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Tag / metro

A Lost Breed of Parisians

Without them, Paris would’ve stood still. They were immortalised in song by Serge Gainsbourg, and put into poetry by the cheeky Raymond Queneau. But by 1975, Paris’ metro ticket punchers, or poinçonneurs, were a dying breed. Their rise and fall traces the streamlining of the whole métropolitan system, which was inaugurated at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair to a crowd in…

Why Paris’ Greatest Art Nouveau Metro Stop Is No More

No one does nostalgia better than Parisians, who just seem to have a real knack for sprinkling eccentric, liveable history into their everyday routine. Case in point? Those luscious Art Nouveau metro stops, or “dragonflies” as they were dubbed by locals at the time of their construction in the 1900s. The green, arabesque forms were…

Metro Makeovers for the Abandoned Stations of Paris

Anyone who wants to make a swimming pool out of an abandoned metro station neglected for 75 years, has definitely got my attention. The ghosts of the Parisian underground could soon be resurrected if city voters play their cards right in the upcoming mayoral elections. Promising candidate, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who would become the first female to…

Paris Launched a Contest to Re-Design its Derelict, Disused and Defunct Spaces

Three abandoned metro stations, two defunct underground nightclubs, a forgotten art nouveau shopping arcade, an old Renault garage, a disused water reservoir, and a post office– these are just a few of the 34 incredible hidden sites of Paris being presented as a creative canvas for potential designers, architects and urban planners as part of “Reinvent Paris 2”. The…

What Paris Metro Workmen Found Sealed behind the Walls

When your walls start to look outdated, there’s always the option of just painting over them, which is a little bit like what the Parisian metro has done over the years to update its stations. When the old white tiling of yesteryear needed a revamp, they simply covered them up with more modern materials. A quick…

Spotting Cute French Guys on the Paris Metro

I have a friend who used to leave her house for work at the exact same time everyday to make sure she caught the same train as her Paris metro crush. She never mustered the courage to speak to him and one day he just stopped taking the same train and she never saw him again. It…

That time the Paris Metro was Segregated by a Class System

Today I pulled up an old New York Times article reporting the news that Paris’ subway system had eliminated its First and Second class carriage system. But the newspaper article wasn’t from 1950-something, it was from 1991.  Image (c) Flickr, Alexandre C Forgive me, but for someone living in a country whose national motto is “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”, and…
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