On a crumbling facade, the sign “Bakery” remains faintly visible. The door and windows are bricked up. The same goes for most of the houses that make up the town center. The cobbled sidewalks are overrun with green moss. A situation that for a long time gave the Old Town the image of a ghost village.
A reputation that the Goussainville town hall is determined to change. Since 2022, it has launched a broad revitalization operation to “highlight this heritage”, says Khader Berrekla, the city’s deputy general director, forced to raise his voice to drown out the noise of a plane flying over the village.
A return to life begun after more than 50 years of abandonment. For the Old Town, located less than five kilometers from the runways at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, it had almost emptied of its inhabitants in the early 1970s, at the time of the airport’s construction. At that time, the Paris Airports Company (ADP) had committed to buying back, at a price above the market, all the houses included in zones overly exposed to noise.
ADP planned to raze them, but that was without taking into account the Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul church, of which a portion dates back to the 13th century. Classified a hundred years ago, the building protected all the houses within a 500-meter radius around the bell tower from destruction.
Around 300 people stayed despite the nuisances. The houses of those who left were saved but not maintained and are mostly in a lamentable state today.
“We could feel the walls trembling”
That is the case with the large building located on the village square, lined with lime trees. In a few months, the old dwelling, rotted by damp and with unstable floors, will be transformed into a cafe-restaurant and exhibition space.
“It’s a resilience project with new activities that will create jobs, training, a new economic momentum”, assures Khader Berrekla, convinced that the noise from the roughly 300 planes that pass over the village each day will not hinder the arrival of tourists.
“In the Concorde era, you could feel the walls trembling”, comments Nicolas Mahieu, who has been running the Vieux-Pays bookstore for 30 years, the only active shop.
“The setting is superb. It has kept its charm with the old stone”, he says, pleased with the rehabilitation works underway.
Just a stone’s throw from the village square, a group of schoolchildren leaves the castle park laughing. The children have just run off their energy in a brand-new treetop parcours. Opened in 2024, AbracadaParc is also part of the revival project.
“You really had to have a lot of imagination to envisage it,” recalls Vanessa Schweitzer, its founder. “It was a wasteland, a squat, there was a lot of waste: carpet, scrap metal, beer cans.”
Today, thriving, the leisure park also leans into the ghost-town image with an escape game titled “The Forgotten of Goussainville”.
“We get used to the planes,” promises Vanessa Schweitzer, who confirms that when the sky is clear, the planes follow another flight path and spare the village from their roar.
