Category: Paris

Paris Is Building Three New Bridges Over the Seine

It’s part of a larger plan to fight climate change. Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s proposal to build car-free bridges in Paris comes after she announced her goal to ban gas-fueled cars by 2030

The Paris we know and love will soon go through a bout of changes, but luckily, they’ll be for the better. This week, Paris City Hall proposed building three garden bridges over the Seine to transform the river bank into a futuristic-meets-historical destination.

According to the The Times, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to build three new pedestrian bridges over the Seine in a move to revive the city’s 18th-century tradition of having merchants set up stalls on bridges. It’s hard to imagine exactly what the final project will look like, because as one city official claimed, there’s “nothing like it anywhere in the world as far as we know.” It could be similar to Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, which is filled mostly with jewelry shops and art stores, but it’ll be more of a city plaza [ . . . ]

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Mourning in Paris

Paris is a good place to mourn. It takes itself very seriously in a way that is sometimes tedious when you are young and full of the future, but is perfect when you are entering middle age and walking down cobblestone streets and missing someone you loved very much, particularly if that someone lived there. Paris is tonally at its most appropriate when you realize that somehow that someone, who was so intricately woven into the city — someone who, for you, was Paris — is no longer there and yet the city remains itself. The city somehow survives. But Paris absorbs your sadness like it has absorbed hundreds of years of sadness. [ . . . ] Read at NYTimes

Paris Already Canceled Its Christmas Market This Year—Its Ferris Wheel Might Be Next

The wheel isn’t part of France’s history.The mayor of Paris wants the city’s tourist attractions to reflect its heritage.

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has announced a host of changes in the French capital this year, including a plan to ban gas-fueled cars. While that won’t happen until 2030, City Hall’s most recent project will have a more immediate effect. Paris will no longer host its annual Christmas Market on the Champs-Elysées, and the mayor wants to pull down the big ferris wheel that stands nearby at the Place de la Concorde.[ . . . ] More: Paris Already Canceled Its Christmas Market This Year—Its Ferris Wheel Might Be Next

One Cafe, Five Friends: 5 Pailles in Paris

There’s a cafe scene in Cédric Klapisch’s cult coming-of-age film Le Péril Jeune where we see five high school friends hunkered around a table, razzing each other. At one point, the bartender shouts that they’d better order something or get out, to which Romain Duris’ character replies, “Give us a coffee with five straws.”“We thought it was the perfect name,” says Egemen Tavsanci, co-founder of 5 Pailles (Five Straws) cafe, which opened in January in Paris’s 10th arrondissement. “One cafe, five friends,” he says, referring to Klapsich’s movie and 5 Pailles’ origin story. He and friends Bengisu Gunes, Can Atalay, Caglar Alpertunga, and Ezgi Senturk, all perched high on corporate ladders, decided to drop everything a year and a half ago to open a cafe. “We hated the coffee in Paris, so [ . . . ] More at: One Cafe, Five Friends: 5 Pailles in Paris