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The Cour des Miracles was one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in Paris, mainly in the 17th century, basically a hideout for beggars, thieves, and criminals, where even the police were afraid to go in. During the day, these beggars would head out to the nicer parts of Paris pretending to be blind, crippled, or seriously sick, to get more money out of people passing by. Then at night, they'd come back to their own neighborhood, the actual Cour des Miracles, and that's where the "miracle" happened, the blind could suddenly see again, the crippled could walk fine. The name comes straight from that contrast, fake disabilities during the day, miraculous healing once they got home.

Victor Hugo actually made it famous in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, there's a whole chapter set there, with Esmeralda getting dragged in and Clopin Trouillefou ruling over the place like a king.

There were several of these "courts" scattered around Paris, including one near what's now the Montorgueil area. Louis XIV eventually sent the police to clean the place out in the 1660s, under Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, and the whole area disappeared later during Haussmann's renovations in the 19th century. The expression "une cour des miracles" is still used in French today to describe a chaotic or sketchy place.

Taken in 1838 by Louis Daguerre, this is Boulevard du Temple, and it's considered the first photo to ever capture a human being. The exposure lasted several minutes, so the busy street full of people and carriages basically vanished from the shot, everything moving was just too fast to register. One guy survived the process though, bottom right corner, getting his shoes shined while standing still long enough to be caught on camera. Daguerre shot this from his studio window near what's now Place de la République. Locals called it "boulevard du crime" at the time, because of the theaters putting on crime dramas, not because the street itself was dangerous. A couple of buildings from back then are still standing, one of them is now Théâtre Déjazet.

1. The oldest bridge in Paris, even though "Pont Neuf" literally means "New Bridge"
2. The first Paris bridge built entirely in stone, with no houses built on top of it
3. This bridge had the first sidewalks in Paris, built to protect pedestrians from mud and carriages
4. La Samaritaine started right here, as a water pump that supplied the Louvre
5. The birthplace of Paris's bouquinistes, the book sellers still lining the Seine today
6. The statue of Henri IV was destroyed in the Revolution and rebuilt in the 1800s, with sealed boxes hidden inside
7. A real Nile crocodile was found alive in the sewers nearby in 1984

Tucked into a quiet corner of Montmartre. Cobblestones and a nice view from the steps looking out over the rooftops. Picasso's old studio used to be right there too.

Paris built an entire palace in 1900 just to show off electricity. Kind of insane when you think about it.

It stood on the Champ de Mars facing the Eiffel Tower, designed by Eugène Hénard. The facade was 130 meters long and 70 meters high, covered in stained glass and ceramics, with a chariot on top pulled by hippogriffs that shot out what looked like colored flames.

At night they lit up 5,000 multicolored bulbs on the front, plus eight huge lamps of colored glass. There was also a fountain in front, the Château d'Eau, designed by Edmond Paulin. People used to come just to watch it light up after dark.

But here's the part I didn't know until I looked into it: behind that whole decorative front was an actual power plant, boiling 200,000 liters of water into steam every hour. It produced around 40,000 horsepower, way more than the 1889 fair managed with 6,500. This thing powered every other building at the expo.

And then it was just gone. Built from the same cheap temporary materials as most of the fair, so once the expo closed in November 1900 it came down. Unlike the Grand Palais or Petit Palais, which are still standing today.

Église Saint-Christophe-de-Javel, in the 15th arrondissement, is IMO one of the most striking churches in Paris. It was built between 1926 and 1930 by architect Charles-Henri Besnard, who's actually credited with building France's first prefabricated church, the whole thing was made of reinforced concrete pieces, molded and assembled on site by a company called Fourré et Rhodes.

It's dedicated to Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers, because the church was built right next to André Citroën's car factories, and there's a huge mural in the choir by Henri-Marcel Magne showing Saint Christopher surrounded by travelers, along with trains, planes, ships, and cars, a direct nod to the industrial neighborhood around it. Inside there's also a set of twelve painted panels retracing the saint's life by Jac Martin-Ferrières, and stained glass by Jacques Grüber.

The interior is genuinely gorgeous and really unlike anything else you'll see in a Paris church. Listed as a historical monument since 1975, it's usually only open for Sunday mass and Heritage Days.

This 23-meter metal ceiling, designed by architect Jacques Hermant between 1906 and 1911, features a rosette with the coats of arms of Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux, and the building is actually open to the public on weekdays, no banking business required.

Went inside the Tribunal de Commerce in Paris the other day, didn't expect it to be this interesting. It was built between 1860 and 1865, Napoleon III and Haussmann era.

The dome is what got me, 45 meters tall, and it's actually a hidden war memento. Napoleon III had it modeled on a small church he saw from a distance at Lake Garda, while waiting to hear the results of an attack he'd ordered on the tower of Solférino in 1859. That dome is also completely off-center from the building, which was intentional, Haussmann wanted each boulevard to end at a landmark, so he had the architect align the dome with Boulevard Sébastopol instead of keeping things symmetrical.

The inside is genuinely stunning, a monumental double-revolution staircase, beautiful painted ceilings, a tapestry (from the Gobelins) above the fireplace in the Chambre du Conseil. There are omperial symbols everywhere, massive lions at the entrance and Napoleon's "N" carved into the decor all over the place. Truly an exceptional building!

Found this building in the 18th, 185 rue Belliard, Immeuble Deneux. Built 1911 to 1913 by architect Henri Deneux for his own home. The façade is covered in colorful flamed stoneware tiles by Gentil & Bourdet, same ceramicists behind the Louxor cinema. There's a small mosaic above the entrance showing Deneux himself at work, compass in hand. He lived on the top floor until he died in 1961. A few years after finishing it, he became chief architect of Reims Cathedral and rebuilt its roof after WWI damage using a patented concrete system, funded by Rockefeller of all people.

Today, the Place de l’Estrapade in Paris’s 5th arrondissement is a charming square with trees and a fountain. It is also known to fans of Emily in Paris. But behind its pleasant appearance lies a much darker history.

Until 1687, the square was used for the estrapade, a particularly cruel form of punishment.

The victim’s arms were tied to ropes, usually behind their back. The executioner would then raise them into the air and suddenly drop them, stopping them just before they hit the ground. This could cause the victim’s shoulders to become dislocated.

The punishment could be made even more painful by attaching weights to the victim’s feet, sometimes causing serious injuries or even tearing limbs from the body. In Paris, the estrapade was especially used against deserters and Protestants during periods of persecution.

The torture was eventually abolished by Louis XVI in 1776. Today, it is hard to imagine that such a peaceful-looking square once had such a brutal past.

A simple doorway wedged between two unremarkable cafés leads to this small passage connecting the Place de la Bastille to Rue Daval. If you don’t know it’s there, you’d never guess what lies behind it. Once through the gate, the noise of Bastille and the bustle of Rue de Lappe disappear.

This cobblestoned lane, about a hundred meters long, is lined with small buildings with typically industrial façades covered in climbing plants. When it was developed by Antoine Pierre Damoye, an 18th-century ironmonger, the courtyard was home, like many other passages and courtyards in eastern Paris, to dozens of craftsmen’s workshops from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

This small garden was originally named Jardin de la Vallée-Suisse, after the Swiss pavilion from the 1900 World's Fair, and was renamed in 2010 to reference Nouvelle-France, the French colony that eventually became Quebec. English garden style inside, waterfall, stream with fish, a footbridge, and statues of Jacques Cartier and Samuel Champlain. Montreal's mayor gave Paris a sugar maple in 1962 and it's still there, plaque and all. Small space, a lot going on.

The Mur des Fermiers généraux was one of the old walls of Paris, built between 1784 and 1790 to collect taxes on goods entering the city and fight smuggling. Proposed by Lavoisier, the 24-kilometre wall surrounded much of Paris and included 61 barriers, many designed by architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux as impressive neoclassical buildings called “propylées.”

Because its main purpose was to collect taxes, the wall quickly became very unpopular with Parisians. This led to the famous phrase: “Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.” During the Revolution, several barriers were attacked, and the entry taxes were eventually abolished in 1791, although the octroi was later restored.

The wall was finally demolished in 1860 when Paris was expanded to the Thiers fortifications. Most of it disappeared, but four of Ledoux’s original buildings remain today: the Rotonde du parc Monceau, Rotonde de la Villette, Barrière du Trône and Barrière d’Enfer. The old route of the wall also roughly corresponds to many of today’s Paris boulevards, and parts of Metro lines 2 and 6 follow its former path.

École Militaire, at the far end of the Champ-de-Mars. Built by Louis XV in 1751, the idea was to train young nobles who didn't have money for a proper military education. Same architect as Place de la Concorde, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, and the complex ends up being 117,000 square meters, dome, clock, eight columns on the central pavilion. Napoleon was a student here in 1784, graduated as second lieutenant in the artillery, then set up his own headquarters in the building about ten years later. It's still active as a military school, which is why most of it is closed to visitors.

The cour d'Alsace-Lorraine is a charming little street in the 12th. Located near the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, it splits into two dead ends, with lovely buildings painted in bright colors! This private passage is open to the public during the day and features a collection of workshops occupied by artisans and independent professionals. A fun detail, It was built around 1789, supposedly with stones from the Bastille.

The Museum of Relief Maps is a small museum inside Les Invalides, it's basically a room of huge scale models of fortified cities, built for the army back in the day (we're talking 1668 to 1870). Louis XIV had these made so generals could study a city's walls and defenses before attacking it. There is a crazy level of detail on some of them. only 28 are shown now out of the 100+ that existed, covering fortress towns all along the coast, very impressive!!

The museum got classified as a historical monument in 1927, barely any visitors when I went, It's worth a stop if you're already at Invalides for the Napoleon tomb.

In July 1842, Ferdinand-Philippe d'Orléans, Louis-Philippe's eldest son and heir to the throne, jumps out of his carriage when the horses bolt near Porte Maillot. Bad landing, cracked skull, dead a few hours later in the back room of a grocery shop; Guy was 32.

His mother, Queen Marie-Amélie, has a chapel built right on the crash site, designed by Fontaine (the king's architect). Neo-Byzantine style, Greek-cross floor plan, pretty fancy. And for the decor she went all out, stained glass designed by Ingres himself, cenotaph by Ary Scheffer, sculptures by Triqueti. Consecrated in 1843.

It's called "Saint-Ferdinand" after the prince, and "Notre-Dame de la Compassion" as a nod to a mother's grief losing her son (Virgin Mary / Marie-Amélie, same energy).

The chapel was listed as a historic monument in 1928. Then around 1970, big construction project at Porte Maillot (ring road and convention center), the chapel's in the way, so instead of demolishing it they take it apart stone by stone and rebuild it 100m away, at Place du Général-Kœnig.