Explore 2000 Years Of History On 3-D Map Of Paris

by Kraig Becker on

History buffs and virtual travelers have a new Internet time sink that is sure to kill hours at a time. Dassault Systèmes, a company that specializes in making unique 3-D virtual reality simulations is painstakingly recreating the city of Paris using their advanced computer modeling systems. But not content just to show the City of Lights in its current form, the company is recreating it at various stages throughout history, allowing us to explore how it evolved and grew over time.

The virtual city, which can be accessed by clicking here, traces the origins of Paris back to the Roman conquest in 52 B.C. Over the centuries it developed into one of the largest and most vibrant cities on the planet and all of that plays out here in this digital model, which lets you select from several different eras. Landmarks such as Notre Dame, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower pop into the landscape as time passes, giving us an unprecedented look at a living city that changed over the ages to meet the needs of its citizens.

Paris 3D can be explored from a web browser and requires the user to download a special plug-in to make it work. I had a few issues getting it to run on my Mac using Safari, so you may want to try another browser when giving this a go. There is also an iPad app available but it is a more constrained experience. Both versions are fascinating to play with and any fan of Paris will enjoy the opportunity to stroll its streets and explore the city’s history.


Video Of The Day: Paris In Motion

by Elizabeth Seward on

“Paris In Motion (Part II)” from Mayeul Akpovi on Vimeo.

Thanks to BBC Travel’s Sean O’Neill, I checked out this beautiful time-lapse video he linked to on his Twitter page. “Paris In Motion” features over 3,500 images taken and compiled by Mayeul Akpovi. From famous landmarks to airports, this video captures the frantic motion within the city of Paris. Car headlights blur together as a quick streak of light, clouds rush the above sky and people walk in every direction in this video. Check out this video and then watch the making of footage here.

Paris Water Walk: Footloose On The Canals Saint Martin And Ourcq

by David Downie on

You don’t have to be Moses to walk on water in Paris. Even a footloose freethinker can happily skip over the flowing Canal Saint Martin and its sources, the farther-flung Canal de l’Ourcq and Bassin de la Villette.

These unsung watercourses built or expanded by Napoleons I and III enter Paris on its northeastern edge at La Villette, site of the city’s former slaughterhouses. They curve torpidly across the edgy 19th, 10th, 11th and 4th arrondissements – in that order – until they reach the Seine at the Arsenal Marina.

I was tempted to write “spill” or “rush” but the fact is the canals flow slowly, through many locks. They’re the antithesis of in a hurry. At the right time of day the mood along their tree-lined banks matches the go-slow pace of the water.

Missed seeing the canals up to now? That’s easy. From behind Place de la République, all the way to the Place de la Bastille and the Arsenal Marina, the Canal Saint Martin runs underground. That’s one reason it’s easy to walk on its waters: the esplanade on top is a linear garden. The park and flanking roadways change name many times. Parts are asphalted and used twice weekly for open-air markets.

The market on Boulevard Richard Lenoir held Thursdays and Sundays happens to be Paris’ best. It’s one reason why, when I walk the canals end to end, I start here early on Sunday. In fact, since the new Seine-side walkways have opened on the Right Bank, I pick up the pedestrian path on the river, amble past the Arsenal, then wend my way through the market heading northeast.

For me, the serious excitement starts at the first mossy lock in a pocket-sized park under giant trees. That’s where the Quai de Jemmapes and Quai de Valmy begin. You spot your first humpback bridge 100 yards along. From here to the edge of town it’s an almost uninterrupted series of locks, placid, greenish water, sycamores five stories high – and cafes, nightclubs, restaurants and bobos galore.

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Whereas the Marais was gentrified 30 years ago, the Canal Saint Martin got going around the year 2000. It’s still the land of Wannabe-Bobos – the ones who haven’t quite made it into the star-architect, starlet and multiple-starred chef empyreans.

But judging by the cigarette butts littering the embankments, the SUVs and Smart cars on the sidewalks, and the prices at the cute cafes serving silly food, the prospects are excellent. This will soon be another Place des Vosges. It’s even noisier, with fewer foreign tourists.

Since the object of my walks is to find authenticity in an increasingly gentrified Paris, my enjoyment skyrockets once I get to Place Stalingrad. This section of waterway changes name, becoming the Canal de l’Ourcq. The unpronounceable part is a river. It’s what actually feeds the canals and the wide Bassin de la Villette, another marina.

At Stalingrad and Bassin de la Villette the new park is big with tame hipsters and wilder varieties of Parisian alike, the kind covered with tattoos and equipped with portable professional sound systems. They compete with the barge-cafes, embankment-side clubs, and the multiplex movie complexes facing each other on the Quai de la Seine and Quai de la Loire.

These quays and their unpaved embankments are now the prime destination of Paris’ new generation of bobo-boules players. They’re also the city’s main binge-drinking and partying venue, a lively scene once darkness falls. That’s why I get up here in the morning, when the party crowd is sleeping off the latest all-nighter. Or I saunter over in the late afternoon, at dusk, when the locals and yuppies mix on the quays. There are sling chairs, bike lanes, and walking paths – and if you like rowing or fishing you’re equally well served. Rest up! You’ve got another mile or more to go.

Beyond the locks and pivoting bridge with bizarre decorations, the best part of the walk begins: Quai de la Marne and Quai de l’Oise. Here the aerosol artists have beautified many a wall, the low-income high-rises lend an enchanting could-be-anywhere feel, and the kaleidoscope of characters you encounter seems increasingly full of character.

Geezers come out to La Villette to wet a line: this is the best fishing in town, it’s claimed. The most prized spot is where the Quai de la Gironde and Quai de la Charente meet the quays of Marne and Oise fronting what used to be the meatpacking plant and slaughterhouse district. Anglers pull up plump pike and perch, and maybe even the proverbial lost trout that’s survived a trans-suburban swim.

Urban sunbathers hike out here too. The canals are a reflecting pool, increasing the intensity of the Parisian sun and deepening the summer’s leftover Saint Tropez tan.

The backdrop: train trestles and the reconverted meatpacking plant – once Europe’s biggest. It now houses the Cité des Sciences museum and Geode movie theater. Plus there’s the crazy Parc de la Villette with its fire-engine red garden “follies” and tatterdemalion lawns. The old slaughterhouse, La Grande Halle, a mega-concert venue, lies behind, and so does the Cité de la Musique, Paris’s ear-challenging music conservatory.

On weekends, young couples and their kiddies, yuppies and rare birds – the real working-class Parisians – turn La Villette into an open-air, inner-city resort.

After a cross-town gallop it’s a great place to hear contemporary sound pieces – and fuel up on coffee or something vinous. The hike back to the Seine on the opposite bank of the canal replays the scenery. It also stretches out your water walk by a couple more hours – if you go at the appropriate, deliciously slow pace.

Author and private walking-tour guide David Downie’s latest book is the critically acclaimed “Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light,” soon to be an audiobook. His next memoir, published in April 2013, is “Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James.” His websites are www.davidddownie.com, www.parisparistours.com, http://wanderingfrance.com/blog/paris and http://wanderingliguria.com, dedicated to the
Italian Riviera.

Louvre Opens New Department Of Islamic Art

by Sean McLachlan on


The Louvre in Paris is opening a new Department of Islamic Art that will have one of the best such collections in the world.

One treasure is this ivory pyxis of Prince Al-Mugẖīra, shown here in a photograph courtesy Wikimedia Commons. It was made in 968 at Medina Azahara near Cordoba, Spain. Note that there are human figures on it. While many Islamic traditions forbid the depiction of people and animals, others such as the Moors of Spain, the Moghuls of India, the Persians of Iran, and the Ottomans of Turkey all had a long tradition of human portraiture.

This is just one of the many insights visitors will gain now that a refurbished and expanded wing of the museum has opened its doors with more than 30,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Department of Islamic Art will exhibit nearly 3,000 works, whose origins range from Spain to India and date from the 8th to the 19th century. The total collection numbers some 18,000 works from the Louvre’s collections and some on long-term loan from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

The recent furor over the depiction of the Prophet Mohammed in an anti-Islamic movie has overlooked the fact that some Islamic traditions do create portraits of Mohammed, as this page from the University of Bergen makes clear. Of course these are positive portrayals, but they show that the Islamic world is not monolithic in its ideas of what can and cannot be shown. The Louvre did not state whether they have any such images on display.

Seine-Side Saunter: Retaking Paris’ Riverfront

by David Downie on

Before dawn the other day, I stole down to the Seine and waited in darkness until the security
guard at the construction worksite had walked upstream out of sight.

Vaulting with the agility of a middle-aged guy with bad knees, I strode down the newly laid cobbled walkway below the Pont de Sully. The site is part of an ambitious project to slow or banish cars from Paris, and welcome walkers to the Seine while revitalizing the river’s UNESCO World Heritage Site banks.

I danced a silent, gleeful jig of victory; the river would soon be ours again!

Soon: In September 2012 the one-mile stretch of walkway on the Right Bank between the Canal Saint Martin and city hall is slated to be finished. In spring 2013 an even longer stretch on the Left Bank near the Musée d’Orsay will be ours. Add them to the existing Seine-side pedestrian areas and by summer of 2013 we will be able to walk across town on either bank following the river almost entirely unmolested by automobiles.

Photo: Paris.fr

I made the victory sign, a flying “V.” I then lowered my index finger in a loving F-you salute to something directly across the Seine from where I stood: the billionaire’s townhouse on the Ile Saint Louis where for decades my arch-nemesis would hob and nob and chain-smoke with the other cigar-puffing plutocrats who ran France in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. They were the bankers, financiers, real estate developers and members of the construction lobby, the charming folks who practically destroyed old Paris, starting with the Seine.

My nemesis was and remains a certain Georges Pompidou, long a minister and then president of France. Dead now, he lived on the Ile Saint Louis overlooking the Seine’s Left Bank. But he grooved a few blocks away with the top 1 percent at the Hotel Lambert, the 17th-century townhouse currently under restoration and facing me across the river. For decades the mansion was owned by the Rothschild clan and frequented by a Who’s Who of malignant “modernizers.”

Before Pompidou… [Jongkind, 1874 (Musée Malraux, Le Havre)]

Granted, I was not in Paris in 1874 when the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind set up his easel by the Seine and painted his gorgeous view of the Quai des Céléstins and the old riverside port, plus the five-arched Pont Marie. I was not old enough to remember the quays before their transformation in the late ’60s to early ’70s. How could I suffer nostalgia for something I’d never known? Easy.

My first stay in Paris as an adult was back in 1976, a few years after Pompidou made the egregiously misguided statement that “It is not the car that must adapt to Paris, but Paris that must adapt to the car.” Among Pompidou’s many destructive projects – eyesore high-rises, shopping malls, the new Forum des Halles – he was bent on turning the Seine into an expressway. He succeeded. Thirty-six years ago I stood on the Pont de Sully in this very spot and wondered what madness had seized the Parisians, so well known for their love of the past. Now I am beaming with satisfaction: live long enough and you’ll see some things get set right.

The river had always been the lifeline of the city. Along its banks since before the Romans arrived were habitations, port facilities, bridges, taverns and towpaths. One of my favorite crime novels by Georges Simenon, “Maigret et le clochard (Maigret and the Bum),” was set on the Ile Saint Louis and in the Port des Céléstins. Having read it when young, I felt I had been here.
But Pompidou wanted American-style freeways to show New York and Chicago that Paris could be just as modern. He demolished nearly all the city’s ports and poured cement embankments in their place. He ran tunnels under historic buildings in some spots and built out into the river in others. The Seine morphed into a sewer flanked by raceways.


Now… a work in progress (Photo: www.alisonharris.com)

As I tooled that dawn along the sidewalks above the worksite, peering down, I dreamed the dream of current Mayor Bertrand Delanoë: cleaning up the Seine so that it’s swimmable again – to humans and fish. That’s a few more years down the road.

While the transformation continues despite Paris’s sweltering summer heat, thousands of hikers, walkers, joggers and cyclists are swarming to the already pedestrianized sections of the Seine. They run from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower (almost) on the Right Bank and from the city’s upstream limits to the Musée d’Orsay on the Left Bank. It’s a route I do several times a week in one direction. I can’t wait to be able to go downstream on the Right and upstream on the Left, or the other way around.

So what’s the downside?

Critics argue that traffic will be nightmarish – precisely what the mayor wants in order to get Parisians to give up using their cars. Other naysayers are closer to the mark when they foresee noise problems for riverside neighbors, round-the-clock partying, and more work for Paris cleanup crews. The gentrification and de-naturing of what was a real, working city continues. Paris is party central, a place for tourists.

Photo: APUR/JC Choblet

True: We’ll probably never get the rough-and-ready freight facilities and riverboats back. We may never see people and horses braving the Seine’s brisk waters alongside trout and salmon. But you never know. And walkways, bars and open markets for yuppies surely have got to beat the asphalt jungle. My big question is, how well will the mayor’s yellow-brick road stand up to the ravages of climate change and ferocious flooding? Tune in next summer for an update once the job is complete.

Author and private walking-tour guide David Downie’s latest book is the critically acclaimed “Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light,” soon to be an audiobook. His next memoir, to be published in April 2013, is “Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James.” His websites are www.davidddownie.com, www.parisparistours.com, http://wanderingfrance.com/blog/paris and http://wanderingliguria.com, dedicated to the
Italian Riviera.