In September 2022, I logged into my Vélib’ account with the intention of buying my usual 7-day pass, only to discover that the 7-day pass had been replaced by a 3-day pass for the same price, € 15 at that time, now € 20. The elimination of the 7-day pass had apparently Read More …
From the Arch of Triumph in Paris there are twelve major avenues that radiate out in twelve directions. The best-known of these twelve avenues is the Champs-Élysées, which still had a disgusting ten lanes of cars when I took these photos in 2012. Now it is down to eight, as Read More …
Paris, like most cities, had a large assortment of internet cafés for about ten to fifteen years, around the turn of the millennium. The newspaper Le Monde, in an article published in 2015, spoke of “the golden age of the cybercafés” as lasting from 1995 to 2005. Since then, “customers Read More …
On the official Paris pedestrian map, the last block of rue Cujas (with the house numbers 16 through 29) is now shown as a solid green line, meaning a public pedestrian space (espace public piéton). Although this is less than a quarter of the street’s total length, it reduces traffic Read More …
If you owned a newly-renovated 48-room hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris and wanted to give it a catchy name that would ensure a full house all year round, would you call it “French Theory”? Really? I wouldn’t, but perhaps that just shows my lack of marketing savvy. Of Read More …
The cornerstone for La Grande Mosquée de Paris in the Latin Quarter (5th arrondissement) was laid in October 1922. On the occasion of the centenary, in 2022, the French newspaper Le Monde republished an article from eleven years before, which described the Grand Mosque as “a grandiose and controversial project” Read More …
The French newspaper Le Monde has moved four times in its seventy-eight-year history. Its latest move was in 2020, when the company’s 1,600 employees (at least those who were not working remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic) moved into this striking new building at 67-69 avenue Pierre Mendès-France, in the Read More …
The French word Gaîté means cheerfulness or happiness, and this historic theatre was certainly a cheerful place in the middle-to-late 1870s, when several of Jacques Offenbach’s comical operettas were performed here. Offenbach himself was the theatre’s director and impresario for two years, but he was not so happy with the Read More …
The Place de la Bastille is one of several squares in Paris that have been completely rearranged in recent years, to reduce the amount of space devoted to motor traffic and increase the space allotted to pedestrians and cyclists. The July Column, at the center of the square, was previously Read More …
Paris has finally found a good use for its Bourse de Commerce, an impressive circular building that was originally used as a wheat market in the eighteenth century. (I imagine that this was where Balzac’s Père Goriot made his fortune as a wholesale grain dealer during the French Revolution.) François Read More …