fried food, rides to ride and tchotchkes to buy, Christmas trees and ice rinks.
Liège’s special touches were mostly about chocolate. Galler, a Liege-based firm, was the dealer. At one booth, we got cut in line by a local who, unapologetic, exclaimed, “I tell everyone when they come to Liège, they must come for the chocolate. That’s why you come to Liège!” At another booth we picked up waffles dipped in chocolate. Little consumptions that mark another European city.
After our time at the markets we walked across to the Outre Meuse island to look for a convenience store, and to stroll, and the last thing about Liège struck us. Liege is the birthplace for Georges Simenon. Simenon was a 20th century writer. His greatest creation was Inspector Maigret, the protagonist of 75 detective novels that modernized the genre, at least according to some.
I hadn’t read any of Maigret books when we visited - I would go on to read three as they marked an intermediate step in learning French, coming after Le Petit Nicholas and Tintin. I had heard of him already, though, and as we walked in the Outre Meuse island in the middle of the river, I had his ghost in mind, his image, his work, and the feeling that his effort, his model of success, was hovering over us, a reminder of what could be even coming from a town like Liège.
Value Of A Replacement City
We left the city the way we came, of course, through the Calatrava-designed train station, a dampness in the air as we boarded our train in the cavernous hall. There was no great feeling as we left, no desire to return or business left unfinished, except for the mistake over the football game.
Liège has stayed with me through these years, though, a decade on from our visit. For all these pieces of color, these histories and figures and views and tastes, I think the city has stayed with me precisely because it epitomizes what a city of its type can be. No more, no less. That is remarkable in its way, too.
Is there a city that stands out to you as ordinary and yet memorable? Reply to this email or leave a comment with any favorites.