A self-guided walk · central Paris

You were going to
walk past it
anyway.

Offbeat Paris is 45 short, sourced stories pinned to ordinary addresses in the middle of the city. The strange thing about a building is rarely on its plaque.

Three of the stories are on this page, in full, free. Read one and you will know whether the other 42 are worth $14 to you.

Read the first story

The walk is not on sale yet, so there is no buy button here and nothing on this page asks for your email address.

Engraving of an ordinary Paris façade: shuttered windows, one iron balcony, a heavy carriage door standing ajar. — An ordinary door, an ordinary street. There are 45 of these in the walk and every one of them has something behind it.

45: stops, all walkable
5: neighbourhood legs
$14: one payment
0: apps to install

Three of the 45, in full

No teaser, no gate. The whole story, and where it came from.

This is the product, so it would be strange to hide it. Same voice, same length, same source note at the end as every other stop.

Stop 1 of 45Champ de Mars, 7th

The city gave the Eiffel Tower 20 years, then meant to take it down.

Stand underneath and you are standing under a temporary structure. The tower went up as the entrance arch to the world’s fair of 1889, and Gustave Eiffel’s agreement with the city ran for 20 years. At the end of 1909 the thing became the property of Paris, which was entitled to take it apart and sell the iron for scrap.

What saved it was not beauty. Beauty was the argument against it: writers and painters had signed a public protest while it was still going up. What saved it was that the army found a use for the top. From 1903 the officer Gustave Ferrié was allowed to run wireless telegraphy aerials from the tower, with Eiffel paying for the experiments himself and making very sure the results were known. A permanent radio station followed.

A 300-metre aerial in the middle of the capital was worth more standing than flattened, and the demolition quietly stopped being discussed. Nobody in the crowd in 1889 was told they were looking at something permanent. They weren’t.

Source note: the tower’s own history pages at toureiffel.paris, on Eiffel’s 20-year concession and the wireless work begun in 1903.

Engraving of a Haussmann façade whose windows are all bricked up and blind, with smoke rising from a pavement grating. — Five floors of windows and nothing behind any of them.

Stop 17 of 45145 rue La Fayette, 10th

There is a building on rue La Fayette with nothing behind the windows.

Number 145 does what the rest of the street does: pale stone, iron balconies, five floors of tall windows, a door in the middle. Look at it a second longer than a passer-by would and the windows are wrong. They are flat. They are the same shade top to bottom, at every hour, in every weather.

There is no building behind them. The façade is a screen with a shaft behind it. The address belongs to RATP, the company that runs the city’s trains, and the hole under the false front lets air out of the railway tunnel that runs beneath the street. Keeping the front was cheaper than explaining a gap in the row.

It is the most honest address in the 10th: a building that admits it is only a face.

Source note: the address is RATP property and serves the tunnel underneath. When the inside was taken out is not something anybody official puts in writing.

Stop 31 of 45rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, 5th

The narrowest street in Paris is named after a sign nobody can produce.

Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche runs from the quay to rue de la Huchette and is 1.8 metres wide. Two people pass each other sideways, or one of them waits. It was opened in 1540 and it has been the street of the fishing cat ever since, after a painted sign that hung on one of its houses.

What the sign showed is where the record gives up. The usual telling has a real cat that hooked fish out of the Seine with one paw, and a cleric who kept it. Another has no cat at all, only a fishmonger with a sense of humour and a name to advertise. The sign is long gone. Nobody has ever produced it.

So the city has kept a name for five centuries on the strength of a picture no living person has seen, in a street too narrow to hang it in.

Source note: Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, on the opening of the street in 1540 and the origin of its name.

Engraved shop sign of a cat crouched on a stone quay, one paw hooked into the water at a fish. — The sign the street is named after, as it may or may not have looked.

What’s inside

One walk, 45 stops, written down.

You pay once and get a private link that keeps working. Open it on the street, standing in front of the thing.

Stops: 45, and every one of them is an address you can stand at.
Legs: 5, between 8 and 12 stops each, in a suggested walking order.
Ground: Central Paris: the quays, the Marais, the Latin Quarter, Les Halles and the covered passages.
Reading: Written stories, two or three minutes each, on the phone in your hand.
Price: $14, one payment. No subscription, no second charge.
Access: A permanent private link. Nothing to install, no account.

Six plain answers

Is there an app to install?

No. It opens in the browser already on your phone.

Do I need an account?

No. There is nothing to make, nothing to log into, and no password to lose in Paris.

How much, and how often?

$14, once. No subscription and no second charge, ever.

Is it audio?

No, it is written. That is the honest trade: read at your own pace, in traffic noise, without headphones.

How many stops, and where?

45 stops in central Paris, grouped into 5 legs. One leg is an easy afternoon.

Are the stories checked?

Yes. Every claim ends in a source note, and where the record is unclear we say so plainly.

The walk goes on sale at $14.

It is not on sale yet. There is no buy button on this page, nothing here takes a card, and nothing here collects your email address. When the link goes live, this is where it will be.

Walking in Paris in the next few weeks? Write to us and a person will answer.

Write to us

hello@offbeat-paris.nanocorp.app