Paris Walking Tours
Take a guided stroll through Paris's most beautiful streets and sites. Perfect for those who want a more active and personal way to discover Paris.
natega 3en shams from here
Paris Bike Tours
Discover the city of lights on a bike. It really is the way to go for a more unique and personal way to discover Paris. We also offer bike tours to Versailles and Giverny, a perfect day in the making for the more actively inclined.
Day-trippers, night music
Sports facilities will also be provided on the riverside level below the Invalides and the Quai d’Orsay, and visitors will be able to stroll onto an “archipelago” of floating “islands” on the water, to observe the rich biodiversity of flotsam provided by the opaque river.
In other words, a version of the Paris Plage concept will be in permanent operation along the defunct Left Bank expressway. Given what’s happened on the Trocadéro esplanade, however, the “reconquest” of the Left Bank riverside is likely to draw street vendors and junk trade. By night, the frustrated youth of Paris, who now only dream of busy nightlife like London’s, will get a waterside disco under the Pont Alexandre III, where high-decibel music will be tolerated because no one lives nearby.
In front of the Musée d’Orsay, an enormous, unattractive, bleachers-like staircase will descend from street level to the river’s edge, arching over the riverside walkway. It will afford breathtaking views and, by the same token, will disfigure the site it’s on. In summer it will be complemented by a huge screen floating in the Seine for open-air movies. Based on past experience, opponents fear that after dark the giant stairway might lend itself to undesirable and very dodgy activities.
For the first six months, starting in 2012, implementation of the initial projects will be experimental, and reversible—although little is likely to be reversed unless the opposition wins the 2014 municipal elections. Although the announced budget is a modest €35 million, in these rocky economic times the money might be better spent on projects more useful to Parisians than tacky installations that will disfigure the banks of the Seine—a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1991.
Glass canopy
To rid the Seine of vehicles would be a welcome policy if viable alternatives were offered; replacing cars with crowds of day-trippers and the clutter of assembly-line tourism is not a welcome alternative. Delanoë calls the plan the “pacification” of the riverside, but the 30,000-odd motorists a day who are denied the expressways are less likely to be pacified than overcome by road rage up above.
The Pompidou Center and the Forum des Halles are also legacies of the 1970s. The initially controversial Pompidou ended by gaining the public’s favor, especially after its renovation in 2000. The Forum des Halles, the city’s oppressive underground subway/railway hub combined with a charmless shopping mall, was a sorry substitute for Victor Baltard’s handsome 1850s iron-and-glass central market pavilions, and it has long since become an unsavory hangout.
Although no start date has yet been set, plans are to replace the universally unloved Forum with a 150,000-square-foot Canopée designed by Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti—an undulating structure of louvered glass covering a new pedestrian promenade and a glass-walled music conservatory, among other things. The Canopy will face onto a vast rectangle of gardens completely redesigned by David Mangin, whose elegantly unobtrusive project for the Forum itself was chosen by a public plebiscite but nonetheless rejected by City Hall as too conservative, and replaced by the Canopy instead.
City authorities are hoping that the addition of the music conservatory, side by side with a hip-hop center, will set an example for “vivre ensemble” policies that will encourage a multicultural and multiethnic modern France for the future.
Thirza Vallois is the author of Around and About Paris, Romantic Paris, and Aveyron
Take a guided stroll through Paris's most beautiful streets and sites. Perfect for those who want a more active and personal way to discover Paris.
natega 3en shams from here
Paris Bike Tours
Discover the city of lights on a bike. It really is the way to go for a more unique and personal way to discover Paris. We also offer bike tours to Versailles and Giverny, a perfect day in the making for the more actively inclined.
Day-trippers, night music
Sports facilities will also be provided on the riverside level below the Invalides and the Quai d’Orsay, and visitors will be able to stroll onto an “archipelago” of floating “islands” on the water, to observe the rich biodiversity of flotsam provided by the opaque river.
In other words, a version of the Paris Plage concept will be in permanent operation along the defunct Left Bank expressway. Given what’s happened on the Trocadéro esplanade, however, the “reconquest” of the Left Bank riverside is likely to draw street vendors and junk trade. By night, the frustrated youth of Paris, who now only dream of busy nightlife like London’s, will get a waterside disco under the Pont Alexandre III, where high-decibel music will be tolerated because no one lives nearby.
In front of the Musée d’Orsay, an enormous, unattractive, bleachers-like staircase will descend from street level to the river’s edge, arching over the riverside walkway. It will afford breathtaking views and, by the same token, will disfigure the site it’s on. In summer it will be complemented by a huge screen floating in the Seine for open-air movies. Based on past experience, opponents fear that after dark the giant stairway might lend itself to undesirable and very dodgy activities.
For the first six months, starting in 2012, implementation of the initial projects will be experimental, and reversible—although little is likely to be reversed unless the opposition wins the 2014 municipal elections. Although the announced budget is a modest €35 million, in these rocky economic times the money might be better spent on projects more useful to Parisians than tacky installations that will disfigure the banks of the Seine—a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1991.
Glass canopy
To rid the Seine of vehicles would be a welcome policy if viable alternatives were offered; replacing cars with crowds of day-trippers and the clutter of assembly-line tourism is not a welcome alternative. Delanoë calls the plan the “pacification” of the riverside, but the 30,000-odd motorists a day who are denied the expressways are less likely to be pacified than overcome by road rage up above.
The Pompidou Center and the Forum des Halles are also legacies of the 1970s. The initially controversial Pompidou ended by gaining the public’s favor, especially after its renovation in 2000. The Forum des Halles, the city’s oppressive underground subway/railway hub combined with a charmless shopping mall, was a sorry substitute for Victor Baltard’s handsome 1850s iron-and-glass central market pavilions, and it has long since become an unsavory hangout.
Although no start date has yet been set, plans are to replace the universally unloved Forum with a 150,000-square-foot Canopée designed by Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti—an undulating structure of louvered glass covering a new pedestrian promenade and a glass-walled music conservatory, among other things. The Canopy will face onto a vast rectangle of gardens completely redesigned by David Mangin, whose elegantly unobtrusive project for the Forum itself was chosen by a public plebiscite but nonetheless rejected by City Hall as too conservative, and replaced by the Canopy instead.
City authorities are hoping that the addition of the music conservatory, side by side with a hip-hop center, will set an example for “vivre ensemble” policies that will encourage a multicultural and multiethnic modern France for the future.
Thirza Vallois is the author of Around and About Paris, Romantic Paris, and Aveyron
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