Around Place de la Bastille - bis

Referring to “Around Place de la Bastille”, I actually went back to la Bastille end last week for a rather surprising walk together with my son, his wife and my two grandchildren.

Where you today can find the new Paris opera house, Opéra Bastille, used to be a railway station, Gare de la Bastille, for trains heading east, the Strasbourg line. The last – steam engined - train left the station in 1969 and it was demolished in 1984.






Where there used to be rails, there is now a green, park like, promenade, some 4,5 km (3 miles) eastwards. At the end you reach the green area Bois de Vincennes. This creation has clearly created added value to the surrounding quarters (including the price for a flat).

To start with you walk on a viaduct; the underneath 72 arcades are today used for some quite fashionable shops, restaurants and cafés.My granddaughter Paloma took the lead and the rest of the family had to follow.She got fascinated by all the flowers and decided to have a closer look at most of them and of course ask for their names. (She did not learn very much due to lack of knowledge of her promenade partners.) Anyhow, we had a nice walk. To go back home, I took a municipal bike.

Around Place de la Bastille

Place de la Bastille is of course a historical place, but there is nothing left of the Bastille. In the centre of the place, you have column celebrating, not the destruction of this famous prison in 1789, but the 1830 “July revolution” (yes, France has had a number of revolutions) which took place three hot (!) summer days July 27-29 (“Les Trois Glorieuses”), exactly 177 years ago, forcing one king (Charles X) to abdicate in favour of another one (Louis Philippe). Behind the column you can see the new Bastille Opera house, opened in 1989. The place is still often used for different political or popular manifestations.

Around la Bastille, you have an area which used to be where you bought your furniture (before Ikea), Faubourg-Saint-Antoine. Since centuries this was an area where you could find hundreds of workshops making furniture and shops selling them. There are a few left, but even if it seems to have been decided that the area shall not be demolished, many of the buildings in the large number of small side streets are now progressively occupied by more fashionable offices, art galleries and shops and they are to a large extent also transformed into lofts for living.

This is also an area for an active nightlife with a lot of cosy restaurants, clubs, discotheques… Rue de la Lappe has a long tradition in this respect; this is where the “bals-musette” and the “apaches” were “invented”. One famous “bal” is still left, the Balajo (Bal à Jo). Today you can go there for salsa, techno, retro… depending on the day and the hour.
Some of the photos I took for the Fête de la Musique were taken around la Bastille and rue de la Lappe.

The original photos can be found on my other blog "Peter - photos".