A Sneak Peak Inside Notre-Dame Before Its Reopening

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When Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic for The New York Times, stepped inside the storied Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris last summer he was amazed. Awe-inspired, even. He was also in a head-to-toe white scrub suit, with rubber boots and a hard hat.

The get-up was a precaution to avoid exposure to toxic lead dust, a caution imposed by the team leading the renovation. Scaffolding encased the building’s exterior. Inside, hundreds of construction workers in hazmat suits hammered, pushed carts and drove beeping trucks around and above him as they touched up frescoes in chapels and worked to restore the cathedral’s wood and lead roofing, its stained-glass windows and the famous spire that had snapped and plunged through the ceiling during the devastating 2019 fire that brought the world to its knees.

Watching them work, Mr. Kimmelman said, felt “like witnessing a kind of miracle.”

Mr. Kimmelman got early access to the cathedral, years into the restoration process, where he watched as workers carefully brought the building back to life. (After the fire, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, promised the cathedral would reopen in five years.) Mr. Kimmelman teamed up with Mika Gröndahl, an editor for The Times’s Graphics department, to present an immersive look at the rebuilding process ahead of the cathedral’s reopening on Saturday.

In an interview, Mr. Kimmelman reflected on his first impressions of the refurbishment, why it was so important to painstakingly restore the cathedral and whether a building made of new materials can still be considered the same building. These are edited excerpts.

How did you get access to Notre-Dame before it reopened?

They had been, for years, very reluctant to let anyone in who wasn’t working on the cathedral. It took me about five years to finally get a peek. I teamed up with a colleague, Aurelien Breeden, a reporter in the Paris bureau, to try to organize a visit in June and to keep track of what was going on at Notre-Dame.

He appealed to the authorities at Notre-Dame over and over; we tried to put a full-court press on to suggest that it was really urgent that we start in the summer if we were going to produce something meaningful for the opening. They agreed, and were very generous. We spent a day looking throughout the cathedral and meeting with various people who were in charge of the restoration, and some of the workers.

How many times had you visited previously?

The first time I went there was with my parents as a child. I had come from the Soviet Union, where it wasn’t even possible to get a glass of milk. So part of my memory of Paris at that time was of Notre-Dame, and part of it was that they had milk. Since then, I’ve visited dozens of times, and I’ve passed the cathedral countless times. It’s something that was both present and not necessarily on your mind, as are so many things that become part of the furniture of a city, that you take for granted..

During the fire, a lot of people suddenly realized that the cathedral was important to them, or at least that the idea of the cathedral was important to them, and the thought of losing it was a tragedy. Because who wants to live at the moment when Notre-Dame burns down after nearly 1,000 years?

What do you remember about the morning the cathedral caught fire?

I was on my way to a piano rehearsal, and Michael Slackman, who was then running The Times’s International desk, called me and said I needed to write a column about Notre-Dame urgently — it was burning down. I thought, that can’t be true. It’s a stone building; Notre-Dame can’t burn down. He urged me to check on my phone and look at what was then Twitter. And I saw the building burning.

I rushed to my computer and immediately called as many people as I could who had some knowledge of the cathedral and interesting thoughts about it. It was hard to think of another building that could have meant so much to so many people.

What’s something about Notre-Dame that you can experience only in person?

You can’t really understand the scale. You can’t understand the process of moving through it, because so much of that experience involves sound and smell, and often crowds. It’s important to understand Notre-Dame, the way it sits in the city at large, what it’s like to turn a corner and see it.

At first it’s kind of confusing and really big, but then the temperature changes, the light changes. There’s a sound in the cathedral, a particular quality. It’s like a musical instrument, or a living thing.

You’re suddenly absorbed in this space, which is so awesome. After that initial feeling of awe or being overwhelmed, there’s a kind of calm that one feels, even in a bustling cathedral like Notre-Dame — they are sanctuaries for a reason.

Were you nervous about how the restoration was going to look?

My first concern, or curiosity, was, would it look spanking new? Sometimes, when you see something that’s been weathered and worn and has a certain patina to it, and then you see that patina removed, it can look jarring.

What was your first impression?

All of the work looked so meticulous and caring. It was as if the whole thing was a collective act of devotion. I mean, the wood rafters, which nobody will see publicly, were rebuilt such that each of the wood oak beams matched precisely the shape of the medieval beam that had burned down, which fortunately, providentially, they had a precise, accurate record of. It’s rare to work on something that’s so important and spectacular, and you see that in the quality of the work.

The cathedral is now a hodgepodge of old and new: The original walls and stained-glass windows, a rebuilt spire, the original organ, a restored medieval attic. Can we still call it Notre-Dame?

It’s like us. We get things repaired. We don’t necessarily look the same, but there’s something about the soul, our identity, which goes on and can make a place much more meaningful and beautiful over time. It’s not just about whether something is made of stone or concrete.