Left Bank
From Freepedia
- For the musical group, see Left Banke.
- For the Chicago nightclub, see Rive Gauche Nightclub.
The left bank of a river is the bank on the left when looking in the direction of flow towards the sea.
In Paris, France
The Left Bank (French: Rive Gauche) is most commonly associated with the Seine in central Paris. Here the river flows roughly westwards, cutting the city into two halves; the Right Bank, to the north, and the Left Bank, to the south.
Though, technically, the Left Bank also comprises the 13th, 14th and 15th arrondissements, in general it means the 5th, 6th and 7th arrondissements, symbols of French intellectualism.
The Left Bank is one of the city's most romantic districts. This is the Paris of another era, the Paris of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and dozens of other members of the great artistic community at Montparnasse.
More than simply a geographical region, the Left Bank has become a name for a particular style of life, fashion, or "look". Some of its famous streets are the Boulevards Saint-Germain, Saint-Michel, and the Rue de Rennes.
The Quartier Latin ("Latin Quarter") is a Left Bank area in the 5th arrondissement so named because it has been the center of Paris's university life for over seven hundred years.
Compare with Right Bank for additional facts about Paris.
In Biscay, Spain
In the metropolitan Bilbao area of Biscay, the term has another meaning:
- The left bank of river Nervión (Spanish, Margen Izquierda; Basque, Ezkerraldea) with the towns of Barakaldo, Sestao, Santurtzi and Portugalete and extending to the iron mines (Zona Minera or Mehatzaldea), was the place of industrial workers living in crowded desarrollismo apartments. They supported leftist ideas.
- The right bank was the place of the industry owners, the bourgeois living in the chalets of Neguri, that allied with the Spanish right wing.
The "hanging bridge" joins both at the mouth of the river before the aber. The distinction has dimmed as the industrial crisis and the lack of building space caused the upward mobile children of the left-bankers to move to right-bank Getxo, where chalets left the place to apartment blocks. However, both banks are still distinguishable in economic, demographic and political measuring.
Reference
- Lottman, Herbert R. The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. ISBN 0395313228. ISBN 096228744X. ISBN 0226493687.
Left Bank Books is one of the US's longest-running, collectively-owned and run anarchist bookstores. Located at 92 Pike Street in Seattle, Washington. www.leftbankbooks.com
