Paris #3

Paris gardens are amazing. Lush and green, and open. Rarely does one see a fence. This openness, perhaps a virtue of the culture - the land of Foccault and Descartes and the magnet that drew Marx, Stein, and Hemingway, resonates throughout the city. Should you wish to touch the most venerable structures you can. Notre Dame, the Institut de France and many others. Only the Senat (the Palais du Luxembourg) was sealed off, and then, only in the back. Devoid of Jersey dividers on the sidewalks, and garbage trucks in the alleys. We have grow so accustomed to over-scaled cities here in the States, towering monsters, or else the single floor of the provincial village thrust into the metropolis that when we find ourselves in the midst of a properly scaled city, it seems like a toy, like a model, not a real city. Could a real city be this pleasant, this wonderful? Only Greenwich Village can match Paris in scale.

Yet the Jardins of Paris play an integral role in connecting the town. I have seen a 100 pictures of the Louver in architecture books. Stubbornly portrayed from the street side, the photos are tantamount to showing the loading dock of the UN headquarters. The Louvre plays out to the garden around it in its horseshoe enclosure. That Garden opens to the Tuilleries, a long park, .5 kilometers, that fronts the Seine. The Tuileries stretches to the Place de la Concorde which opens to yet another park the size of the Tuilleries which then leads to the axis of the Champs Elysees, ended by the Arc de Triomphe. These parks combine to overlay another scale upon the city. At once shrinking it and overlaying a grand scale, while opening up the city.

The parks, each of them, is magnificent in their own way. The worn wan grass of American parks is nowhere to be seen. The paths are the finest chalky white gravel, reflecting skylight, contrasting the green, and draining water faster than asphalt. The clutches of trees, formally planted in rows, cast a dark spell underneath them, affecting your perception of the rest, lightening the world.

There is more. The police huts in the Jardin du Luxembourg are perfect architectural structures, the best I of any building I saw in Paris.