Paris’s missing palace and the making of the Louvre | Hacker News Reader

Paris’s missing palace and the making of the Louvre

messynessychic.com

32 pointspepys15 comments

Ok, but the last image is NOT of the Tuileries but of the Hôtel de Ville (city hall) which also burned in 1871 but is a very different building...

Yes indeed! Very good catch.

Very sadly many of France's best treasures are lost mostly due to stupidity. Here are a few:

- Les Halles de Baltard

- Château de Saint-Cloud

- Tuileries Palace

I wouldn't call them our best treasures. La Grande Chartreuse on the other side...

Richelieu had unused forts filled with gunpowder and blown up. I suppose it was the most efficient way to get the stones back to build other stuff.

The Regneville castle partially survived the ordeal...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ch%C3%A2teau+De+Regn%C3%A9...

Cluny III

Burning the Tuileries was an intentional revolutionary gesture. There is no stupidity involved here. Les Halles Baltard were just a fairly traditional covered market. Château de Saint-Cloud was destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War.

I really wish people spent less time fetishising old ruins and more time actually building a liveable city. Paris would be so much nicer. Might be even more relevant at the national level actually. France really is a dying country.

> I really wish people spent less time fetishising old ruins

Somewhat of a valid statement, but the loss of historical patrimony is really a pity. Les Halles de Baltard was most definitely more than a traditional covered market. Paris is a livable city assuming you can find and afford a place to live.

> France really is a dying country.

Funny. After having recently returned to the US from a stay in France, I had the opposite impression. France has functioning infrastructure and reasonable prices, the US has...

> reasonable prices

You were fooled by your American salary and the euro-dollar parity. Prices are extremely high compared to what people earn.

Fair point.

> I really wish people spent less time fetishising old ruins and more time actually building a liveable city. Paris would be so much nicer. Might be even more relevant at the national level actually. France really is a dying country.

8% of their GDP is tourism, so the old ruins are actually important.

Now to address your real point, I just came back from Paris and if anything it's a very good example of positive "human-scale" urbanization. Sure they don't have skyscrapers, but every building is about 6 stories, which is great for density. You can take the RER/Metro/Train to go basically anywhere. For shorter travels you have a great network of buses that isn't (compared to Canada and most likely the US) snubbed by wealthy people so you don't feel like you'll get stabbed by some homeless person when you climb onboard.

> France really is a dying country

On that point we agree actually, but I really don't see how their issue is bad urbanism.

Experiencing Paris as a tourist and living in Paris are two very different experiences. You don’t really see the cramped apartments with awful isolation, the constant urban work improving nothing, the lack of vegetation, the never ending noise, how the public transports always have issues, how the city is constantly grubby as a tourist. Also despite the impression you get from the small buildings Paris is actually extremely dense. People just live in shoeboxes.

I really like the city but it wears you down sometimes.

That's fair, what you wrote actually echo what I thought as I was coming back: that I loved every second of it yet I'd trade the architecture, lively arrondissement and culture for my much larger apartment any day if I had to pick.

That being said, I've yet to see a city where people downtown don't live in small apartments so I suppose some people are just fine with it.

I recently read that Marseilles is a prison of rival drug cartels.

How many major French cities are strangling themselves? How many are not?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58395124

> I recently read that Marseilles is a prison of rival drug cartels.

You've read rubbish. Marseille has gang issues in some neighborhood but it's not a « prison ». It's certainly paying the price for poor urbanism in the 50s, though. But things are generally improving.

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