The Pompidou Centre – also know as Beaubourg after the quarter of the same name where it stands – is a striking modern architectural marvel. It housesEurope’s largest museum for modern art, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information, an immense public library, and IRCAM, a music and acoustic research centre. There are regular exhibitions in the centre with the biggest names of the art world, but lesser known contemporary artists also well presented.

<< The Centre was designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano; the British architect couple Richard Rogers and Su Rogers; Gianfranco Franchini, the British structural engineer Edmund Happold; and Irish structural engineer Peter Rice. The New York Times noted that the design of the Centre “turned the architecture world upside down”. The jury of the Pritzker Prize, an award that was given in 2007, said the Pompidou “revolutionized museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.” >>

Quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_Georges_Pompidou

Apart from the building and what’s inside, the square in front of the museum, the Place Georges Pompidou, is also worth mentioning. It became a very interesting spot with street performers and artists, musical events, exhibitions, carnivals and the like entertaining bystanders. The Beaubourg area is steeped in history, but the contemporary Centre Georges Pompidou and the colourful crowd it brings mix perfectly – it’s an experience no one should miss.

Centre Georges Pompidou official website: http://www.centrepompidou.fr/

In 1860 Emile de Labédollière wrote the following about Rue de la Gaîté:
“Near these walls we go into a sort of land of plenty: a long street, which extends to the fifteenth district, called the Rue de la Gaîté. Balls, restaurants, nightclubs abound, and in the evening, the crowd gathers at the doors of theaters”.

The street is still lined with cabarets and music-hall theatres that date back to the of 19th century Paris. Most famous of them are “Bobino” at no 20, the Montparnasse Theater opened in 1818, and the Comedie Italienne.

“the heart of bohemian Paris”

“the Paris of Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, Doisneau and Brassai”

The theaters in Rue de la Gaite are:

• Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse
• Théâtre Montparnasse
• Théâtre du Petit Montparnasse
• Bobino
• La Comédie italienne
• Théâtre Rive Gauche

Other theaters around Rue de la Gaite:

• Le Guichet Montparnasse (rue du Maine)
• Le Petit Journal Montparnasse (Rue du Commandant-René-Mouchotte)
• Théâtre d’Edgar (boulevard Edgar Quinet)

Rue de la Gaite is accessible from metro stations Gaîté and Edgar Quinet.

See more photos:

http://eman59photos.blogspot.com/2010/04/theatres-of-rue-de-la-gaite.html

Rue Mouffetard runs along a flank of a hill which was called from Roman times as “mont Cetardus” and many historians believe “Mouffetard” is a derivation of this name. As with today’s rue Lagrange, rue Galande, rue Descartes and rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, it is a road built by the Romans. In the Middle Ages it was the center of Saint-Médard village, and from 1724 it became a district of Paris known as Faubourg Saint Médard. The neighborhood escaped Baron Haussmann’s city redevelopment relatively unchanged. The Rue Mouffetard area today, broadly speaking, is part of the latin Quarter.

Rue Mouffetard and the area are featured in director Krzysztof Kie?lowski’s film, “Three Colors: Blue” (Trois Couleurs: Bleu).

Text based on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_Mouffetard,_Paris

Suggested Hotels

Grand Hotel Jeanne D’Arc - http://grandhoteljeannedarcparis.com/

Metro stations: École Militaire and La Tour-Maubourg.

The market is at its best:
Tue–Sat 8:30–13:00 or 15:00–19:30,
Sun 8:30–12:00,
dead on Mon.

More information: “Rue Cler: The Art of Parisian Living”, by Rick Steves:http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/destinations/france/ruecler0208.htm

Beneath this lies the underground station Chatelet-Les-Halles, central hub of Paris’s express metro system, the RER.

Les Halles was the central Market in Paris. In 1183, King Philippe II Auguste enlarged the marketplace in Paris and built a shelter for the merchants, who came from all over to sell their wares. Known as Les Halles, for almost 700 years the masssive glass and iron building was the “stomach of Paris”.

Throughout the space divided in three big areas – Historical information, Cellar/Museum, Wines Exhibition – the visitor may obtain a diversified information, provided by texts, maps, photos, utensils, reconstituition of various stages of the viniculture, Portuguese tiles and vintage and new wines. In an exhibition space of 1400 square meters, the Museum presents an allotment of more than 1050 wine brands, with more than 750 commercial wines and 300 collection wines, the oldest being a 1815 Madeira Wine, possible to find, among others, in the Cellar-Museum area. Of the new wines, about fifty of them are available for tasting.
Hours – Open daily from 10am to 6pm (closed on Tuesday)

The church was built during 1824-1844, on the site of the former Saint-Lazare jail enclosure. In that enclosure had been sited the Maison Saint-Lazare, occupied by Vincent de Paul— he lived and worked there — and afterwards by the Congrégation de la Mission, from 1632 to 1793.

Jean-Baptiste Lepère, a French achitect, had been put in charge of the church’s design and the initial phases of construction.  The first stone was laid in August 1824 in the presence of the préfet de la Seine, Gaspard de Chabrol, and the archbishop of Paris Mgr de Quélen. Work proceeded slowly, and was several times given up, being especially delayed thanks to a lack of credit as a result of the 1830 Revolution. Therefore, it was Lepère’s son-in-law, Jacques Hittorff, who finally followed the project through from 1831 to 1844. The building opened for religious practice on 25 October 1844.

Hittorff massively modified the initial plans (which did not plan for even one tower), with his church opening onto the Place Franz-Liszt, giving the building a church square. He also added a system of ramps, laid out today in gardens, to aid access by horse-drawn carriages.

The church’s basilical plan evokes several grand schemes of religious architecture without specifically copying one in particular. Above the portico (borrowed from those of Greek temples) is a pediment sculpted by Charles-François Lebœuf-Nanteuil on the subject of “The Apotheosis of Saint Vincent-de-Paul”: the saint is glorified, surrounded by figures symbolising his saintly actions— a missionary, a galley slave, and some Daughters of Charity devoting themselves to children or to healing the sick. Inside, the painted frieze of 1848-53 around the nave (between the two levels of columns) is by Hippolyte Flandrin, and shows 160 male and female saints advancing towards the sanctuary. The decoration of the Lady Chapel, in the apse added later at the back, is by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The Calvary shown on the main altar is by François Rude.

The building suffered during the Paris Commune: the bell towers were hit by seven shells, and the terrace and ramps by more than twenty, all fired from the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

The Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul is close to the Eurostar and mainline station Gare du Nord, and so is twinned with St Pancras Old Church (a church in London close to the new St Pancras International station). This twinning was inaugurated on 11 December 2007 with a bilingual service at St Pancras Old Church.

Recommended hotel around :
Hotel Annexe, 4 rue Taylor, 75010 Paris
http://www.annexe-paris-hotel.com

The garden lies behind glass and seems to be a part of the building. A car reflects in the glass so the picture was taken from the streetside. The glass protects the gardin from the street, like a sort of biotope. The open glass-steel construction strengthens the relation with the outside world.

261 Boulevard Raspail, Paris 14th

Why does the Place du Tertre swarm with mediocre artists clamoring to paint your portrait? As is often the case in Paris, it’s Baron Haussmann’s fault! But for once, the baron did some good along with the damage when, by razing many working-class neighbourhoods in central Paris, he unwittingly encouraged the development of Montmartre (which had been annexed to Paris in 1860).
Around 1880 began the transformation of the Butte (Hill) from a country village into the home of hordes of artists and other marginalized folk who no longer had a place in Haussmann’s grandiose central Paris. At the foot of Montmartre cabarets thrived – up top on the Place du Tertre, an unimaginably (to us) intense period of artistic activity took hold. The Place saw movements from Impressionism to Cubism to Fauvism to Surrealism come and go, right up to the eve of World War I, such greats as Renoir, Picasso, Braque, Dufy, Cézanne, Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec painted here and, often, kept studios and living quarters in the adjacent streets.
These days, despite the oppressive, constant tourist crush on the square, one can still discover that old-time Paris feeling here – not to mention the fact that some of the current painters aren’t too bad at all!