Rue d'Aubagne, six years after the tragedy, the trauma and the bitterness

At the top of this steep street in the working-class district of Noailles, near the Old Port, buildings numbered 63 and 65, which collapsed in a matter of seconds, killing eight people, left a large concrete void.

Tourists and passing Marseillais stop in front of the large gate which protects this "hollow tooth", destined to become a municipal "resource center".

But Virginie Vallier, from the windows of her apartment just opposite, at number 66, can no longer stand this "hole" which reminds her of the "unimaginable": "No one could have thought that a building would collapse like that, with people inside."

The subject is barely broached when "everything comes back": that day when "we wondered why little El Amine's mother had not come home" (Editor's note: Ouloume Saïd Hassani had lost her life, swept away by the collapse of the building, just after dropping her 8-year-old son off at school), when she was no longer allowed to return home, then the whole year in a hotel and the endless hassle of the work to get back into her apartment.

Today, a few days before the trial, this middle school French teacher says she is "exhausted" and wonders if she did the right thing by "hanging on."

Especially since this street that she loved, between Afro hairdressers and small bars, is no longer the lively "village" it once was.

"Calm, too calm"

Anonymous, a grocer at the top of the street also deplores "the void" left by all these unoccupied dwellings: the entire odd-numbered side, evacuated, from number 67 to 83, but also all the others, the squatted apartments, the owners who did the work then rented them out as Airbnbs, and the tenants who never returned.

The unsanitary housing is still there, with its condemned buildings with padlocked doors, propped-up windows and cracked walls. Like at number 43 where Saïd, 54, disabled, pays 480 euros for a slum of about fifteen square meters invaded by cockroaches.

And, when evening comes, drug trafficking takes over.

"People are afraid to come here because of the dealers, there are fewer people, it's quiet, too quiet," assures Efosa Iroghama, behind the counter of his deserted bar.

Under the bust of the poet Homer which dominates the nearby small square, now renamed "Place du 5 novembre 2018", access to the panel commemorating the eight victims is hindered by overflowing trash cans.

From the door of her restaurant "Mama Africa", Félicité Gaye describes herself as "the guardian of the cemetery": "What destroyed me was that I was attached to these young people, especially Julien and Simona" (Editor's note: two of the victims), she says, her eyes misty.

She thought that after such a tragedy, "everything would be repaired, we would have liked it to shine like in the 8th" arrondissement, in the southern residential districts of the city.

But the top of Rue d'Aubagne remains dilapidated, as if abandoned. A manager of the Public Society for the Development of the Metropolis, in charge of degraded housing, distributes leaflets to the inhabitants: the first construction site of this entity created after the tragedy will finally start, with the rehabilitation of around thirty homes, but in a neighboring street.

"Why, symbolically at least, didn't they start with rue d'Aubagne?" asks Virginie Vallier.

The forty-year-old says she "no longer expects anything". She says she discovered late that a prop that was supposed to support the first floor of her building, damaged by the collapse of the buildings opposite, had been placed "in the wrong place": "People died on the other side of the street, and we're not learning anything from it".