Sunday: June 27
Paris Bourse
A lot today, with a little variety. The Bouse for the traditional financial markets, and the Bourse du Commerce (was for commodities but now is the Chamber of Commerce) are two really nice buildings worth seeing. Near each are nice cafes frequented by the business people of the area.
The Place des Etats-Unis and Place Canada are just two nice squares with monuments. The Place des Etats-Unis has an interesting history and unique in its previous name. Central AC lies under the Place de Canada.
The Cite Internationale Universitaire is not a university, but student houseing. A really nice place. I have no idea what it costs to live here, but whatever it is, it is worth it. A great place.
And it is interesting to see the old city walls. I know of two places you can see them and they are presented here. Enjoy...
Paris Bourse
Historically, stock trading activities have been located at several spots in
Paris, including rue Quincampoix , rue Vivienne (near the Palais Royal), and the
back of the Opéra Garnier (the Paris opera house). In the early 19th century,
the Paris Bourse's activities found a stable location at the Palais Brongniart,
or Palais de la Bourse (designed by architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart).
From the second half of the 19th century, official stock markets in Paris were
operated by the Compagnie des agents de change, directed by the elected members
of a stockbrokers' syndical council. The number of dealers in each of the
different trading areas of the Bourse was limited. In the case of the agents de
change (the official stockbrokers at the Paris Bourse), there were around 60. An
agent de change had to be a French citizen, be nominated by a former agent or
his estate, and be approved by the Minister of Finance, and he was appointed by
decree of the President of the Republic. Officially, the agents de change could
not trade for their own account nor even be a counterpart to someone who wanted
to buy or sell securities with their aid; they were strictly brokers, that is,
intermediaries. In the financial literature, the Paris Bourse is hence referred
to as "order-driven market", as opposed to "quote-driven markets" or "dealer
markets", where price-setting is handled by a dealer or market-maker. In Paris,
only agents de change could receive a commission, at a rate fixed by law, for
acting as an intermediary. However, parallel arrangements were usual in order to
favor some clients' quote. Moreover, until about the middle of the 20th century,
a parallel market known as "La Coulisse" was in operation.
Until the late 1980s, this market operated as an open outcry exchange, with the
agents de change meeting on the exchange floor of the Palais Brongniart. In
1986, the Paris Bourse started to implement an electronic trading system. This
was known generically as CATS (Computer Assisted Trading System), but the Paris
version was called CAC (Cotation Assistée en Continu). By 1989, quotations were
fully automated. The Palais Brongniart hosted the French financial derivatives
exchanges MATIF and MONEP, until they were fully automated in 1998. In the late
1990s, the Paris Bourse launched the Euronext initiative, an alliance of several
European stock exchanges.
Click here to see other pictures...
Click here to see other pictures...
Bourse du Commerce
This is an absolutely beautiful building both in and out; although many don't agree. I love the round structure and the curvature of the related buildings. Best approached from the rear, the old Commerce Exchange looks like a giant spaceship about to lift off. Now home to the Paris Chamber of Commerce, it's worth a stop inside to see the beautifully restored iron-and-glass dome, which Victor Hugo dismissively likened to a jockey's cap. Still, it was the first iron structure built in France, in 1809, atop the wheat marke.
Behind it, the 100-foot-tall Colonne de
Ruggieri is a remnant of the Hôtel de la Reine, a mansion built here in
1572 for Catherine de' Medici. The column, which miraculously escaped
destruction through the ages, was used as a platform for stargazing by her
powerful astrologer, Cosimo Ruggieri. Legend has it that on stormy nights, a
silhouetted figure can be seen in the metal cage at the top.
Click here to see other pictures...
Click here to see other pictures...
Place des États-Unis
The Place des États-Unis (United States Plaza) is a public space in the 16th
arrondissement . It consists of a square — strictly speaking, a quadrilateral, —
approximately 140 metres long and thirty metres wide, tree-lined,
well-landscaped, and circumscribed by streets, forming a pleasant and shady
vest-pocket park. The park is officially named Square Thomas Jefferson, but
buildings facing it (on three sides) have Place-des-États-Unis addresses. The
eastern end of the square, however, is capped by the Avenue d'Iéna and a
confluence of streets known as the Place de l'Amiral de Grasse. These streets,
all of which debouche into the eastern end of Place des États-Unis, are the Rue
Freycinet, Rue de Lübeck, Rue de Bassano, and the Rue Georges Bizet.
The area around the Place des États-Unis was created by the destruction of the
old Passy water reservoirs. (They were reconstructed in 1866 on higher ground,
in the triangle formed by three streets: Lauriston, Paul Valéry, and Copernic,
about two hundred metres to the west-northwest.) The Place des États-Unis was
originally called Place de Bitche to honor a village in the Moselle department
in northeastern France that valiantly resisted a Prussian invasion during the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
The square's name was changed when Levi P. Morton, the American ambassador, saw
fit, in 1881, to establish his residence and his country's embassy there after
abandoning unsuitable offices a few blocks away at 95, Rue de Chaillot. The
similarity between the name of the Moselle village (Bitche) and the slightly
off-color English word, bitch, made the Americans uncomfortable, so the chargé
d'affaires prevailed upon the préfet for the Seine department to change the name
to something less risible. The French official arranged for the name, Place de
Bitche, to be transferred to another site in the 19th arrondissement, near the
Pont de Crimée, and rechristened the square outside Mr. Morton's legation, Place
des États-Unis.
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Click here to see other pictures...
Well, another "place". This one has a few statues but generally, you can't really get into it. I read that there is a major works underneith and maybe that's why. Supposedly, Paris city provide air conditiononing to certain places, and below Place de Canada is a 42MW AC unit. You don't really hear anything though. It's a pretty place...you should see it.
Click on the picture to get a larger view.....
Jacques Cartier
A Monument at Place de Canada
Cité Internationale Universitaire
Most people think it is a university; but it's not. It is a group of residences for students. It is organized by houses named after countries. It is well maintained and a very beautiful area on the outskirts of Paris. The subway and busses make it a very convenient place to live and study. Rockefeller build the largest and serveral other buildings here.
The Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, also known under its
abbreviation of CIUP or often as Cité U (pronounced si-teh-y) among Parisiens,
is a private park and foundation located in Paris, France. Since 1925, it has
provided general and public services, including the maintenance of several dozen
residences for students and visiting academics in the Île-de-France region, and
has been officially recognized as a foundation of public interest since then.
Several structures have been designed by architects of note, such as Le
Corbusier, Willem Marinus Dudok, Heydar Ghiai and Claude Parent. The residences
are organized mostly by nationality, although residents in each maison are not
necessarily from the country implied by the naming of the building. Students of
132 different nationalities were living in the Cité Internationale in 2006.
Click here to see other pictures...
Click here to see other pictures...
Old City Walls
There are a few places in Paris where you can go and see remnants of the old city walls. This particular area is right next to Saint-James Village we saw earlier. OK, so what, not much to see really. But it is kind of neat to see them and think that these are so old and yet, still standing. In this case the walls open to an area that the kids use for football.,..it's kinda weird to think how they kick the ball off the wall; who knows what else has hit that wall. A school is right at the end so this gets a lot of play. Interesting....
Click on the picture for a larger view....
Place de la Contrescarpe
Place de la Contrescarpe is the axis of a large, formerly
working-class district, the ancient Faubourg Saint-Médard, gentrified, but still
colorful, that spreads to the south on both sides of the market street Rue
Mouffetard. In the Middle Ages the area lay outside the walls of the city. It
has long been a haven for outsiders, real and fictional.
François Villon caroused at the taverns outside the Porte de la Bourdelle, the
gate to the road to Lyon, in the fifteenth century, when the little plateau
which is now Place de la Contrescarpe teemed with the activity of travelers,
stable hands, traders, teamsters, and sedan chair porters. The most popular
tavern was the Maison de la Pomme de Pin, where students and fellows came to
drink cheap, untaxed wine. Rabelais drank at this tavern in the early sixteenth
century, and a few years later Pierre Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and fellow
poets formed the Pléiade to promote the controversial idea that French was as
legitimate a language for poetry as Latin.
