Hi Jeanbon, I appreciate I am very much in the minority on that one, and don't get wrong I rather like Paris as a whole, but the big sweeping boulevards really leave me cold.
I think it was because I was expecting Place de la Concord to be an actual public square. I understand that it has good views because of these boulevards, but as a destination it just isn't a particularly welcoming place. As someone travelling through it, it is basically a big grey 14 lane highway you have to get across if you want to walk from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe.
Perhaps it is beacuse the priority of the space is with cars and that isn't really Hausmann's fault, but anything in an historic city centre where the priority isn't with pedestrians will need to do an awful lot to win me over, and even those big sweeping grand views of Parisian monuments didn't win me over here unfortunately. |