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Category / Nostalgia

That Time When Parisians Used to Hang Out at the Morgue for Fun

Some thirty thousand people visit the Notre Dame de Paris everyday, but little-known to tourists or even to the Parisians that pass by it on their daily commute, there was once a much more popular yet sinister attraction that shared a backyard with the historic cathedral, capable of luring up to 40,000 visitors in a single day. That attraction was…

The Old Butcher’s Bookshop, Paris

On the longest street in Paris, at the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens, sits a unique little bookshop that’s often overlooked. While the famous Shakespeare & Co is chock-full with tourists everyday, outside Le Pont Traversé at 62 Rue de Vaugirard, the lone passerby is occasionally browsing the bookstand at leisure. So I thought I’d…

A Walk along the Paris inner city Railway, abandoned since 1934

I spent my Saturday afternoon, avoiding the Parisian summer crowds and tiptoeing along the train tracks of the “Little Belt” railroad (La Petite Ceinture), a surviving relic of a bygone era, closed since 1934; open for pleasant summer strolls if you look hard enough for a way in … Built in 1862, the Petite Ceinture…

The Suburban Paris Ghost Town

Paris lies is the center of Ile-de-France, the most populated region in the country with more residents than Austria, Belgium, Greece, Portugal or Sweden alone. It boasts the world’s fourth-largest and Europe’s wealthiest and largest regional economy. But one small corner of the region paints a very different picture. Just a thirty minute drive north…

Country Bumpkin Lane in Paris

Okay, so that’s not its real name, but they should just call this place what it really is– a countryside paradise in the heart of Paris. A zippy ten minutes from the Eiffel Tower on my mobilette and I had putt-putted my way to Pernety in the 14th arrondissement, a very family-orientated neighbourhood with lots…

The Clandestine Paris Party Planners with a taste for the Abandoned

So, there’s planning a party and then there’s planning a party in a secret abandoned location– in Paris! You’re about to delve into the world of the most unique underground party organisers in the world… A secretive group called We are the Oracle has surfaced in the French capital in recent years, throwing once in…

Unrecognizable Paris: The Monuments that Vanished

What you are looking at is not Disneyland Paris. These are photographs colored by hand (a popular practice at the turn of the 20th century) of the Exposition Universelle in 1900 in Paris. It was the fifth one to take place in the city and centered mainly on the revolutionary achievements in electrical technology at…

The 1920s Speakeasy Club with a Treehouse in the Backyard

We’ve stumbled upon the backyard of a speakeasy club called the Krazy Kat Club in Washington DC, July 15, 1921. It looks like they might have decided to move their staff meeting outside to their treehouse in the heavy heat of July– and nobody is in the mood for business. Every workplace should have a backyard…

Summer Camp at Chernobyl

For as far back as Google’s records go, the search word “Chernobyl” has never trended higher. In the past month, the data graph has spiked like a reading on a level 5 earthquake. Of course, it’s all down to HBO’s Chernobyl, which after only one month on air, has become the highest-rated television series of all…

French Art Deco Dream Girls

Pochoir was a damn delicate practice, and it was inextricably bound to the star of Paris’ Golden Age of Illustration, André E. Marty. The Frenchman and his stencil-centric drawing or pochoir method defined the aesthetics of a generation, especially for the high fashion set. There was “an outpouring of luxury fashion publications that used pochoir” at the…

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