the Louvre (or so Henri IV thought). About two centuries later, during the French Revolution, the name was changed from Place Royale to Place des Vosges, to reward the first administrative département —Les Vosges—that paid taxes, thereby recognizing the revolutionary regime.
Heavy carriage doors, nowadays often locked, hide courtyards, some groomed into pocket-size formal gardens, others dotted with statues. In several there are workshops, art galleries, or fashion boutiques, and these are the easiest to breach. Since this is a particularly toney address, you’re likely to encounter well-fed movie stars, politicos, and other nouveaux on the threshold of L’Ambroisie, among France’s most expensive and pretentious multiple-starred restaurants, located at number nine. Starveling models saunter out of Issey Miyake’s fief of fashion headquartered nearby at number five.
Like any poor little rich boy, the square has its problems, though none seems life-threatening. Locals complain about the rush-hour traffic on the north side, a through street, and about the ever-swelling number of tourists on weekends. Some years ago one long-time resident I met, a dealer in antique Japanese art, closed her boutique and retreated to a by-appointment-only showroom in a rear court. Too many visitors were handling her fragile collections, she told me with a shiver of disgust. The square’s bête noire for decades was a self-styled antique dealer who spilled his ragbag of merchandise under the arcades (but that was nothing new—the first ban on flea market–style displays dates to 1758).
Then there are the itinerant bangle-hawkers, organ grinders, and sour-mash Dixieland bands that besiege the square daily to the delight of some locals and the horror of most others. Pierre Balmès, the expert on antique timepieces who opened his shop here in 1949, had observed the remake. “Sometimes I miss the old, run-down Place des Vosges,” he told me one busy Saturday. “It was so peaceful and quiet.” Alas, the gentle Balmès’ hour tolled, and his magical time-tunnel shop is now yet another gallery selling merchandise that falls under the much-abused rubric, “art.”
The one blight against which all residents united back in the 1990s is the tour bus. After many an administrative battle, buses were limited to disgorging their hordes on the north side of the square before moving to less scenic quarters. There’s talk every few years of creating a car-free zone here and in the surrounding Marais; on Sundays many streets are now off-limits to the vehicles of nonresidents. A permanent pedestrian island might not be a bad idea, as long as a Montmartre-style elephant train isn’t part of the deal and the car-free area is big enough to thin merrymakers to acoustically acceptable levels.
“I’d like this to be my kingdom,” a thirty-year resident told me several years ago as we stood on his second-floor étage noble balcony. The square’s original aristocratic residents always lived on the étage noble , and my host, perhaps unwittingly, emphasized how privileged I was to enter the hallowed halls of his multimillion-euro apartment and enjoy a glimpse of how the other half lives. “In an ideal world no one else could live here or come in but me,” he confessed unself-consciously, “and that just goes to show you how attached one becomes.” He reminisced about how, in the early 1990s, he and other property owners had asked the powers-that-be to lock up the park and hand out keys to residents only—a scheme that had provoked public outrage (including my own) and much wringing of hands. The square seems to breed such undemocratic sentiments, inspired, perhaps, by the dramatic views from on high. It’s as if the architects had drawn their plans with condescension in mind.
There are several public entrances (five to be precise), but there is only one proper way to approach Place des Vosges the first time around: take Rue de Birague. An
Heavy carriage doors, nowadays often locked, hide courtyards, some groomed into pocket-size formal gardens, others dotted with statues. In several there are workshops, art galleries, or fashion boutiques, and these are the easiest to breach. Since this is a particularly toney address, you’re likely to encounter well-fed movie stars, politicos, and other nouveaux on the threshold of L’Ambroisie, among France’s most expensive and pretentious multiple-starred restaurants, located at number nine. Starveling models saunter out of Issey Miyake’s fief of fashion headquartered nearby at number five.
Like any poor little rich boy, the square has its problems, though none seems life-threatening. Locals complain about the rush-hour traffic on the north side, a through street, and about the ever-swelling number of tourists on weekends. Some years ago one long-time resident I met, a dealer in antique Japanese art, closed her boutique and retreated to a by-appointment-only showroom in a rear court. Too many visitors were handling her fragile collections, she told me with a shiver of disgust. The square’s bête noire for decades was a self-styled antique dealer who spilled his ragbag of merchandise under the arcades (but that was nothing new—the first ban on flea market–style displays dates to 1758).
Then there are the itinerant bangle-hawkers, organ grinders, and sour-mash Dixieland bands that besiege the square daily to the delight of some locals and the horror of most others. Pierre Balmès, the expert on antique timepieces who opened his shop here in 1949, had observed the remake. “Sometimes I miss the old, run-down Place des Vosges,” he told me one busy Saturday. “It was so peaceful and quiet.” Alas, the gentle Balmès’ hour tolled, and his magical time-tunnel shop is now yet another gallery selling merchandise that falls under the much-abused rubric, “art.”
The one blight against which all residents united back in the 1990s is the tour bus. After many an administrative battle, buses were limited to disgorging their hordes on the north side of the square before moving to less scenic quarters. There’s talk every few years of creating a car-free zone here and in the surrounding Marais; on Sundays many streets are now off-limits to the vehicles of nonresidents. A permanent pedestrian island might not be a bad idea, as long as a Montmartre-style elephant train isn’t part of the deal and the car-free area is big enough to thin merrymakers to acoustically acceptable levels.
“I’d like this to be my kingdom,” a thirty-year resident told me several years ago as we stood on his second-floor étage noble balcony. The square’s original aristocratic residents always lived on the étage noble , and my host, perhaps unwittingly, emphasized how privileged I was to enter the hallowed halls of his multimillion-euro apartment and enjoy a glimpse of how the other half lives. “In an ideal world no one else could live here or come in but me,” he confessed unself-consciously, “and that just goes to show you how attached one becomes.” He reminisced about how, in the early 1990s, he and other property owners had asked the powers-that-be to lock up the park and hand out keys to residents only—a scheme that had provoked public outrage (including my own) and much wringing of hands. The square seems to breed such undemocratic sentiments, inspired, perhaps, by the dramatic views from on high. It’s as if the architects had drawn their plans with condescension in mind.
There are several public entrances (five to be precise), but there is only one proper way to approach Place des Vosges the first time around: take Rue de Birague. An
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