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The French take May Day seriously. They buy little pots containing lilies of the valley and carry them home. I saw this a hundred times today.

Ever heard of Cite Leroy? Me neither. It's a 600-foot-long alleyway in the 20th arrondissement whose residents fought off a city plan to replace it with a major housing project in the early 1990s. It's not often that ordinary folks prevail over The Machine. Someone should write a short story or make a movie.

They've since created this shared garden.

The handful of people who live here now want to be left alone, and for that visionary gleam they showed 25 years ago, I'd say they deserve it.