At the origin of it all is Marcel Merle, my great-grandfather, born in Paris in the 19th arrondissement on 26 February 1903, and who passed away on 11 November 1980 in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. I must not forget my great-grandmother Marthe, who of course played an active role in Marcel’s business. Even before him, she had run her own small grocery shop on Rue Stendhal in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. Marcel was something of an “inventive boilermaker worker”, based in the 20th arrondissement on Rue des Rondeaux (this street runs alongside Père Lachaise Cemetery), where he lived with his wife Marthe and their two daughters, Simone and Paulette. As his workshop became too small, he moved his family and purchased the VALDO factory, located at 127–129–131 Rue du Chemin Vert in the 11th arrondissement. The factory was in a very poor state when he acquired it in 1946: the previous owners of this foundry had ceased operations in 1936 (probably following the strikes of the Popular Front) and returned to their country of origin, Italy, at the end of the war. At the time, the chimney was at risk of collapsing, and in that post-war period, when materials were scarce, it was dismantled brick by brick so that the materials could be reused elsewhere.
The MERLE boilermaking workshop operated until 1986. It produced refrigerators, hot water tanks and many other products required to meet the ever-growing demand for post-war comfort. But Pépé Merle also manufactured the first machines used to bleach paper pulp, cable cars for ski resorts (notably Serre Chevalier), the first road marking line machine (a patent never filed or exploited by Marcel…), as well as cabinets designed to house the first IBM computers.
Having become too small, polluting and noisy for its Parisian surroundings, the factory closed its doors in 1986. However, the activity was taken over by the industrial group ASEDEC and relocated to the suburbs, in Noisy-le-Grand. A second life then began for this former industrial site: concerned about managing the boilermaking workshop alone, my great-grandmother had already started, as early as 1956/57, to build a small garage to run a parking service. Paulette MERLE and her husband Bernard GISI, a RENAULT agent—selling new cars, repairs, bodywork, a petrol station and parking—occupied the former factory space until 2006. Today, part of the garage remains on the ground floor of No. 131, and the two front buildings are the only remnants of that bygone era. New residential buildings have since been constructed on the former factory site. The entire space is now dedicated to housing, and there is no longer any trace of its industrial past—the 11th arrondissement is no longer “the little factory of Paris”.
